Aereogramme

A conversation with Craig B

(May 2007)

Interview by Alexis Roberts

It has been four years since Aereogramme last set out to tour the United States. The day before lead singer Craig B. had to hop on a plane, he chatted to The Red Alert about traveling, the band’s recent visa catastrophe, expectations for this trip to America, personal taste in music and everything in between. A week later I was able to see Aereogramme, along with A Northern Chorus and The Twilight Sad, rock the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles. Even though the guys haven't been to the states in four years, the show resulted in a fairly decent turnout, fully equipped with the quintessential man groupie standing up front shouting all of the words and energetically convulsing in time to the songs.

Why don't we start out by talking about your recent issue with obtaining a visa. Your tour had to be postponed and you also had to cancel about half of it, correct?

Yes, well, it's not very interesting, I'm afraid. But because you have applied for a visa means that you can't just go and pretend that you're going on a tourist visa because they have got the knowledge that you've applied. So then we had to wait until we had the application accepted and eventually then got the knowledge that there was a huge backlog of applications this year and we weren't the only ones. So at least now we know that we didn't fuck it up. It was just red tape.

How many dates did you have to cancel ?

The first week is gone. We were supposed to start off in Philadelphia, and then do a couple of dates on the east coast, head up to Canada, on to Minneapolis and then cut straight across to Seattle. We've managed to reschedule Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Boston. So those shows have been rescheduled, but its not the same, but at least we're getting there! I just don't think that people in America realize how difficult it is for non-U.S. residents to get into the country. It's very, very difficult... The visa application is just- I've never seen anything like it! We had to go to London to get it which is about 300 miles from Glasgow and then another 300 miles back just for someone to say "Yup, you've got it, Okay!"

Now it seems like it would be harder than ever to be traveling because of all of the immigration issues we've been going through in the US lately...

Actually our first tour was just a couple of weeks after 9/11. And we have traveled to the US before on three different tours, but this has been by far the hardest application that we have had so far.

So this is your first time back in four years ? I personally feel like the "scene" has changed so much in the past four years, do you have any expectations of what it's going to be like ? 

Because of all of the hassle over the past couple of weeks, I'm just over the moon that we are going to get there! Expectations? No. I'm Scottish, so we look on the dark side of life and I'll just be happy if people show up and people enjoy themselves at the shows. I'm not expecting to revolutionize the music industry. I just want to have an enjoyable time and enjoy playing to the people that maybe haven't seen us play in four years. I'm interested to hear your point of view on how you think it's changed, though.

I've kind of been growing up in this entire revolution where more underground bands are getting picked up by major labels, and kind of becoming huge overnight, and I know that also now that in general with websites such as PureVolume and MySpace, those things that have really surfaced over the past few years, that they are huge contributors to expanding a band's fan base. I mean, especially for bands outside of the country. With the differences in web addresses, Google will only give you a .com, but with MySpace, for instance, it's much easier to find  out about bands that are outside of the United States or Canada.

Yes, and the problem I find is that there's a huge, huge difference between how many records the majors sell and how many records the independents sell. I'm not totally sure what it's like in the US, but in the UK, there are barely any independent labels left. We're on one of the very few and when I say independent, I mean truly independent. It's not funded by anybody else. I think in the last couple of years there has been a huge divide between the bands that have nothing and the bands that sell millions. It's very difficult for a band to start out on a major and not want to sell millions but it seems like there's not a learning process, or development. It's a real shame, I think it's not healthy for the industry.

I have to agree with you. I think it's better to kind of start out from the ground up and work your way up to that kind of a status, rather than just being thrown in head first.

Certainly. We'll have to see what happens in the next couple of years but these things are still changing, you know?

Oh, yes. Also with the being able to download off of the internet, the industry is sort of morphing. I was just reading an article about how record sales in the US have dropped so dramatically. They were talking about how the Dreamgirls soundtrack was the number one record and only sold 66,000 in its first week of sales which made it the lowest selling number one record ever. A couple of years ago Britney Spears would release an album and sell a couple million in the first week, and now it's dropped down to 66,000, which is crazy.

That is absolutely shocking to hear. I understand that MySpace has forums for many people to share music, and I think that's fantastic for non-mainstream bands, but then the level above MySpace, which is, you know, getting a record deal and having the money to support themselves is actually getting harder to achieve. It's now sort of MySpace to major label, or nothing. If you go from MySpace to an independent label, it's very hard to survive.

I understand that it's hard to make money with an independent deal?

It's not a complaint or anything, but Aereogramme, we've been a band for eight years now and we've never made money off of the music. We get to travel to incredible places, but we still have jobs. There's sometimes a drive to get into a band to make money, and I totally understand it but that's something that we, as a band, never considered. We truly got into music because we passionately love music. It's getting harder for bands like that to really exist, you know?

Yes, it is, I understand and I agree. I feel that it's hard on the bands that are on the independent labels, the truly independent ones, not just the subsidiaries of major labels, which are really just a major label in indie clothes.... Anyway I heard that you had a throat infection, has that all cleared up now ?

It has yes. The top range of my voice just disappeared and I think it's partially the fact that I've just been screaming for quite a few years on tours because we toured quite extensively for the first album and particularly the second album that we released. It's a horrible mixture of tobacco, whiskey and screaming. I just couldn't keep up, it just closed up, and it was actually only rest that got it back, it was nothing else. There was no medical cure, I went to see doctors, but nothing but rest really brought it back. It was a bit of a scary moment.

So do you have any special treatment to keep it in shape on the road ? Do you just plan to get enough rest ?

We've actually got a new member who's taking on a lot of the screaming, which helps here. I could scream, but I don't think that I'd like to scream for an entire tour. I just don't scream as much any more.

It's nice to have someone else up there, to take a little bit of pressure off of you I'm sure. I assuming that not being able to scream, and the throat infection in general had an effect on how the album turned out?

It did. It wasn't the only reason, it was just more of a catalyst for how the new album turned out because I couldn't use the top range of my voice, and we were starting to get a feeling that the band might come to an end. On top of that I really didn't have the desire to scream and hit my head against the wall any more, which is what I felt like on previous albums. So the songs were coming out naturally without screaming. That was what developed into making the new album far more cinematic instead of kind of standing on distortion pedals. At the same time, we did what we've always done. I'm really glad, to be honest, that it happened this way because if we had done another album of the same old tracks of Aereogramme going quiet, loud, quiet, loud, it would have been far less interesting that the album that we created. The loss of voice wasn't the reason, it was more just the influence on where we took it.

I think if you have heard all of the Aereogramme albums you can hear a certain evolution that kind of occurs...

I'm glad you think that. I think it's a bit of a departure from before, but I don't think it's too much of a departure. If you listen to Seclusion, the EP before this, I don't think it should come as that much of a shock. We were never really a screaming band anyway, we just had one or two songs per album that had screaming in it. The rest, at least 80% wouldn't have screaming at all, so it wasn't really any major difference to me.

Sometimes if you only have one song with screaming, it's the one song that someone hears and all of a sudden you're pegged as a band that screams all of the time.

Yeah, believe me, we've been dealing with this our whole career!

Well, I love the new record, I think it's beautiful and I love Seclusion, too. You can definitely hear the similarities and the progression from Seclusion to My Heart Has a Wish.  I also enjoyed the video included with Seclusion.

Oh, excellent, thank you. I mean, for how much it cost, I'm very, very proud. I wrote it after a night of insomnia and it was really influenced by the work of the Asian horror films that we were fans of at the time. But we really had no budget at all for it, I'm really glad we got it done for how much it cost. I really would have loved to have had some money laying around for it, though.

So I heard that you guys are friends with Isis ?

Well, we toured with them a couple of years back and there is a Dutch label that puts out our music and they have CD's called The First Time Sessions that put two bands together and when they were in Europe we went in the studio and recorded for two days . It was really just an experiment, but it was a fantastic experience with Isis and we are really big fans of them.

Do you all listen to Red Sparowes at all?  

Yes, well, I'm a big fan of Neurosis. So anything that comes out on Neurot records is really up my street. So like Grails and Red Sparowes...

Are there any other bands that you have listened to growing up, or even that you're listening to now that may have had an impact on how your albums turn out ?

Well, we've all got very, very different influences. The bass player, who's a very big influence on the band, is more into Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails. Ian the guitarist is more of a Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits fan. For me, I really love metal bands and modern metal like obviously Isis, Neurosis, and Meshuggah. 

Well, you all have very different tastes, but when it comes to writing, even though you are also different stylistically, it all seems to come together and mesh so well...  

To be honest, I'm so glad that we've stuck together over the years, because there's no way anyone could have done it without each other. We all kind of play a part, and everyone, I think, brings something very important to the band. So I think that's a huge influence on me, also. I wouldn't want to just go into a band with only guys that love metal, or only guys that love indie - that's not what interests me.