Interview: Above & Beyond

Spotlight: Your second artist album ‘Group Therapy’ was just released. There is a lot of passion and emotion behind many of the vocals. What was your inspiration behind the tracks?

Tony: Everything that happens to us in our lives inspires the album, whether it’s lyrically in terms of telling stories about things that happens to us all, or musically telling stories. We’ve always treated these artist albums that we’ve done as a way of expressing ourselves like a band would express themselves. It’s not a collection of famous singers singing songs that they’ve written. It’s songs that we’ve written and that try and describe an arc of time in our lives since the last time we’ve written an album, and then some from before that time. It’s not completely autobiographical, but it’s as autobiographical as we can get really.

Spotlight: That’s probably why you connect with so many fans out there. How long did it take you to finish the album?

Tony: It was sort of finished a year ago, but then took another year to actually finish. I think we had all but one of the songs done. The thing that really took some time, and I’m glad we took the time to do it, was to think about how those songs were going to be presented in terms of production, because so much has changed and moved in our scene, that to just regurgitate the Above and Beyond sound of old would have been very tired.

Radio 1 in the UK has got something that we never really think about that much. It’s doing its own thing, but we ended up with the first two singles on the Radio 1 playlist, which is a totally unexpected bonus, but I think that’s really down to the work and effort that we all put in with the help of Andrew Bayer in the last 12 months really sorting out the grooves and the vibe of the songs we had already written. That’s something that really is so much a part of what we do naturally that we sometimes forget that we do it. But songs are songs, and the way they present themselves is a whole other book.

Right back from our remixing days we’ve gotten used to the idea of taking a song that was written over certain chords, and in a certain order, and chopping it up and moving it around, and changing the vehicle to deliver that song into something else. A Thing Called Love has about eight completely different versions that we wrote, and there’s twenty remixes because we were going to release it, and then we didn’t, and then we decided to release it again. But throughout all of that is the song, and that’s really our start point and the most important thing for us as a group. Second, but still incredibly important in our world is how that’s delivered and the sound of it, and I think we’ve ended up with a fairly new Above and Beyond sound to finally replace the original one, which we think everyone copied it so much that we got so tired of it. But, throughout it all, the songs are really what excite us and make it worthwhile for us to do.

Spotlight: How do you all write your music? Do you collaborate together in the studio, or do you write each each track individually?

Tony: All of the above. There is no recipe for it. The songs that Richard Bedford sing on the album typically will start with a track that Jono or Paavo or I have started. Mostly Jono and Paavo because they’re so much quicker than I am musically, and then I tend to write most of the melody and lyrics for those songs.

I think one of the things that has been great for us in the last few years has been meeting up with Zoe Johnston who, even before we were working with her, was writing songs that were absolutely spot on in terms of where we like to investigate emotions and relationships. So we began working with her to get a female perspective, and she’s obviously a talented singer/songwriter in her own right, so she tends to do quite a lot of the work on her own, but we have actually collaborated with her much more in terms of starting from the ground up and writing with her. Sometimes we will say to her we have an idea for a song, for example, the last thing you think about before you die. Then she’ll write that out. So even if we can’t express it ourselves, we have written a song about this specific thing, and we might have other ideas that she can make whole. I think it’s nice to have a balance for us in our world with some female perspective songs from the ones that we obviously write from our own perspectives, which are sometimes a little different. I think that there are differences (laughs).

I think at the heart of it is a real fascination with the knife point of decisions. One of the fascinating things about the human condition is that you can have two completely conflicting ideas in your head, both of which feel very compelling, but point in completely opposite directions. That “should I stay or should I go”, and why both of them make sense to you, and I think that’s the thing that always excited us about Zoe. The song that really excited us that she wrote was Crazy English Summer. It’s got this line in it: “sometimes I feel glad to be free, sometimes I just want your arms around me”, and it’s that indecision that said to all of us she’s going to be perfect for Above and Beyond because that’s kind of where we’re writing anyway.

There are so many things you can write about, and so many ways you can describe things, but I think what we love about what she does, and what we’re excited about when we’re writing songs on our own is that kind of split mind that you get at the point where you’re considering whether you should go left or right, or whether you should leave or stay, or whether you should love somebody or not. I think that’s really what Tri-State and Group Therapy are about for the most part. None of the songs are unequivocally sad or unequivocally happy. They’re somewhere in the middle. I think in terms of when people turn to music, when people really use music to help them in their lives, and when it really has a role in your life is at that time. Whether maybe you just split up with someone, but you’re not entirely sure that it was the right thing to do, which generally is the way those things happen, and music can help you fill in some of the details that maybe you haven’t thought yourself. So that’s really where we’re at in terms of “pitch” (laughs).

Spotlight: What’s your most memorable gig to date and why?

Tony: We always used to say that our gig in Brazil to two million people was our most memorable gig because it just sounds good on paper, but actually this gig we did a couple weeks ago in Reno just because of the nature of it, and because it was so unusual in our world. We had a gig in Reno, and the promoter canceled it without telling us, and we got there at 9:30 with the gig canceled, and I said to Paavo there are probably loads of people who came to Reno to see us, so we should probably do something about it. So we tweeted that we were in this casino hotel bar, and if you want to, come for a drink. We ended up with about nine people, one of whom said there’s a club down the road which is doing an open deck tonight, and maybe we could play there. By the time we got down there there were about 25 people. We tweeted and put on Facebook that we were going to do a show in this little club for nothing, and there were about 250 people who came in so slowly over the course of the night that we met every single one of them. It was like a house party. It was absolutely amazing! It was a very rare, wonderful, and really a sort of life affirming thing to do.

Normally we turn up to a nice hotel, we get taken in a nice car to a nice back stage area, we do this thing, and then we go back home again. You do interact with people in those two hours, but you don’t get to meet them and find out where they came from, and that’s what was lovely about that Reno show. We were just sort of tipped into this gradually swelling room full of people who were actually disappointed two hours before, but elated at the time they walked through the door. It was very magical and spur of the moment, and I’m really glad we did it.

Spotlight: So is it difficult to be traveling all the time?

Tony: I think we’re all used to it because we do it, but it is extraordinarily difficult, and I think people don’t quite grasp the demand it makes on your body and your state of mind. Historically, agents and promoters thought if it’s physically possible to get somebody from A to B, they can do a gig in A and then a gig in B, but I can tell you that 12 hours of traveling between gig A and gig B doesn’t put you in the best state of mind.

For us it’s not just us standing behind the decks in a dark room playing records. The Above and Beyond show is actually a very physical and emotional thing. There’s a lot of stuff going on for us. The travel sometimes makes it hard to go on stage, but one thing that is absolutely true about what we do is that when you’re standing up there, and there’s a room full of people that have been waiting a month to see you, you feel that energy, and I think that you can go from being barely able to stand to being perfectly able to jump around the stage very very quickly. It’s an interesting exercise to see what you can do if given the energy from somewhere.

Although, it feels so much richer than just the excitement for me. The connection you feel that you’re making with people just by looking and waving at them, and shaking their hand, and the energy you get back from those people. There’s something really great going on, and I’m very glad we DJ with two people because you’re really only DJing half the time, and it gives you half the time to connect with people in the audience. Thank God we’ve got that time because that process for me is really so much of what we’re doing up there. It’s not just about playing records. I think if it was there wouldn’t be much to being a DJ. I think there’s so much more that’s going on, complicated stuff, and thank God because that’s really what gets you through the night if you’ve had a long day of traveling.

Spotlight: What are your plans for for Ibiza this summer?

In addition to our dates at Cream at Amnesia on June 30th, July 14th, August 11th, August 18th, September 1st, and September 18th, I think it’s one of the August dates that we’re doing the official album launch party, so expect something special.