Interview - Ghosts

My second face2face interview was with two of Ghosts in London. It was months before the smoking ban so they were puffing away in their record label's HQ. They seemed genuinely nice guys and I was given tickets to see them in Camden that night. Yaay.

Words - Suzy Sims
Previously published on Native.tv in Feb 07 http://www.native.tv
(c) Niche News & Publishing Ltd


GHOSTS - SIMON PETTIGREW & JONNY HARRIS

The singer's smiling and wants to put the record straight. "I did an interview where I said 'I really like Primal Scream', and then you read the article and it's like 'Simon's all-time hero, Bobby Gillespie!' Woah... I love Primal Scream, but he's not my 'all-time hero' or anything like that!" Best avoid misquotes today or there'll be trouble...

I’m sat on a squishy black sofa with Simon Pettigrew and Jonny Harris of Ghosts. They’ve just introduced themselves – Simon’s the singer and guitarist, and Jonny’s the singer and drummer. “Backing singer,” he clarifies.

"Don't steal my limelight. Behind your drums," says Simon. Jonny's wearing a natty waistcoat and is sitting shyly on the other side of the table, while talkative Simon helps me out when I manage to sit on a telephone belonging to Atlantic Records. Ghosts also includes Mark Treasure on keyboards and Robbie Smith on bass, but today they’re not in this small room which is decorated with posters, signed vinyl and half-filled ashtrays. Simon and Jonny are smoking and looking a little pale of face. The PR offers them a beer but they wince and say it’s too early.

I ask about Ghosts' early years. "I used to work for Ofsted's early years department, so part of the early years were working for the early years," says Simon, confusingly. "Government regulation of children under eight, so we saved some babies and then we formed a band."

They met at school in Surrey (“rock and roll,” says Simon) although Jonny’s from London, Mark’s from Horsham (“proper rock and roll”), Robbie’s from Woking (“home of The Jam,” adds Jonny) and Simon was born in Hong Kong and later moved to just outside Guildford. Practices and playing covers brought the members together, with a few changes. The now bassist was the then keyboardist, and vice versa. “Robbie became the bass and Mark became the keyboards. Mark was on guitar then I was on guitar then I was the backing vocalist, then I was the lead vocalist. He's always just been the drummer,” says Simon, who is the seventh or so man to take the mic.

"The Spinal Tap thing with drummers, we have with singers," says Jonny.

They met at school in ‘92/’93 and used to play covers, although the university years saw a major shift in direction.

"Then we became Polanski, an electronic outfit," says Jonny.

"We went to university and met this other guy called Andy, who's from Barnsley - slightly more rock and roll, but we though we needed a cool northerner. And we wrote some wicked music together and that was all kind of icy electronica, 'Kid A' Radiohead, DJ Shadow kind of stuff. Steve Lamacq played it on the evening session 'Unsigned Spotlight' one week, and from that we ended up able to release a couple of 12"s through a label called Slow Graffiti at Cardiff,” continues Simon.

Unfortunately it became "bloody difficult" to keep on without forking out for expensive kit, and they found themselves moving into a new direction as a pop-rock band. They tried to get signed with their new sound but still under the Polanski name, and when that was unsuccessful they had a name change to Ghosts. Sadly the music industry never runs that smoothly.

“Blagged a publishing deal off the last person in the music industry not to have heard of us. She's laughing now. Went away, wrote songs, had breakfast at Claridge's and picked up our cheque,” says Simon, making it sound slightly easier than it was. “It was epic, it's been five years of seriously trying.

“Before we got signed we'd probably only played about fifteen gigs and Atlantic had never seen us play before we got signed."

"They'd never even met us," says Jonny."Well, they met us on the Friday and signed us on the Monday."

"They offered the deal blind."

"It was quite tempting on that first gig they came to just to fuck it up." Go back to the electro again? "Yeah," says Simon, raising a mocking finger at some horrified imaginary record label types. "’Ah ha ha!’ Bringing out a dark, 28 minute track as our first single. No singing, no melody. One snare drum, softly changing."

"White noise drone," says Jonny.

From nothing to something. Ghosts are a hot tip for this year and were featured in the BBC’s Sound of 2007 top 10. How excited were they about that?

"I was quite annoyed actually, we were at number nine," says Jonny.

"It's one of those ones where you get told like a week or something before that, 'Oh you made the top 10!' and we were like 'Oh, wicked'. Then it's (disappointed voice) 'Oh... nine.’ But we came third in the public vote which is quite cool, given that Mika and Klaxons were inevitably going to win,” says Simon. “I was actually shocked, because we were the least high profile. We were quite baffled as to why we were there to be honest. I mean, I always used to read them sitting at my desk every January really depressed that I wasn't on it."

And now you're on it and you're depressed because you're number nine. "I'm not depressed, it's just a trick of the mind. If we'd not been told we're in it… it's like 'Maybe we can get top five'," says Simon. "Obviously it's really flattering, and obviously someone thinks we're doing something right, but at the same time the Bravery did win in 2005. so..."

The less said about that the better. Tell me about Danton Supple. Sniggers from the lads. "That's the name of our album," says Simon. "Apparently!" comments Jonny. Certain radio stations had managed to not read their press releases properly, announcing that Ghosts album would be called 'Danton Supple' - something which no doubt surprised/honoured Mr Supple, respected engineer and producer who is famed for having worked with Coldplay, Doves and Starsailor.

"He thought it was hilarious actually," says Simon.

"He's a lovely, lovely man," says Jonny, "who thinks the same way as we do."
"But who doesn't mind when Jonny wants to wade in and change things and stuff," says Simon.

"He's very accommodating, he's great at what he does but he also appreciated that our demos were pretty much how we wanted it. So people have sort of tarred us having him - the whole Coldplay thing - but it wasn't like that, his whole approach is to listen to the band and serve them as to how they want it, he doesn't stamp any of his... it doesn't sound like Coldplay!" says Jonny.

"Jonny's got co-mix and co-production credits."

How long were you working with Supple for? "A month recording then about a month mixing. And then he had a baby, on Christmas Day actually, and his house was hit by the tornado, so he kind of got busy and we finished it off ourselves.

"He got it to the right level and we just pissed around with it and make it how we want. Like sometimes Jonny will sit at the desk and turn one knob and he'll just go [head in hands]," says Simon. "In fact you can see that moment on our MySpace pictures."

I was trying to look at those pictures yesterday but you know what it's like, it takes so long to load sometimes you just give up.

"They weren't actually there yesterday for some reason, MySpace decided to have a real weird mess up. It had a picture of a random tattooed guy which we can't remove!"

Next question card - "Tell me a fact about the person to your left," Jonny chuckles. He's on the end of the sofa by the wall, so sneaks a look at the poster above his head which is a large red advert for T.I. 'King'. No luck there.

"I'll tell a fact about you then, because you're on my left," says Simon. "Okaaay..." says Jonny, a bit worried-like.

"Jonny has synasthaesia - it means he sees sounds in shapes and also every number has an associated colour. It's random. 77?"

"It's reddy brown."

"14?"

"White is the one, and the four is brown."

"He's completely consistent." No, I get it, I'm like that with numbers.

"Do you have that with numbers?" says Jonny with interest. Yes, vaguely.

"I'm really intrigued as to how that comes about," says Simon. "I was trying to rationalise it, like maybe you had a number chart when you were a child and every number had a colour." To me, 77 is a bit orangey.

"Yeah, reddy," agrees Jonny. Simon laughs and swats his arm to keep the loonies at bay. I tell him he's sane but he's not having any of it. "I'm the weirdo now, am I?"

Plans for 2007? "Getting some sleep would be nice," says Simon weakly. They both look tired. Have you been up all day doing crap interviews?

"No. We're technically still on tour," says Jonny. Turns out they've had a few late nights and been kicked off buses "at ridiculously early hours for no good reason." Jonny's trying to explain other work things which have kept them awake but Simon's too agitated about public transport.

"There's all these rules about how far bus drivers can drive and there has to be 11 hours of rest between journeys which means you end up..." Stuck somewhere random in London. "Yeah. And I wasn't sleeping very well on that bus."

"That's not really a plan for 2007," Jonny points out. What, sleeping on buses? "Sleeping in hotels!" says Simon.

"Touring until the end of Feb, single's out in March, headline tour April and May, single in May, album the end of May." A European tour is currently being organised and they’re hoping to play a few festivals, possibly Guildfest because it’s their ‘local’. They say it’s the kind of place where when James play ‘Sit Down’, the whole crowd sits down. But there are young people alongside families and it’s all good fun.

Other plans are "trying to get a second album," says Jonny. Oh, are you working on that already? "Thinking about it." But your first one's not out yet!

"Our schedule is looking scary," says Jonny. "Looking at a lot of band's second albums, they're always really crap and we want to avoid that."

"We need to live with songs," says Simon. "We didn't want to have 'Right, you've got a month, give us an album' as it would be like 'We can give you an album, but we won't be 100% sure of it in a month'. You need to..."

"Can you pass me that beer?" asks Jonny politely. I thought it was too early for beer. "It ordinarily would be, but I'm just trying to overcome a hangover."

If you haven’t heard Ghosts before, here’s a taste of their influences - Talk Talk, Fleetwood Mac, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Arcade Fire, Guillemots, Bloc Party, Beach Boys. “All ‘Best Of’s!” jokes Simon. “Spiritualised... Madonna, Kylie Minogue.” I’m informed they don’t take stage fashion tips from the last two (“We’re working on a plumed dress," says Jonny, a little too seriously) although Mark on keys is going gimp. Allegedly.

"Like a superhero gimp.""Saving sado-masochists from... I probably shouldn't finish that sentence," says Simon. "Influences are just pretty much anything. Pop music generally has the best production. Like 'Toxic' by Britney Spears. It's a fucking good song. The fact that it's Britney is neither here nor there."

As for new music; "We haven't really had the chance to listen to the radio," says Jonny. "You hear of all this music but you just haven't had a chance to hear it."

"My iPod would have been stacked with the influences section of this interview," says Simon, still in mourning after his went missing somewhere between Sweden and the UK, "and some random stuff. I downloaded a song from the internet for the first time the other day." Oh, well done. "It was 'The Get Go', by New Young Pony Club, which I've got a real soft spot for. I did it illegally," he adds, like a naughty schoolboy. "I can't get an iTunes account because the security number on the back of my card has wiped off, but I don't know where I live -" You don't know where you live? "Well I don't know what address my bank has for me."

"He doesn't actually have a house," says Jonny. Is that why you're trying to sleep on buses all the time? "Yeah, kind of."

Onto 'Stay The Night'. "The single? Is that an offer or...?" Well, you know, it's Valentine's Day tomorrow. Yes, the single.

"We went to Sweden for two months earlier in the year after signing a publishing deal to try and write some songs to get a record deal and it was the first good one we came up with. We kind of sat there for three weeks getting nowhere and all of a sudden it all happened,” explains Simon. "I believe it's the 26th most played song in the UK at the minute."

“A 290% increase in plays from last week to this week, which was the highest rise," says Jonny.

"Look at him with the media figures!" laughs Simon.

"I hope people will buy it." Simon perks up. "It was in the background in EastEnders the other day! So we know we're doing something right. We're thinking that's probably the pinnacle of our career. We're going to retire now." You can't get much higher than that, apart from perhaps being in the Queen Vic yourself.

"Shame we don't actually get paid for it. It was actually in Phil Mitchell's car. I didn't actually see it, I'm just relying on someone else's information."

Before ‘Stay The Night’ there was 'Musical Chairs' - the song, not the game. But you can talk about the game if you like. "Apparently they don't have musical chairs in America," says Simon. "Well they do but they call it something different. We looked it up. In Japan it's got the weirdest fucking name..."

"I'm almost tempted to get someone to make a phone call and find out what it was," says Jonny. A brief bit of internet surfing tells me that it's often known as 'Going to Jerusalem.' Unless you're in Romania, where it's 'Birdie, Move Your Nest'.

"It was genius. So yeah, looks like it'll be a UK-only release," says Simon. "Again, that was another Sweden song. We kind of hit upon this concept of obsessively inserting key changes where possible; not in the sense of a boyband track where the whole track goes up. Straightforward verse, and then it changes key into the pre-chorus, and then it changes key halfway through the pre-chorus and then the chorus is another key change again. But then it all resolves itself.”

It all sounds very confusing. You manage to remember where the key changes are? "Yeah," they both say, in it's-all-easy tones. "We've played it like seven, eight thousand million times."

"But we can still fuck it up," says Jonny. "He can," says Simon. "He's unreliable."
Jonny disagrees. "I'm a rock!"

"To be fair when we played a gig last night (in Camden) and he lost the click-track for a good 20 seconds he still managed to stay in time."

"That was very scary."

Did anyone else notice? "No. We had the technical nightmare from hell yesterday," says Simon, who's actually sounding quite cheerful about it.

Technical nightmares sound part and parcel of life as a Ghost; even on the night they consider their best gig, which Jonny immediately tells me was in Brighton.

"We were playing with Air Traffic, and actually as many people came to see us as them, which was nice," says Simon. "And we had lots of our friends there as well, and the sound was great, and loads of things went wrong during the gig. I play guitar every song normally, but I just had to give up for the last two and just go a little bit... There was a little runway, there was a tiny little pseudo-runway into the crowd and I though 'fuck it', I should do this properly." Did you jump off the end? "No. The fans wouldn't catch me. I would have just squashed endless young lives. But it was great, just 'cause so much went wrong. But the feel of it was just really fun. Good reaction."

"Maybe tonight will be the best gig," muses Jonny.

Their biggest gig to date wasn’t a proper gig at all, but an appearance as the house band on ‘The Friday Night Project’, the madcap C4 show with Alan Carr and Hairy Justin (Lee Collins). They played live to an audience of 600. Jonny said it was a surreal experience.

"It's like the Sound of 2007 - who the hell's heard of us?" says Simon. "What are we doing here - it's like the last few bands were Mika, Klaxons, Primal Scream, Amy Winehouse, and then us. Steven Seagal was presenting, Jamelia and Gemma Atkinson were on it."

"Didn't get to meet any of these people," says Jonny. "We were introduced - and then they left during the song, to go on their helicopters." Simon proudly announces their dressing room was next to Wendy Richards’.

"Who's Wendy Richards?" asks Jonny. We educate him.

"It was scary having to play fully live on this first TV appearance, especially with our set up 'cause you have to sit there through the whole show and it takes about three hours to get to the song. And you can't really warm up your voice because you're sat right there on the set."

Is that the one where you play all the ad breaks in and out?

"Yeah, we did that as well," says Simon. "Actually a little secret - you actually mime those. You go in and you record them in the afternoon just 'cause they have to be so exact that they can't trust the bands to get them right to start with. So what they do, is they just start playing and you're like 'Fuck!' and start joining in and miming it. They give you like a second before they start panning round to you. But yeah, very surreal."

Were you not tempted to do it slightly out of time? "I was tempted," says Jonny. "Mark was taking photos and suddenly there's the music - 'huh?'," he says, miming chucking a camera down and playing keys.

"It's actually the biggest gig we've ever done in terms of people - the loudest roar I've ever heard when we got in,” says Simon.

"I mean obviously they'd been whipped into a frenzy by that point and none of them knew who we were," says Jonny the realist. "But it was still nice."

The average Ghosts fans are "women between the age of 18 and 30," says Jonny. Is that who you're hoping to attract or who you're actually attracting?

"Basing it on MySpace," says Simon, "it seems to be very much -"
"Gays and girls," finishes Jonny.
"No," Simon smiles. "It seems to be a broad range. We've had one fan who's come to every single gig, a guy called Dave.” Simon met Dave in a Primal Scream/Black Rebel Motorcycle Club mosh pit and told him he was in a band with a gig coming up six months later. “And he turned up and he's been to every one since.”

"Last night we played, and it was the first time we noticed quite a lot of people actually singing lyrics which is bizarre," says Jonny. "But none of them spoke to us afterwards." Scared of you.

"Scared of Ghosts.

Don’t be.

http://www.ghostsmusic.com/