Elbow may not be the biggest band in Britain, but this Mancunian quintet is certainly one of the most celebrated. Their first album, Asleep in the Back, was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2001, and the group has been nominated twice since, winning in 2008 for The Seldom Seen Kid. Elbow’s trophy room also features a Brit Award for best British group as well as Ivor Novello Awards for songwriting, and it’s a good bet that their current album, Build a Rocket Boys! (which competed for this year’s Mercury against P.J. Harvey) will be on a number of year’s-best lists.
We spoke with keyboardist Craig Potter, from his home in Prestwich, England, about the band’s songwriting and live performances.
Your albums credit the music to the whole band and the lyrics to Gus Garvey. Is the writing process really as compartmentalized as that?
Not really. Guy writes all the lyrics, but we all contribute and discuss lyrics, and maybe do editing here and there with him.
We’re known for the lyrics. It’s a massive part of why people love us, because Guy is such a great lyricist. People get very involved with it, and so do we. Because it’s so important to support the song with the right feel musically, we have to know the ins and outs of each theme of each song.
The lyrics on Build a Rocket Boys! seem almost like reading someone’s diary. Do the rest of you grasp all the personal references or does Guy have to explain them?
Yes, sometimes he has to explain some things. But then again, in like Jesus Is a Rochdale Girl, we were all part of the scenes that he’s describing. We all knew which house it was because we used to be around there all the time.
So what is a Rochdale Girl?
[Laughs] It’s a girl from someplace called Rochdale. It’s a very specific thing – one of Guy’s ex-girlfriends from when he was a teenager approaching his 20s. In that song, he mentions some very specific things, like a yellow duvet cover, and that’s got some real strengths about it because, for me, when you hear specific stuff in songs, you really know he means it.
There’s quite a range of rhythmic approaches on the album, with some songs relying on funk or R&B-oriented beats while others feature an almost mechanically straight pulse.
We actually started out as a funk band, really, when we first began writing songs. It was around the time of the Beastie Boys and Check Your Head, and we used to like all that sort of thing. I think we overfunked for a while, but it definitely gets back in.
There’s also a lot of detail in the arrangements, like on The Birds, where there’s a lot of layering of guitar and keyboards and percussion. Do you worry about getting all the fine points across live?
Not really. Because the feel of the music needs to go so much with the lyric, I’d say we err more to things sounding as close as we can to the record, rather than doing different completely versions, because we’ve spent a long time getting those arrangements, and getting the sound to fit with the song and support the song. So we want to do something very similar live.
It’s a little bit rockier live, and the guitar riff drives it along a little more than it does on the album. It’s good in lots of ways. It’s not quite the same, but we make sure it works with what we’ve got.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Elbow plays the Sound Academy in Toronto on Sept. 28.
