Jon Perks talks to Fyfe Dangerfield about Guillemots' new album, which takes the band in a new direction.
For Guillemots, “conventional” means you don’t have the metronomic clattering of typewriters as part of the rhythm section.
But that’s not to say their third album Walk The River is middle-of-the-road mediocrity or songwriting by numbers.
Far from it.
Described by frontman Fyfe Dangerfield as songs which sound “as if they were being heard through the night sky, sleepwalking their way onto tape”, the new long player was created over 18 months of experimenting and playing together as a band; three weeks in Snowdonia, followed by recording “in a really boring industrial estate in London”.
A band’s third album is often difficult, where creative blocks and tensions threaten to derail the artistic flow and commercial success of its predecessors.
“I don’t know; I think every album can be difficult,” says the Birmingham-born singer. “I would say that with us it was the second one that was difficult, not the third.
‘‘Making this record had difficult moments like any record has done but it wasn’t a difficult process – it was a pretty joyous one.”
Since the release of their second album Red, neither Dangerfield nor Guillemots have lain idle.
While Dangerfield released solo album Fly Yellow Moon and enjoyed chart success with a cover of Billy Joel’s Always A Woman (courtesy of being used in a John Lewis TV ad), he and the rest of the band – the wonderfully named MC Lord Magrão, Greig Stewart and Aristazabal Hawkes – continued to play and work together on the follow-up record.
“We started doing it I think May last year or June, but the solo stuff didn’t really take up that much of my time and we did gigs here and there and the recording itself was very minimal,” insists Dangerfield.
“I keep getting asked ‘what it’s like being back with the band?’
‘‘I kind of haven’t really stopped being with the band beyond about three months apart two years ago, so it’s just that we’ve been writing and doing stuff behind closed doors, I guess.”
