RÜFÜS
It is building to be a massive year for RÜFÜS with their new album Bloom set to do big business which will no doubt take them to all corners around the globe. If that’s not enough there is a major April headline tour happening around the country. Across The Ocean spoke to James Hunt during the break taking in some downtime as he was getting ready for a massive year of touring here and overseas.
It is definitely shaping up for a massive year in 2016 for the band isn’t it?
Yeah, it has been pretty crazy. I’m appreciating being able to sit and chill out while I can.
Do you feel like pinching yourself when you look at the career trajectory of the band with things continuing to get better and better?
I definitely have a lot of pinch myself moments. For me I can’t believe that we get one bit of good news followed by another bit of good news a few days later. It is quite surreal but very cool what is happening at the moment. I think all three of us are appreciative of what is happening at the moment.
When you look at 2016 do you look back to last year and start setting more ambitious goals or take it week by week as clichéd as that sounds?
I don’t think we’re married to those pressures but we often take a step back and look at where we are and a lot of the time we will set goals and often we’ve met most of them because we work so hard, we have an amazing team working around us and often we step back to reset the goals based on what we want to achieve even something simple as playing a certain festival. There is that element of it plus the unpredictability of the industry we’re working in being not so structured so we roll with the punches day by day and see if something is going to play out or not.
Do you ever look at your passport and think crikey I’ve been to all these places?
Yeah definitely! I look through there page by page and it does seem like a blur sometimes.
What were some of the big highlights for RÜFÜS last year?
I think playing Falls Festival recently was a pretty huge highlight in our careers with some of biggest and most enthusiastic crowd we have played to. I think the thing with last year we were locked away writing this album and there has been some downtime so being able to play some of these new songs and not have an opportunity to test them out and seeing how positive people are towards them is really cool and brilliant for us.
After seeing the video clip for You Were Right from Falls Festival and how the crowd was going off has there been much thought given to doing a live release?
It is something that we’re definitely interested in especially if we’re doing a full set at one of our own shows. We continually try and push ourselves further and further in the live show and how we interpret the songs in a live sense. I think that will be something that will be on our minds for sure.
Were the second albums something that was even considered or thought about by the band or did you have a vision which you stuck to then smashed it out?
I wouldn’t say we had a vision but the one thing that helps was we started the writing process in a cottage in the countryside in Suffolk which is in the UK then two months in Berlin writing. In a way we were pushing our own little vortex and not having much idea about the outside world or back in Australia where we had success. It was really hard to remember the nature or any pressure for writing the second album or any expectations. We were in our own bubble making the music we wanted to make. In hindsight it was a really cool thing but we didn’t plan it that way.
Was there a real conscious thing with Bloom not to cover the same ground as your debut Atlas?
I think that’s the things we’re always pushing for. I think we had to push some envelopes of what we were being inspired by and some techniques we were using in the writing. We were cutting up a lot of break beats and trying to make them sound a lot more crunchier. I think we were always going to be able to pull it back in to whatever our sound is in the process over the year.
How would you describe the difference in sound between both albums?
Um, I felt like with this album we really pushed the textural side of things trying to sound older and more worldly. That was a big focus for us and things weren’t sounding so clean necessarily having a bit more dust on it and you’re cutting these older records having the background noise and this hiss on the track so things weren’t so pristine. We were also really focused on pushing the song writing and still retaining that influence of that little city and accessibility that we had when we were writing before. Like I said we don’t want to push that far out that it was totally unrelated to what we usually do. Pushing forwards, keeping things a little cohesive!
What was one of the biggest lessons learnt that you took in to this recording experience?
One thing was trust in what we were initially writing. If we write and idea it’s about embracing that idea rather than chopping and hacking taking the life out of it. Also trusting the fact that the first take might not be perfect and there may be little mistakes.
Do you find that ideas come up at the weirdest times and you’re writing them on napkins or scraps of paper?
Oh yeah! That’s the beauty of an iPhone and all our recording apps have three hundred small recording clips. I would be driving and I would sing a beat in to my phone but when I try to write it in to a song it is like oh shit! I think it is the nature of the process and we are constantly thinking. It is draining because your brain is constantly working and trying to picture how to finish a song or something like that.
Is that hard when you have downtime to be able to switch off from music?
That’s something that we’ve all spoken about and we have had some time off and even then we’ve all been itching to write. I would be up in Queensland for a week on holidays and I would be on my laptop working on this idea. It’s good, it shows that we’re hungry even if it is terrible. It is about the process more so than the outcome.
Playing Coachella must be an awesome buzz?
Definitely, it’s an institution. It’s a huge line up and we’re excited by LCD Sound System reuniting playing the hits. Hopefully, we’ll have a day off before or after depending on when we’re playing to be able to walk around and absorb it all.
Whether it is rummaging through vinyl at record stores such as Clarity and Title finding hidden gems to scouring the internet to find that album by the next big thing or chasing bands to get that elusive autograph and photo his passion is music all the way.
- Aversions Crown - January 27, 2017
- Sick Of It All - January 19, 2017
- Refused - January 11, 2017
