Mercury rising as Elbow head for Wolverhampton

Sep 17 2008 by Jon Perks

Elbow are finally getting the praise and rewards they deserve – 18 years into their career. Keyboardist Craig Potter speaks to Jon Perks.

The announcement of the Mercury Music Prize is always met with a degree of surprise, criticism and controversy, but few can have objected to the name of Elbow being announced as this year’s winner.

The Bury five piece’s album, The Seldom Seen Kid, is only the fourth in a career of 18 years. And arguably their best to date.

Their rise to the top is anything but Mercurial, but you won’t hear them complaining.

“We’ve done alright this year, yeah, the album’s gone down very well,” says keyboardist Craig Potter. “We seem to be a little bit more popular than we were before this album came out, which is nice.”

This easy-going, relaxed outlook is perhaps one of the reasons behind Elbow’s success - albeit not on the scale of Coldplay, whose debut was also released at the start of this decade.

It is also one of the reasons they’re still together after all this time.

“I think we get on surprisingly well, compared to most bands,” says Craig, whose brother Mark is the band’s guitarist. “I think it shows in the fact we’re still together and going after all these years; I think a lot of reasons bands argue is down to money and we split it five ways, but that’s ‘cos we all write… I think we’re pretty lucky.”

While enlisting outside assistance on last album Leaders Of The Free World, the Potters, front man Guy Garvey, drummer Richard Jupp and bassist Pete Turner decided to do it all themselves on the follow-up, Craig given the producer reins, a role he clearly relished:

“There was no big leap, we just did it all ourselves and ended up with an album that sounded great,” he says, matter of factly, not immodestly.

“’Great, there it is then, we don’t need to get anyone in on it.’”

The Seldom Seen Kid is Elbow’s highest charting album to date, hitting number 5, going gold and spawning two hit singles (so far), including One Day Like This, already a favourite with live audiences and, clearly, TV sports producers, who have made it ubiquitous on their coverage of pretty much every major event this summer.

“We tend not to release an album unless we think it’s better than the last one, but as far as how well it’s going to do, we never know,” says Craig.

“There’s always talk about which potential singles are going to do well, but it’s I pretty hit and miss - we’ve had songs on previous albums we thought would do really well and didn’t…

“The album has to be better, or at least as good [as the last], or else we’d never release our own stuff,” he adds.

“This time round the biggest step forward to me is the mixing side of things; I feel my skills have improved quite a lot on that side of things, rather than just producing, because mixing’s quite a skill in itself.

“I’d say because a lot of my time is taken on the producer role then maybe I haven’t been sat at the piano as much, but creatively I’ve been more involved on this last album,” he adds. “I’m happy with that; we all chip in together. The writing process is always different; quite often it can be just me and Guy or Mark and Guy sat around with the basics of a song around just piano or acoustic guitar, but I think we’re different from a lot of bands - we do actually tend to build songs, rather than sit around on our instruments.

“We do tend to sort of say ‘right, here’s a song - what does it need? What sound does it need?’, rather than ‘what are you going to play? - we ask ‘what does it need, right here, right now?’ - a lot of these songs are built from the bottom up, we like to have each song having its own character.

“Just because I play keyboards doesn’t mean there necessarily has to be keyboards on the song.”

One of the appeals for many fans is Elbow don’t hog the limelight - they look like a bunch of ordinary blokes, albeit ones who can play and sing pretty darn well. Guy Garvey may have his own Sunday night show on BBC digital radio station 6Music, but he’s hardly in the Chris Martin/Hello! Magazine league of fame.

Happily.

The rest of the band are even more down to earth:

“Hobbies?” says Craig “Well I’m pretty much covered in kids at the moment - I’ve got two boys and one’s nearly three and the other one is just over a year, so apart from that I’m enjoying getting into the mixing stuff and I’d like to develop that, personally… everyone else just goes to the pub, I think.”

* Elbow play Wolverhampton Civic Hall on October 15. New single The Bones Of You is out September 29.