Sasquatch! Music Fest: heavy songs and moments of tenderness with Biffy Clyro
from: crowbi_wan - Uploaded on 05.06.2011
Interview by Joyce Quach.
The Scottish trio Biffy Clyro fronted by Simon Neil with James Johnston on bass guitar and Ben Johnston on drums is already a household name in Europe, but in North America, the band is still quite the hidden treasure. The boys kicked off day one of the Sasquatch! Music Festival on the Big Foot stage and gave the audience a heavy dose of mosh-worthy rock and roll with a slower rock ballad interlude and ended with the awe-inspiring track ‘Mountains’.
String Magazine caught up with lead guitarist Simon Neil after the performance to talk about playing all over the world, love and empowerment.Biffy Clyro interview Sasquatch 2011
How’s the festival treating you so far?
Simon Neil: Fantastic! It’s absolutely beautiful here—one of the most gorgeous settings for a festival. It’s really similar to European festivals compared to a lot of the American ones which are perhaps in a city. So this one feels like a real community and we love it so far.
Being one of the first bands to play, did you see anything crazy happening in the audience from high up on the stage?
Not just yet. Actually the sun was shining so God was smiling on us. We could hardly see a thing. I think we got sun tanned, actually.
You guys played some small venues in Canada, you play huge stadiums in Europe, and now you’re in the States playing a festival. Do you have a favourite venue?
I guess when you play smaller shows of 400 people you can get a real intensity going and a real congregation feeling—it almost feels like a religious experience when it’s that small and that intense. We are fortunate that we get to do both [large and small] shows.
Do you feel that you have to change your performance according to crowd size?
Never. That’s one thing that we hold quite dear to our hearts. From the very start we were playing to one person or two people. We’d always just give it our everything and treat every show like it’s our last show because you never know what’s going to happen. You never know if people are going to like you or hate you. When you come on stage and you haven’t given it your everything, it’s an awful feeling and you only make that mistake once in your life. It’s a good lesson to learn for any band.
Do you put in a conscious effort to make sure your set lists and albums have a good balance of harder rock tracks and softer ballads?
Most of my favourite albums had really heavy songs and moments of tenderness. We’re influenced by bands like Wilco and Red House Painters as we are by Lightning Bolt or any kind of noise band like these guys [Simon stops to listen to Death from Above 1979 in the distance]. Biffy Clyro interview Sasquatch 2011I think it just bleeds through in what we do. The more albums you get to make, the more chances you get to take. You can try different things and if it doesn’t work you can try it again, but you gotta take the chance. Plus, we want to be a band for people in all moods because we’re not always sad or angry.
What were you going through when you wrote ‘Many of Horror’?
It’s kind of a twisted love song. Myself and my wife have kind of a temperamental relationship. We’re still madly in love, but if anyone can rub each other the wrong way it’s us. It came about those moments where you know you’re together forever, but you want to kind of kill each other and you have to get through those moments together.
The phrase “I am the mountain, I am the sea” is very empowering. What do you feel when you hear that shouted back at you by fans at shows?
Thank you. It’s an incredible thing because I didn’t really think too much about it. It was kind of a transitional period of my life when I wrote that song. I was coming out of a tough time. I don’t really dwell on my lyrics when I’m writing them. They just kind of come out and later I’ll realize what I was really going through. The first time I heard people sing that song that was when I realized it was actually uplifting because I was almost thinking of it as a struggle—you almost wished you were something like a mountain. It seems it’s become this joyous thing at shows and it awoke me to what the song could be.
Having a handful of albums under your belt now, has you writing or recording processes changed over time?
In terms of song writing, I’ve always written songs in the house at home and I still do that to this day. I don’t want to change that because I want to remain quite naïve about my song writing. I don’t want to be sitting in a big, beautiful studio worrying about writing a song to suit the setting. I want it to be personal and reflect things going on in real life.
Published in Music Style