As the first day of Summer Sundae was just starting to heat up, we sat down with Jeremy Warmsley after his blinding set in the Phrased and Confused tent to discuss new projects, vampires and the festival atmosphere…
So, are you planning to stick around for the remainder of the festival?
Jeremy; unfortunately no, it’s too bad, it is a nice festival, I stayed at Latitude the whole weekend though. The thing about being in a band, it’s actually quite an interesting thing I think, but maybe it is not that interesting, we’ll find out… so you get to play about six festivals a year, and if you do each one of those for the whole weekend, then suddenly you’re at six festivals, that is a lot of time at festivals, as much as I like festivals, all you can do at festivals is watch bands and get drunk with your friends in a field and it rains, and you get trench foot, you know great! You can do that maybe once a year, anymore and it gets a bit too much for me. It’s quite similar to the fact of playing in a bar every night when you tour, when you go to see a band you have a couple of drinks, and when you’re playing, the temptation is to have a few drinks. Then you’re playing every night, drinking every night and then you’re an alcoholic and then you’re in the gutter, and people are spitting on you, and that is just a bummer. It’s a fast downfall, and that is how it happens. Do you have particular song which is your favourite to play live? I don’t have a favourite song to play live, although I’m really proud of all the songs I’ve written, when I’m playing solo some of them just don’t work. I whittle down to about 6 songs that I regularly play solo that work really. And I like to do covers, I find that I can play a different song every time and people appreciate that. I could do an At The Drive-In cover, Daniel Johnston or a jazz cover, Billy Holiday or The Smiths. All these different artists bring out different sides of what I love, that’s part of why I think covers take the pressure of, as you know it’s a good song and I don’t have to worry about will this bit of the song sound good. Does the idea of you not knowing a song worry you when you ask for requests? No! I love the element of surprise. In all my solo shows now I give that little spiel about taking requests. People may worry about that though sometimes. At first, instead of writing music, I just learnt every song I could think of. I wanted to learn how to write great songs, by learning all the great songs in the universe. Now pretty much if anybody mentions a well known band, I could probably play a song by them, unless it is somebody I hate, like The Smashing Pumpkins. The thing about The Smashing Pumpkins that not a lot of people realise is that they are actually vampires…
If you could recommend any three items to take to a festival, what would they be?
I’d recommend they brought a car, so they can leave whenever they want, although I love festivals, I also like leaving a festival when it is time to go home, like when it is raining or when you’ve had a fight with your mum or whatever. Number two would be a gourd. I think gourds are going to be the fashion item of next years festivals, like big metal gourds you would take while walking. You’d you know, fill it with vodka and lemonade or whatever. And finally disco lights for our tent…Actually no! I tell you what, a piece of brightly coloured fabric, tied to your tent so you can tell which one is yours!
Is there any new material for us to be looking forward too?
Yeah lots actually, three side projects and some new solo stuff as well. I have a new band called Little Words which is a covers band, we’ve done a bit of recording and put some things on MySpace, we’re probably not going to release anything but it is just for fun really. You know Three Trapped Tigers? A new London band, they are really good! Their keyboardist and I have a side project, which is inching towards completion. Finally, I’ve got a new band which is kind of my songs played by my live band; it’s weird because playing stuff with the band, our live show got to the point where it’s quite different to the stuff on record. I felt like we had a quite distinctive sound that was quite particular and recognizable, I thought it would be cool to make it its own thing, so I wrote a bunch of songs to be played by a band, so we got a band together, called Acres Acres. We’re going to make a record in august.
If you could recommend a book, CD and film to anyone, what would they be?
I would recommended, not a single book, but an eight volume saga, its Iain M Banks culture series. He is very intense; all the big questions answered really. He is a genius. For film I’m going to say is Snow White, Disney film from the 50s, because the soundtrack is banging. CD I’m going to say Dirty Projectors ‘Bitta Orca’, their new CD its pretty fucking amazing.
