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Athlete Announce 2010 Tour

• 12th Oct 2010

Hooks, harmonies and soaring rock anthems…. Awards, accolades and a tremendously loyal live following. People think they know Athlete, four charming men from South London who sprang to prominence when their first album, Vehicles & Animals, was nominated for the 2003 Mercury Music Prize.

But there is more to this Deptford quartet than meets the eye, as the band’s first retrospective album, Singles 01-10, goes to show. Of course, the big anthems, including hits like El Salvador and Wires, are all in there. But, as befits a band who won an Ivor Novello Award for their songwriting, there is impressive breadth and diversity here, too. Spanning the past ten years, the album also features tracks such as The Outsiders (which climaxes with a long, decidedly radio-unfriendly piano outro) and Black Swan Song (a vividly poignant piece that would tug at the strings of the hardest heart).

Athlete, as singer and guitarist Joel Pott attests, are a band who have refused to be pigeonholed, despite lazy attempts to bracket them, alongside Keane and Coldplay, as kings of soft, melodic, post-Britpop rock. ‘People always want you to fit in with a scene,’ he says. ‘And maybe we’d have done better if we’d become mates with all the bands we were compared to. But we never wanted to be part of anything like that.’

As they look back over the past decade, the band – Joel plus bassist Carey Willetts, drummer Stephen Roberts and keyboardist Tim Wanstall – can be justifiably proud of a body of work that stands comparison with anything produced by their peers. Album sales of over a million are testimony to that.

The band have even unearthed a previously unreleased gem of a song for the occasion. Originally earmarked as a single in 2003, Back Track ended up failing to make the final cut on their first album. Now, though, it has been gloriously resurrected from the tape-room, with the band taking the novel approach of using only the equipment available to them nine years ago to finally finish recording it.

But, first things first. Athlete originally played together in their teens, but their first serious attempt at making music came when Joel, Carey and Stephen moved from Deptford to Camden and surfed the mid-Nineties Britpop wave in a hard-gigging, guitar-driven trio. This Britpop-era incarnation wasn’t bad – ‘young, fast and punky, but with good tunes,’ according to Carey – but the trio yearned for something more. Despite record label interest, they went back to the drawing board. Swapping The Beatles and Blur for the sound of the US underground, they turned to Pavement, Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips for inspiration and reinvented themselves. ‘We started thinking about music in a different way,’ says Joel.

Things solidified when Tim returned from university and became a full-time member in 2000. The inclusion of vintage synths and cheap casio keyboards broadened the sonic palate of a group who were already experimenting with new guitar sounds and complex vocal arrangements, and the Athlete sound was born.

Building their reputation, they signed to Parlophone and made Vehicles & Animals. The record, produced by Victor Van Vugt and released in April 2003, was a summery pop album that mixed ear-catching twists with a wide-eyed freshness and naïveté. It was no surprise when its sales reached an impressive 350,000.

‘The Mercury shortlist put us in the public eye, and started a word-of-mouth buzz,’ says Tim. ‘We played V and Glastonbury that year and the vibe was brilliant.’ Among the sparkling singles taken from that debut were You Got The Style, inspired by race riots in the mill-towns of Northern England, and El Salvador, a wry comment on the corporate record company world that the band were now a slightly bemused part of.

‘The lyrics to El Salvador seem even more apt now than they were in 2003,’ says Carey. ‘It’s about our initial impressions on getting a deal. We were signed towards the end of the music industry’s golden era. There was still a lot of extravagance. We were living the life, shooting videos in Cuba, but we also saw that it was all very fickle. The record labels offer you free champagne, but you ultimately end up paying for all that stuff by selling records.’

A second album, 2005’s Tourist, saw a change of tack. The jaunty, sing-along appeal of their debut was superseded by a deeper, more intimate feel. The songs were still built around the band's widescreen electronics, inventive keyboards and shimmering guitars, but the lyrics were more personal, particularly on first single Wires, a song inspired by the trauma faced by Joel and his wife Zoe after the premature arrival of their daughter Myla. ‘She was rushed into intensive care hours after her birth,’ says Joel. ‘I’d already left the hospital, so I rushed back as soon as I got the call. I told myself everything was going to be all right and, thankfully, it was. But that song set a new template.’

The single – which defeated Gorillaz and the Kaiser Chiefs to win the Ivor Novello award for best contemporary song – struck a chord with the record-buying public, and Tourist went to No. 1 to build on the success of their debut.

Beyond The Neighbourhood, in 2007, was another major step. Self-produced, it was the sound of Athlete reaching out to the wider world. An upbeat affair that moved away from the darker undertones of Tourist, it found them making the music they wanted to make regardless of commercial concerns, with The Outsiders ending with that extended piano outro. Despite such apparent indulgence, it still made the Top Five. ‘Each album was a reaction to the previous one,’ says Stephen. ‘Beyond The Neighbourhood had pop on it, but it wasn’t as easily accessible. It was an album that the listener had to work at, but it contained some of our best songs.’

Things moved on again with 2009’s Black Swan. A new label, Fiction, marked a more urgent approach. The opening track, Superhuman Touch, was a surging rock anthem that began with Joel asserting: ‘I’m on fire, nothing’s gonna hold me back’. Recorded in LA with Tom Rothrock, it added Californian sunshine to the band’s quintessentially English sound, but also packed a hefty emotional punch:

Black Swan Song was Joel’s powerful tribute to his grandfather, Major John Pott, who had escaped from a German military hospital in 1944.

‘We’ve sometimes been a studio band, but his time we tried to capture our live sound,’ says Carey. ‘We recorded everything in two weeks, and finished the album before we signed to a new record label. It was tough, but it sparked us creatively.’

Now, with Singles 01-10 providing a bookend to their first decade, they are looking forward. This is the story so far, but Athlete’s race is far from run.

‘This isn’t going to stop for a while yet,’ says Joel. ‘After four albums, you wonder what you are going to do next. We could work with other musicians, but Athlete still provides the biggest challenge – and the greatest rewards.’

Following the release of their “Singles ‘01-10” album, Athlete are touring the UK in November and December.

Dates are :

November
16th – Liverpool O2 Academy
17th – Leamington Spa Assembly
18th – Nottingham Rock City
20th – London Forum
21st – Norwich UEA
22nd – Cambridge Junction
24th – Oxford O2 Academy
25th – Bournemouth O2 Academy
26th – Bristol 02 Academy
27th – Leeds O2 Academy
29th – SheffieldO2 Academy2
30th – Glasgow O2 ABC

December
1st – Newcastle O2 Academy
3rd – Manchester Academy 2
4th – Birmingham HMV Institute