Interview - The Hours

I was pretty nervous before this started. When I was a teenager, Pulp were my favourite band. I was in the fan club and everything, but had never got around to seeing them. Antony Genn played with the band in the mid-1980s and I had been reading odd stories about him for about ten years, so this was pretty big for me. In the end he was lovely and chatty and even gave me a wink at the end. Martin was a little harder to draw out, but that's understandably normal if you're repeatedly being asked questions by a series of strangers. Oh and the bit where I said I saw them at the Great Escape - I was at the back by myself, couldn't see anything on stage because I'm short, got bored, drank too much and got sick. But I'm sure in other circumstances, they would be great.

Words - Suzy Sims
Previously published on Native.tv http://www.native.tv in July 2007
(c) Niche News & Publishing Ltd

THE HOURS

The Hours are very talkative. I could have left the dictaphone and questions in front of them, returned half an hour later to collect and they probably wouldn’t have minded.

“I’m Martin from The Hours.”
“And I’m Antony Genn from The Hours. What do you do, Mart?”
“I play piano. What do you do Antony?”
“I sing, Martin. Like this.” They trill ‘Laaaaa!’ into the dictaphone. “Same note,” notices Antony.
“When it’s in tune, man.”

As they kindly introduced themselves, The Hours are indeed Martin Slattery and Antony Genn. We’re sat in a London pizza restaurant where they nipped to during the previous interview and have decided to stay because it’s far more comfortable than a boring office. They’re done eating, and Antony is currently ordering diet fizz to ‘get more hyper’. The band recently released ‘Ali In The Jungle’, a piece of dramatic pop designed to get the adrenaline pumping. Originally from Manchester (Martin) and Sheffield (Antony), the musical pair formed The Hours relatively recently after decades of playing in other bands. They're both friendly and jokey, and dressed in dark colours. Now they're sated on pizza and probably ready for a nap, it's time to dig out the question cards and get them chatting...

NEXT GIG YOU’RE GOING TO

Not necessarily one of your own. “Well actually we’re going to Summercase, because we’re playing there in Madrid on Friday, and there are lots of other bands playing there,” says Antony. “One of which is our good friend Mr Jarvis Cocker. So I presume that will be the next gig.”

“Probably will be, although you never can tell with festivals can you?” says Martin.

“No, but I would say that’s probably the gig we’re going to because he’s playing two after us on the same stage.”

“Only two? Is he not doing very well?” jokes Martin. “Can I pick the next question?”

FESTIVALS

“That’s not a question,” says Martin. “It’s a topic, Martin!” Antony protests. The band recently played three gigs at Glastonbury, including the Leftfield Tent and the John Peel Stage. According to Antony, the rain started pouring shortly before their Leftfield show so thousands crammed in to see them. The gig on the John Peel stage was the best gig they’ve ever played.

“It was really great, everyone was going for it.” He pauses to order a drink.

“There’s a lot of factors required for everyone to have a great gig,” explains Martin, “and they were all in place on that show.” Is mud one of the factors? “Do you know, not usually but in this case, it obviously was.”

“It seemed to work for us, the mud,” agrees Antony. Watching it on telly all the bands are so clean and everyone else was head to toe in mud. How did you manage it?

“You change into clothes,” says Antony with a big grin. You don’t say. “More suitable stage attire, moments before you go onstage.”

“Yeah, you should have seen us before we went onstage,” says Martin. They also recently played T in the Park and Oxegen, where they saw some great bands including Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes.

“We’re in no way festival virgins. We’ve been going to festivals for years but our band’s a festival virgin and it’s been nice to see a lot of people coming out and showing their appreciation,” says Martin. I think I saw The Hours at Brighton’s Great Escape but I was quite drunk and I don’t remember much about it. But I’m sure they were great. “You’re right, we were great,” confirms Antony with a smile.

MUSICAL PAST

Both Antony and Martin have played with some fantastic names before forming The Hours. They played together in Joe Strummer’s backing band The Mescaleros in the late 1990s and have plenty of gigging experience in other bands. Martin was “plucked from jazz obscurity in Manchester,” as he puts it, to play with Black Grape for a couple of years.

“I used to play in this club called The Band On The Wall in Manchester all the time when I was a teenager. When I went on the road with Black Grape I was about 19, and then I came back and there was a massive poster by the side of this club. The poster was a picture of every member of Black Grape and under my picture somebody had written ‘Traitor’.”

He laughs. Did you get a photo of yourself standing next to it? “I can’t believe I never did that! I would love to own that. I’ve got to say, I was quite shocked. I think it was probably just like a little joke really but you know how you get a little bit paranoid about those kind of things… it kind of freaked me out a little bit so I probably did my gig then went home and had a little cry!”

Antony was the bassist in Pulp for a while back in the Eighties, then graduated to playing other instruments for them. “When I was kind of a young lad and then when they got bigger I kind of went on tour with them and would play a bit of this and a bit of that, and maybe Jarv would want to play something on TV so I’d play guitar for him, I just had a general laugh really."

Antony and Martin also produced and remixed records for other people, like Ian Brown, Unkle and Queens of the Stone Age.“’Til we just realised that we were just giving our ideas away to other people and we might as well actually use them for ourselves,” says Martin. “Which obviously birthed The Hours...”

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO FORM THE HOURS?

“I think the reason why our band exists is ‘cause we spent a lot of time working with other admittedly great people, and we got to a point where we wanted to use our ideas for ourselves and not give them away. Unless you have your own band in this business, you’re always working for somebody else, whether you’re writing film music or whether you’re producing or writing, you’re always doing it for someone else. So we figured that the only way we could do it for ourselves was to form a band,” Martin continues.

Antony then took Martin to see Radiohead perform, which Martin says was “an amazing experience. And we played the one regret game. For me, that would have been to not be on stage with my mates playing my own songs.

“I’ve got to say, I’ve pretty much done all the things that I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. You know, the last one was doing it all again but with my own thing, so…”

Is there any reason you chose the name The Hours?

“It’s just a silly story really,” says Martin.“He was having some turf laid in his back garden and the turf guy said “Don’t stand on that for 48 hours.” So I said: “What about that, we could be called The 48 Hours,” explains Antony. You were this close to being called The Turf Guy. “Yeah. The Turf Dudes!” says Antony, while Martin laughs. “So eventually we just turned it from being The 48 Hours to just The Hours.”

WHAT INSPIRES YOUR SONGWRITING?

“I’ll quote Kraftwerk on this – from silence to everything,” says Anthony. “You know, everything inspires songwriting. Life on Planet Earth inspires songwriting. Watching TV inspires songwriting.”

“There’s a lot in the studio for us where we’ll be mic-ing up the drums and getting ready to record one song and then summat’ll happen, and then suddenly you’re on the road to another song. And that’s the greatest creative environment you could be in, where everyone’s free enough to allow themselves to smoothly move from one idea to another so you don’t lose out,” says Martin. “The idea that you’re working on you think might be an awesome one, it might be just that little scrap of someone falling on the piano that’s actually the great thing and if you don’t pursue it, you’re going to lose it. That’ll be a terrible thing.”

“Lyrically I’m inspired by real life,” says Antony. “Real emotions, real feelings. I mean I want to communicate in a very direct way with people, you know. I’m not into being shrouded in mystery, I’m not into being a ethereal, mysterious, middle-aged prophet, do you know what I mean? I want to tell it like it is and be direct about things. I think honesty is a dying trait on this planet. I think people build up an idea of what they want to be or what they think they should be, rather than saying ‘This is what I am, take it or leave it mate. What you see is what you get’.”

I think with the internet and sites such as MySpace it’s a lot easier now for someone to hide behind an image and you don’t always get to see the real person.

“I know people who make themselves out to be something that they’re not, and as you say it’s very easy to do that these days,” says Martin.

“It’s bullshit, you know," says Antony. "It’s like, what you do is inherent in who you are, but who are you? As far as the music is concerned we can be watching an advert and think: “That’s a good beat,” nick that beat and come in the next day. Like a magpie I’m always stealing. It’s the greatest artistic invention in the world, a collage. Nick a bit from there and a bit from there, sew it all together, put it in with a bit of salt, pepper, spinach, coriander, give it a stir. You got yourself your own little soup there."That’s the idea anyway,” he finishes.

Martin isn’t paying attention because he’s playing with his phone. “Kid dropped it in the mud at Glastonbury,” he says, trying to scrape some of the evidence off.

IF YOU WERE AN ANIMAL, WHAT WOULD YOU BE?

Sorry, I ran out of decent questions so I went a bit Smash Hits. “That’s all right, Smash Hits is good,” says Antony.

“It’s got to be cool to be a cat because you can just do what the hell you want,” says Martin, then admitting he hates his cats because they act like dogs and pester him. That’s very odd, because my dog’s a bit like a cat.

“The world is going bonkers, man! Not only is it July and it’s raining, but your dog’s like a cat and my cats are like dogs.” It’s pretending to be something it’s not. “Has it got a MySpace, your dog? My cats must have. Little fuckers. So yeah, cats. Cool cats.”

After much deliberation, Antony decides on a killer whale. “You know, kind of cool, smart, generally quite a laugh and playful but would just fucking tear you in two at the drop of a hat. Nice and cuddly, a bit Free Willy style, but there is a twisted dark side that could leave a lot of blood and mess.”

WILD REPUTATION

“A perfect lead on,” says Martin. This is mostly for Antony – type his name into Google and you get an interesting variety of stories come up, from his naked streak during Elastica’s set at Glastonbury – he then landed a job as their keyboardist, although it’s not something we’d generally recommend career-wise – to falling off bridges and much drug taking. Does Martin have a similar reputation? “No.”

“I suppose I have a bit of a wild reputation,” says Antony. "But nice, definitely. Well I wouldn’t say I was nice, I’d say I was a good human being. Yeah I’ve been known to do slightly insane mental things with my time. I don’t have a dimmer switch, I’m an on-or--off kind of guy.”

Q magazine’s website mentions his streak as one of the great moments of the festival, so well done for that. “There you go,” he smiles. “I’d like to think that at the end of my life I’ll be remembered for a little more than that. Maybe I won’t.”

“That’s the world we live in,” opinions Martin.

Unfortunately I have in my hand a piece of paper about the band which mentions ‘Infamous Glastonbury streaker Antony Genn’ but fails to mention Martin’s name anywhere.

“I ain’t afraid of the truth!” says Antony, slightly Mr T. “You know I was out of my fucking mind on all the drugs in the drug book. You don’t need to be on drugs to be mental. You take drugs because you’re mental, usually.

"I’m a pretty considered person these days. But I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of me. And I don’t give a fuck about consequences of telling the truth, and if that’s constituted as a wild way to be then I’m quite happy to be that. I ain’t wild as in 'getting off my head' anymore. But put me in a room with the most off their head, wild people in the business and I think I’ll do all right. I’ll outwild them,” he grins. I don’t doubt him.

Does the wildness rub off on you Martin? “I’ve had my moments, but none that have been reported in Q Magazine as the best moments of Glastonbury.”

Let’s get onto some of the imagery associated with The Hours. Firstly:

THE SKULL

It’s the band’s image, on all their artwork, and was designed by their friend and creative genius Damien Hirst. Did he give you a little leftover piece from ‘For The Love Of God’, his recent diamond-encrusted skull?

“We wouldn’t be sitting in Pizza Express if he had,” points out Martin.

Antony explains that Hirst designs all their artwork and says the band is lucky to know him. “He’s one of the most incredible human beings you would ever be likely to meet, on this planet anyway. I don’t know about the rest of the solar system. He’s so generous and creative and he’s got boundless energy. The only people that don’t like Damien Hirst are the people who have not met him.”

Martin calls the skull ‘striking’. “I know he’s into skulls anyway but the way he laid it out for us was brilliant,” he says. The band have t shirts featuring the logo and even toyed with masks in a video, but confess it didn’t quite work.

So if you’re an art lover and you’ve ever wanted to own a Damien Hirst, you may find something by The Hours more within your budget.

And secondly, imagery-wise:

JONAS ODELL

AKA the man who directed the video to ‘Ali In The Jungle’. Antony says Odell has also directed videos for Mad Action and Franz Ferdinand. “My original idea was that when I was a kid I used to really like the opening credits to The South Bank Show. How things kept moving and morphing into the next thing. So I just told him that. You know, what you want when you collaborate with anyone is you want to tell them a basic idea and then you want them to come back to you with something ten times better that what you could have ever imagined.”

“I was going to say, with this whole process, it’s probably the only time it’s happened,” says Martin, “out of a million. Not just videos I’m talking about, it’s very rare you can come out and you have a rough idea of what you’d like and then you get a rough copy of that thing, music, video, writing or whatever from that person and it blows your mind, and you know it’s only going to get better from there.”

“Literally I had that one conversation with him and then made like one or two comments during the making of it. I think it’s a brilliant video and I’d love to work with him again on something. I told him about The South Bank Show and he was like ‘OK I see what you mean yeah, so we could use like an old theatre’ and the next thing you know he sent us that back and I was like – rrrrespect! So there you go. Hats off to Jonas Odell. Respect to that man.”

NARCISSUS ROAD

It’s the name of their debut album and a song on there. It’s also a road in West Hampstead. “I used to walk past it on the way back from my therapist and I always thought “God, that’s a catchy name, ‘Narcissus Road’ for a song or something.” And it never really made any sense to me. Then I had a disastrous relationship with a pathological narcissist and hey presto (clicks fingers) bingo, you got yourself a little song –“

“Fucking bingo!” interrupts Martin.

“Fucking bingo, man! You got yourself a little song there about a horrible human, and it seemed like a snappy little title for the record. That is our album, ‘Narcissus Road’, and it’s brilliant. Go and buy it.”

I will. But I can’t pronounce it because I’ve got a lisp. “I think it sounds like you’ve got a lisp if you haven’t got a lisp. Narcissus Road.” Antony clonks his empty glass down on the table. “Lisps are cool.”

So I leave The Hours to it. They’re discussing their weekend in Spain playing at Summercase, which Martin is particularly looking forward to because he might get to experience a bit of summer sunshine.“It ain’t easy going to see bands and you’ve got to trudge through The Somme. So hopefully we can wander round quite casually and catch a few gigs. I’m hoping Bright Eyes is going to be playing again and you can share the experience, mate,” he says to Antony. Let’s hope they did.

The Hours released 'Ali In The Jungle' on July 9th through A&M Records. 'Narcissus Road' was released in February 2007

Free Damien Hirst artwork! (Sort of). To get your hands on a skull desktop clock, follow this link to download.
Or play about and make your own 'Ali In The Jungle' cover artwork here

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