Interview with 66e by Anna Murray

Dave and Anthony talk songwriting, Radiohead comparisons, success, islands and Elbow.

In 2005, an Irish album was released that proved once and for all the theory first propounded by bands such as Radiohead and Mogwai: that the possibilities of the art of melodic rock song writing had developed above and beyond the capacities of the traditional instrumental combos. The studio is now an instrument in itself, not merely a device through which to process the output of guitars, pianos and voices.

Written as much in the Lisanton Cottage studio as out of it, 66e’s Fall Down 7 Times and Stand Up 8 is a dense collection of soundscapes, constructed over the course of several months around a combination of expressive and sometimes ethereal melodies and grounded basslines, with some serious distortion thrown in for rock posterity. Blindingly simple in appearance, these songs disguise amalgamations of unusual time signatures and crunching harmonies. 66e’s musical eloquence belies their lack of formal music training just as their apparent ease and comfort does the technical intricacy in the construction of their songs: for once and for all, they prove that complexity and simplicity are not mutually exclusive.

“We’re not consciously setting out to write things that are complex or difficult – we don’t really think that much about what keys we’re in or time signatures, we just go by what sounds good together. Apart from a couple of our newer songs, we rarely actually write, or record songs in a live setting though: more often one of us will write a bassline or guitar piece and it’ll grow from there…One of our newer songs began as just this sound I made on my PC. I’d sit listening to it for ages looking for a way to incorporate it into a song before we finally figured out some guitar pieces to go over it.”

A method this organic would prove an obstacle for many other bands, but not so this Dublin group. Live or in studio, they are always focussed, bouncing off each other’s talents, carefully growing sounds from the seeds of an idea: always in control but never at the sacrifice of spontaneity. One of the most striking characteristics of the band’s sharp yet benign sound is the sensation of flux achieved as they move from song to song. Instruments (and/or studio devices) are constantly changing hands, giving rise to a sense of instability: a wraithlike gliding through styles and sounds that catches you off guard at every corner yet still maintains a drifting sense of unity.

“One of the best things about the way we write our songs is that you may not necessarily end up playing the part that you wrote. You might write a piece of a bassline that fits this part of a song and in the final version you might be playing the guitar bits that Alastair wrote for it. We swap instruments a lot. Mike [Pope, a case in point – the drummer who also takes over keys and guitar duties] is always writing lyrics and poetry so he always has a store ready to pull out when it’s needed…then Ed [Cullen, lead vocals] will go out for a while and when he comes back he’ll have the melody line and all the harmonies worked out.”

Ed, one minute giving the most Spartan of vocal performances, the next building warmth and tension into power that tears holes in your ears, has a range and dynamic versatility rivalled by few contemporaries but perfectly matched in technical prowess by his bandmates. His comfort in a higher register coupled (in spite of ravingly positive reaction to the album) with lukewarm response to earlier shows led to almost inevitable comparisons to a “poor man’s Radiohead,” a comparison which evidently, and understandably, infuriates the band.

“Really it wasn’t that surprising. It was sort of inevitable we’d be called a poor man’s Radiohead or compared to Jeff Buckley or Muse. It nearly always happens when your vocalist has a high register and your stuff has a lot of synth, these are just the people who come to mind. It’s still totally wrong though.
“[As for our early live shows]…converting our studio sound into live effectively was something that posed a little difficulty for a while, but that’s something we’ve been talking about a lot lately.” This is obviously where the barriers inherent in creating music that involves considerable layering of sound and harmonies running to four or five parts rears their heads. “Ed sang all the vocals on the album, but we’d like to have at least four really strong voices to do it on stage. Another problem is space: if we could we’d have about four mikes and five keyboards and loads of guitars on stage, but given the size of most of the venues we’ve played in around the country that’s just not possible: smaller venues just don’t have the facilities.”

It’s difficult to pin down exactly who 66e sound like – with a list of supposed influences as long and diverse as they have it’s better not to try at all. In the three years since their official formation, the core of the group have had numerous different line-ups, but the one featured in the album is the steadiest so far, and looks to be the one that will lead them into the future. Of course, the changing faces have brought with them their own changes to the band, from the early riff-based, Mogwai-esque I Died in a Movie EP to their current exquisitely mixed, expansive melody/song-oriented single Scrambled Pictures, for which they are currently recording a video. Even since the release of Fall Down 7 Times and Stand Up 8 they have progressed hugely. The future is still uncertain, but with a second album in the works, caution rarely tempers their determination to hurtle straight on into it, chest out, and flag waving.

“Actually it’s kinda strange to be talking about Stand… again. As soon as we finished we sort of departed from it and started moving on from there. We want to get working on the second album but money’s an issue as always. The first one we released ourselves but we are definitely looking to get signed at some point: I mean it’s all very well to say you’d like to stay independent and everything but it takes to much out of you to have to support yourself and the band. Some of our friends who are in a band just got signed there recently…one of the guys was looking down at the shitty little place he had just quit that day from the hotel room as they signed the contract. That must have been a great feeling!

“We have a fairly steady fanbase and it’s growing all the time. When we started playing first all the bands around were mainly guitar-based indie bands, but since then people like the Killers and the Kaiser Chiefs and those have made synth stuff popular again.

“We don’t particularly want to be huge in that way though. Ideally we’d see success as being able just to live off making music and have people respect what we do. Take Elbow for example. They’ve always just done their own thing, sort of like an island with the stream of guitar and indie rock bands washing around them, and they’re still there making really interesting music that they get a lot of respect for. We’d like to be like that, just doing out own thing and gaining respect for It.”