You brought us some new material today, from your upcoming record. Can you tell us a little bit more about the album and the sound you’ve explored for your next release?
   M: The songs we played are all off the album that is not yet released, which will be called Heavy Soup. Fire on the Moon is out already. Watching the world stop and heavy soup are the next two singles. There’s definitely a sonic concept. We were conscious that these songs had to be fun to be played live. The last record was a lot more dreamy, mid-tempo songs,soundscapey, more cinematic. We did’t want to repeat ourselves for this one. So we wanted to find a way to write songs with limitations, so there’s songs that are a lot shorter, just heavier and faster and a lot more fun, which is probably listening to other bands, maybe just not to repeat ourselves. Sonically there is a theme, there are not so many overdubs so they’d be easier to play live in the last record there sort of like eight or nine people needed and it;s not that feasible. Lyrically.. Well they were all written during the pandemic, strange and disorientating times, so it’s hard for those feelings not to come out. Heavy Soup has been around for a while. It just sounds great, doesn’t it

It does sound great. I was wondering if Heavy Soup was an expression in English I had not heard before, I even Googled it to find out…
   C: It was one that Mikey made up.

Oh I didn’t find it anywhere, you can claim it as yours. What’s a heavy soup?
   C: I don’t actually know. Mikey came up with that title and I think it’s relating back to a friend of ours, could have something to do with…
M: Heavy soup is maybe.. Stuck in heavy soup tonight it’s maybe a state of mind, your mind’s a bit crowded with what’s going on in your life, or you might just have had too good a night.. You know there’s multipla layers and ways you can interpret it.





Yeah, I think that’s true for most of your lyrics. You know, they’re elaborate, there’s a story, and people can interpret them how they want. For me there was a lot of the feelings that we all had during the lockdown - the empty streets, kind of dystopic.
   We were all living it weren’t we! It really was a mad time, it seems quite strange thinking back to it. I can only speak for London, but life has very quickly reverted back to exactly what it was, and it was almost like a strange dream… Like, what happened for two years?

So the songs were written during the lockdown. How did you go about writing them? Logistically, I find it very interesting how people still managed to create something collaborative.
    M: So, Claude and I formed a bubble.
C: It sounds like we almost broke the rules, but we didn’t.
M: Claude lived on his own so we could do this. We would meet up almost every week and in the meantime I would set myself the target of writing the bare bones of a new song. And then Dan, our bass player who is our founding member and lives in Florence, I’d send him the songs and he’d write and record his parts and send them back. And then I’d put them in, I have a home studio set up and we could record drums, so we could recorded and mixed the whole thing in my flat.

Well it sure worked out alright
   M: Yeah, I think most creative people found a positive way to deal with it. To keep some sort of balance, stay sane.
C: I mean, you guys built a recording studio!


It’s a theme that keeps on coming up with the bands that came here to play - a lot of the music that has been played in the studio since we opened it up for live sessions has been lockdown music. And it’s really interesting to see how people coped with the isolation and how this strange experience isn’t just in the stories but also in the songs themselves…
   M: A lot of it crept in in the subconscious, even if you didn’t want to write about that it was impossible not to be affected by it if you’re doing anything creative. It went like that for us, before we knew we had a bunch of songs.
M: We also kept it at 8 songs in the records. Cause I love a lot of the albums from the seventies that eighties were all eight songs records - it was only when CDs came in that people were like “oh well we can fill up like 74 minutes” and then you get fourteen track CDs, who’s got that sort of patience, you’re going to switch off after nine or ten tracks don’t you. Plus a lot of it I find can be fillers, so I’d rather us say less but make each statement stronger more impactful.
Lou Reed, CAN, a lot of the jazz records, Miles Davies, they’re like seven track records. It doesn’t have to be thirteen, fourteen songs.

Yeah, quality over quantity.
    Absolutely, and also if you’re going to do vinyl there’s only so much you can put on it without losing fidelity.

You guys have been playing together a long time…
   This is ten years actually.



Ever had a fight?
   C: Not music related (both laugh).
M: Not really, we don’t really thread on anyone’s shoes musically.
C: Bands just don’t stay together, but we’ve never made it mainstream, and that might be the problem. There’s the incentive, you need to put out that next album because you have a contract, and you need to put out stuff and make money. But for us, we are doing it because we want to, and we have been for the longest time, so we’re just trying to make something that we’d like to listen to first and foremost.
M: And then the friendship, of course. It’s just nice for us to play together, everyone’s a great musician.

I’m asking because we’re also a group of friends that work together and, conscious of the fact that dynamics change and that in the long run tensions tend to happen, I’m sort of gathering advice and stories (laughs)
   M: Well we’ve always worked well together. We’re able to allow each other’s space, we all often collaborate with other people, we all play with other people live. It’s quite healthy. I think when you’re like 20 the tendency is to be like “no, you can’t go play with another band, you’re with us”, but at the end of the day you realise that if your bandmates play more they’re just going to end up being better musicians, so it benefits everyone, really. Being less precious makes you tighter and stronger as a band.
C: We also don’t tell each other what we think the others should play. Usually the first thing that comes out is the right one, we just need to tweak it. But really early on we usually have a good idea of what it’s going to be.
M: Everyone’s really good at self editing their own parts, which is quite good, letting each other breathe.

Heavy Soup is out now.