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INTERVIEW: Athlete
It's three dates into a marathon UK tour and Steve Roberts, drummer with chart-topping band Athlete, is relishing the experience of being back out on the road.
It's been good so far, really good," he says, on the phone from Birmingham, where the four-piece – best known for their hit Wires – are due to play at the city's O2 Academy 2 that night.
"It's quite a while since we've played (live], we're just warming up into it, just really enjoying it. It's good having loads of new songs that we've never played to people before."
The Deptford group are premiering their fourth album Black Swan two months ahead of its official release date. Singer Joel Pott has already declared the 10-song set "the best thing we've ever done" – and Roberts agrees. "I think so. It's always hard to compare albums, all of them have been done at a particular time and mean something at that point. Where we are at the moment, this is the best we've reached.
"I think it's the most cohesive album we've done. We were quite clear about what we wanted it to be at the beginning. We wanted to keep it a simple album, based on getting the songs across as much as we could. It's what we set out to do and we kept to that as much as possible."
Pott has also spoken of this album capturing "the rawness" of the band's live shows – which, Roberts agrees, was the central point. "I guess whenever we've made albums in the past we've always made the album then toured it. But songs develop while you are playing them – that's a natural thing to keep it interesting playing them every night.
"This time we did a short tour before we went into the studio. We didn't record demos this time. Rather than demoing these songs we played them live, then we recorded them as we'd played them in front of an audience. The songs sound as we'd played them on stage the week before. It's given it a different take for us."
Where does this album fit in between the big budget polish of Athlete's No.1 album Tourist and the more experimental electronic touches of Beyond the Neighbourhood?
"It has not got all the detailed production that we did in the past," says Roberts. "It was about playing these songs live then going into the studio and not spending ages afterwards fiddling with stuff.
"We all like our electronic music (the band are known to be fans of Aphex Twin and Mm] but this time we we were, 'No, let's just keep it a performance'."
Subject matter-wise, Roberts says: "We were mainly just trying to write songs that are quite close to home and quite real to us. Beyond the Neighbourhood was quite outward-looking, it was not quite so personal. This time we felt able to do that again. The songs are more about love...there's a more emotive quality to this album."
Partially, he concedes, that's down to the various band members becoming parents. "There's always those kind of songs when you get a bit older and you've got kids – that kind of affects things."
Elsewhere Black Swan marks a new chapter for the band, in that it'll be released by Fiction Records, rather than the band's old label EMI. Roberts says the signs were on the wall when Beyond the Neighbourhood came out in 2007.
"Just as the first single (Hurricane] came out suddenly all the budgets were frozen at EMI. We knew something was wrong. While the people we were working with were cool there were definitely signs of the ship's going down. It was pretty obvious it was time to move on.
"We managed to negotiate our way out of that. Fiction was the obvious place to move on to with their history of working with British bands – people who've had good careers. Snow Patrol are on to their fifth album, Elbow are riding high. Then there are younger acts like the Maccabees and Kate Nash." And, of course, The Cure. "There's that heritage too."
Longtime fans will be pleased to hear Athlete retain their ambition to be stadium-fillers. "I think so," says Roberts. "Like a lot of bands you go through phases and also struggles. There's a side of us that wants to make some quirky electronica but also a side that wants to write stadium-pleasing pop songs. That's reflected in the albums – at some points we're more noodly, at other points we write big radio songs. On this latest album it's very much more trying to have big pop songs.
"I think at this moment we have come to terms with trying to do that. Who knows? By the next album we might just want to revert to 808 drum machines. But with these big songs it's all about how you play them live, how they connect with people. It's something we've always appreciated."
On the 34-date current tour, the band have chosen to play smaller venues to repay their stalwart fans. "We put (the tickets] on sale way before we announced our new album," says Roberts. "It really was a way of playing to people who have been bearing with us, who've been there since the beginning, people who have been fans of what we've done in the past rather than those who like what's playing on the radio."
They've "always loved playing sweaty clubs as well as playing bigger places", he adds. Then there's the novelty of playing new songs cold "which is quite a good thing to do – (it's a reward] for those people who've bought your records in the past these are new songs, no-one else can get them, these are for you".
Roberts is looking forward to playing at the Cockpit in Leeds for the first time in half a decade.
"I've got good memories of playing there a few years ago," he says. "I'm looking forward to going back there. A lot of this tour is like that, playing places we have not played for five years – and playing songs that we've not played for five or six years either. It should be really good."
Black Swan will be released on August 17 then Athlete plan to play a couple of festivals and tour the USA. "We'll see how things go," Roberts says. "It's one of those things where you never really know where things are going to take you because you never really know what the reaction will be."
There will, however, definitely be more British dates to come. "We're booking a bigger UK tour later in the year," he promises.
Athlete play at the Cockpit on Monday, July 6. Tickets are available now from Jumbo and Crash.
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