Tastes Like Caramel

TLC vs. White Lies: Harry McVeigh Tells the Truth About Lies

When we were first introduced to White Lies last year we instantly connected with the haunting skeletal lyrics shrouded in pop-like melodies from To Lose My Life. White Lies seemed a bit of a mystery at the time with scarce and shadowy press pictures, but then all of a sudden To Lose My Life was #1 in the UK! In March we were thrilled to have attended the NME Tour featuring White Lies and Friendly Fires, a line-up that one might consider an odd pairing from the surface until you really experience it. I loved To Lose My Life before seeing White Lies live, but somehow everything made so much more sense when we saw them live and really connected with their powerful and moving stage performance. It was truly an all-sensory engaging show.

Last month, I had the pleasure of chatting with front man Harry McVeigh from his hotel in Seattle as the NME tour winded down. He really opened up to me, giving TLC one of our best interviews to date! Topics discussed included: Touring with Friendly Fires, Love for New York, the state of the world, annoying band comparisons, translating the show to a less intimate arena, and many many others. Without further ado, enjoy the interview below, make sure you pick up to Lose My Life and catch them on tour!

MP3: White Lies – Unfinished Business or zShare
MP3: White Lies – Fairwell to the Fairground (Rory Phillips Remix) or zShare

> Hi Harry, how are you doing?
HM: Hello. I’m very well thank you. How are you?

> You’re calling from Seattle, how are you liking the Emerald City?
HM: I’m loving it actually! It’s a beautiful city and I’ve had a really good couple of days here. Me and Charles the bassist arrived here early because we flew our girlfriends over to spend a few days together.

> How does it feel to be coming to the end of the American tour?
HM: You know..I’m going to miss it. It was quite an amazing experience, we had such a good time playing all the cities we visited and got to see loads of places for the first time ever! We had a great time especially with the Friendly Fires guys, sharing a bus. It’s going to be weird when it comes to an end. But next we’ve got Japan and then we go back to the UK for a week off, so we’re looking forward to that. We love coming to America and we’re looking forward to coming back.

> What has the experience been like sharing a headlining tour and bus with Friendly Fires?
HM: We’ve toured with them two times before in the UK, once on the NME New Noise Tour in 2008 and then again on the NME Awards Tour in the beginning of 2009. So we knew them pretty well before we started this tour. We had a really great time with them, they’re really nice guys in a great band who write really good music.

> Yeah it’s a great line up with both bands on the bill.
HM: Yeah I think so too. It’s a great contrast between our two kinds of music. You definitely get a lot for your money when you buy tickets.

> Definitely agree. So the name changed from Fear of Flying to White Lies. According to this quote from Jack Brown he said in an interview “We just thought we should perform these songs under a different band name.” Do you feel To Lose My Life is more of a concept album or…
HM: Well the whole idea between changing the name of the band was that we felt that it was a completely different band. The music was entirely different from what we were doing before. We started to write music that we really connected with, that we felt the emotion of. With Fear of Flying we just wrote music we thought was cool in the UK and especially in London at the time. When we finally started writing songs that were so different and much more of what we’re about, we felt that it deserved to be under a different name. It’s definitely not a concept album. Although we’re really trying to take our sound into a different direction for the 2nd and 3rd albums, I’m sure its going to follow along the same lines. It’s who we are now, its definitely us, our band.

‘I would love to work with Björk, I think shes one of the most amazing modern singers ever.’

> Naturally it’s going to progress somehow…
HM: Yeah. I’m not quite sure how or what’s going to happen yet. But naturally it’ll be in the right direction.

> We attended the last day of the Bowery gigs on March 27th. During the show, you said that New York was your favorite city and Bowery Ballroom is your favorite venue in the world…
HM: Yeah, that’s definitely true. We always have such a great time, obviously we played the night before you saw us. It’s a fantastic venue– it looks great, sounds great and is a cool place to hang out. It’s definitely one of my favorite venues in the world.

>Your sneakers. Tell me about those.
HM: (laughs) I do have a love for Nike high top trainers, especially black and gold ones. Nike saw that I liked them a lot and decided to make me a few of my own, or actually I went to the Nike studios in London and made a few pairs myself. I’m very grateful to them for those because I love them, they’re amazing.

> I saw the White Lies’ David Letterman performance back in March as well, it was quite amazing with the rose petals at the end. Were you nervous to perform on American television?
HM: Being that we’ve obviously played that song about a thousand times before…it was more of excitement than nerves. It was an adrenaline rush because it was so amazing to be on that show and have such a real experience. It’s something that we won’t ever be able to capture again. The first time any band performs on David Letterman will be an amazing experience, especially being able to meet Letterman. It was really cool.

> It was a great introduction to people in America who hadn’t seen or heard of you before.
HM: Yeah I think so. We were really pleased with the way the video turned out, it couldn’t have gone better. The crew were great and they really helped us out.

> Do you feel that there is a movement going on with bands like White Lies and Glasvegas? A darker and bigger sound?
HM: I don’t know maybe a little bit. I’ve noticed a few bands and a couple of new albums coming out. Especially…have you heard The Horrors‘ new record or new single? It’s fantastic it’s nothing at all like us. Actually they’ve been making pretty dark music since their first record. It’s an amazing song and an amazing recording, really well produced and sounds utterly incredible. They’ve taken it to a radical new direction and its really cool. Maybe there will be a slight trend toward darker music and especially darker subject matter with the lyrics, who knows. I wouldn’t attribute to us or even Glasvegas even though they’re a fantastic band with a great record. Maybe its just the general mood.

‘I think it’s very important that music deals with things like that.’

> Maybe, I mean the times they are rough right now.
HM: Yeah, but it could go either way. With the economic crisis either people would want to listen to music that is really depressing matches the mood that they’re in, or they want to listen to something thats uplifting and makes them feel happy again. So who knows, maybe there will suddenly be a major trend soon in happy music very soon and we’ll be obsolete and people will stop buying our records! (laughs)

> Well it’s not only the music — the stage performance definitely plays a big part in the overall package. I’ve seen both Glasvegas and White Lies and it truly is an experience. It’s minimal, dark, theres a light show, the sound is huge atmospheric, it’s epic to see what you guys do. It’s interesting to see what will happen now.
HM: We definitely work very hard in our live show. We like to spend a bit of money and time getting the light show right and making it look and feel in every way right. We also have a great sound guy which helps a lot. At the same time, we’re hoping to expand on that even more as we continue to tour and play bigger venues.

> The festivals should be an interesting translation of the show.
HM: It’s going to be tricky for us. I’m really looking forward to the challenge of keeping the show very intimate and also very atmospheric and dark I suppose…but in broad daylight.

> My co-writer Jess, who is in London right now, wrote a review about your show and she described your music as “contemplating the dark and morbid but resulting in extremely romantic and affecting music.” Where do you draw that from, where does that all come from?
HM: That’s a very fair description of our music and thats what I like to hear when people are describing our music, because thats what I get from it. The subject matter is pretty dark but a lot of the music itself is very uplifting and euphoric. It just comes from ourselves, it’s the way we write I guess. We definitely connect with the power and the emotion in the lyrics. I think Charles is a fantastic lyricist and probably one of the best I’ve ever heard! You can almost interpret [the lyrics] in any way you want and I think that’s amazing.

At the same time I feel like our music is almost a celebration of the darker side of life and those emotions and those feelings. That’s what i get from our music when I’m performing it. It almost feels like you’re getting all of those things off your chest, shouting them to the world and celebrating doing that. I hope thats what other people get from it as well, there’s a real power to that. What I suppose you’ve got to remember is that a lot of the lyrics for example in to Lose My Life, even the lyrical subject matter is very uplifting. It’s about spending your whole life with someone and never wanting that other person to be apart from you. So you grow old together and die at the same time. When you hear that it happens to people who are married for 50 years and die in each other arms after being together for so long, its a very beautiful and romantic moment. That song is a celebration of that feeling and that moment.

‘I feel like our music is almost a celebration of the darker side of life and those emotions and those feelings.’

> I think it’s an interesting contrast like even if you just heard the music and didn’t hear the lyrics…
HM: Definitely! Thats what i get from it as well. People often compare our band to Joy Divison and The Editors and whatever. We never really listened to that music, we write music that is based on our musical tastes which is a huge variety of things. We listen to quite a fair amount of pop music and I think a lot of the melodies, sounds and arrangements are very pop-driven. I find it an interesting thing that a lot of our songs are very poppy but the lyrics are very dark and meaningful. That’s very rare in…I wouldn’t say pop music but popular music or mainstream music. I think it’s very important that music deals with things like that.

> I think that’s a very unfair comparison.
HM: Yeah we’re kind of sick of hearing about that, its a real pain in the ass.

> We kind of talked about the second and third albums but at the moment you’re still touring. I’ve talked to a lot of bands recently whose material is currently being written based on life on the road. Is that something that you will explore on the new record?
HM: I hope not because it is true that bands tend to– it’s very hard to write about anything else. The year that you make, write and record your first record you’re living your life and you have some kind of normality. But when you’re writing your second record you’re more than likely going to start writing it on the road, spending your whole life focusing on that as there’s nothing else to write about. Hopefully we won’t do that and can separate ourselves from that. The subject matter and lyrics will be a lot deeper than that. I think after the end of the touring cycle for this album we’ll take a couple of months out and start to write the next record in my house in London, at least I hope that’s what we’re able to do. It’s going to be really exciting and we’re looking forward to that.

> You’ve worked with a lot of remixers for songs from this album. Are you interested in going in a dancier direction.
HM: I doubt it. I love dance and electronic music and I listen to a lot of it but I don’t think we ourselves will go in that direction. I think if you’re going to experiment in that music it takes years and years of practice of honing the sound and honing the technical capability in order to do that. Some of my favorite electronic and dance music is from artists who have worked on it for a very very long time. I would like to try it one day but I think it would take a long time to get that right. To do it right.

> Basically not jump on the bandwagon.
HM: …Yeah (laughs) Theres only a few bands who have done it well. The whole electronic, new wave thing.. it’s tricky, you have to be very clever to do that.

> You did a great cover of Kanye West’s Love Lockdown. But, if you could work with any artist and not have it damage your credibility as an artist, who would it be?
HM: I don’t think working with anyone would necessarily damage your credibility, as long as the song your produce is good. I would love to work with Björk, I think shes one of the most amazing modern singers ever. Everything she works on and works with is amazing and sounds incredible, unique and original. I’d love to be involved with any project or I’d love to get her involved in one of our projects. Also Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since I was 14-15 years old and I have a lot of respect for him.

> Okay that’s all I’ve got. Thanks for speaking to me and good luck on the rest of the tour!
HM: It was a pleasure, thank you very much.

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01. May 2009 von anthoNYC
Categories: music news | Tags: harry mcveigh, music news, tlc interview, white lies | 10 comments