Interviews

Little Comets Interview

• 7th Feb 2011

Little Comets have recently released their debut album and have been touring pretty much none stop. We caught up with them to find out how things are going…

Firstly, congratulations on the record release, it’s sounding great! Something I’ve found is that all the songs seem to be pretty dark, how is it for you writing songs about topics such as relationship issues?
I think we tend to pick up on a lot of stories we hear, or hear situations that friends are going through. But I think it’s quite easy to write about a situation where you almost pause it and then comment on it, sort of like a review on an object in a room.

For such dark lyrics, the instrumental backing always seems to be very light hearted and simplistic. Would you say that’s deliberate to combat such dark imagery from the words?
Funnily enough, I think it’s the other way round. We tend to write a song instrumentally first and find a hook and then try to fit lyrics over the top as they pop into my head while we’re playing it. I don’t actually know why it is that there’s such a contrast between the lyrics and the pace of the songs to be honest.

Would you say then, that it’s representative of your own personalities?
Yeah, I mean we’ve always written songs with fairly sensible, easy chord structures and I think that really just defines our sound a bit. I think It’s nice to be simplistic because it just leaves a lot of space to menouvire.

So with the whole writing process, ever since signing to a major label, do you feel restricted with your creativity, especially around the whole Columbia fiasco?
I think our big problem was going into a major label and expecting to still work the same way, recording anywhere but the studio like we used to and that, we found that all this effort we put in created us a strong identity and we just couldn’t swap it over, and that was the whole problem with Columbia.

Has it been difficult to swap over to being a ‘major label’ band?
I think it was mainly just naivety on both parts, We felt it was an essential part of our ‘thing’ to produce it all ourselves, I think we found it quite hard to hand that over to someone else. Especially with the list of producers they gave us, none of them particularly had anything we wanted to go for.

That leads onto the whole thing of recording and rehearsing in weird places, how come?
At first it was just because we couldn’t afford to go anywhere else, but then it was just something we wanted to do, creating sounds out of the place that we’re in. We’ve always preferred much more run down places to anywhere pristine.

Was there a favourite place to play in?
Yeah man, this weird school in Newcastle that we used into record in during the holidays but in terms of rehearsing this run down tv studio we loved. But it’s the whole thing of not being told we can’t do something that we love.

Was that part of the issue with Columbia then?
Yeah, think it was just neither of us on both parts had any defined role, it all just seemed to be a bit of a shambles.

Is there any bands you think should have more acclaim, from round your area, that you’d like to recommend to people?
Check out Grandfather Birds!

Live, you play with a washing line. Explain?
We just wanted a way of doing what we did on the record, live. Also, I think it just looks great visually!

You’re known to do quite a few guerrilla gigs, how did the idea for them come about?
Well say if we were playing in a town, to amuse ourselves during the day we’d find some way of opening our music out to other people that may not have heard of us, for example on the metro in Newcastle is where we did it quite a lot.

Finally, where did the name come from?
Well, my friends name on MSN messenger used to be ‘Le Petite Comet’ and I wondered what the translation was, disappointingly it wasn’t much different. But the phrase just stuck in my head so yeah. That’s it.

Amazing, well yeah, cheers, hope the tour doesn’t completely wreck you and we’ll see you down in London!