Life editor Avery Spofford recently talked with Jack Lawrence-Brown, drummer for the White Lies. The band's rising lightning quick to prominence and will open for Kings of Leon this Friday night at the Sommet Center. Listen to the interview, and check out the full transcript below.
Versus Magazine: So, White Lies are coming to Nashville on Oct. 16 as support for the Kings of Leon, and that tour kicked off in September. How has that been going?
White Lies: It’s been going really well. I mean, we only joined the tour a couple of shows ago, so we’ve played two shows so far with them, one in Minneapolis and one in St. Louis. But yeah, it’s been amazing. It’s a completely new way of touring for us. We’ve never toured across a lot of the states that we’re going to in America at the moment, so that’s a really positive thing.
VM: How would you compare touring in the United States versus touring in the UK and the rest of Europe?
WL: It’s so different … it’s really different. I mean, comparing it to the UK is basically impossible because, you know, the drive between each place that we’re doing at the moment is thousands of miles, not a couple of hundred, and every place that you go kind of feels a bit different and looks very different and … I don’t know, it’s quite an alien experience compared to touring in the UK. It’s more like touring in Europe, because quite often each state you go to kind of feels like you’re entering your own country anyway, so it’s a weird thing for us to do. But it’s a lot of fun, actually, you kind of feel like you’re seeing a lot of the world.
VM: How would you say that the fans are different here versus abroad?
WL: It’s hard to say. For us on this tour, obviously we’re not playing to a room of White Lies fans. Maybe a couple of hundred at most will know who we are before we play the show, and they’re always really receptive. But I think the Kings of Leon fans over here seem to be really excited with all the new material. From what I understand, Kings of Leon have really taken off in this last record over in America, and in England I’ve seen them many, many times, when they used to tour in the UK on their first, second and third album. They’ve always had a really massive following in the UK. So it’s interesting to see them becoming such a massive band all of a sudden over here, and their fans seem to really enjoy it and kind of “get it,” which is really great after touring America for a good three or four years.
VM: I know you have played a lot of festivals recently, like Lollapalooza, Coachella and South by Southwest. How do you feel about playing festivals versus playing a venue like the Sommet Center here in Nashville?
WL: I think that it all depends. With festivals, you have the potential to really make a massive impact. If you’re going out and playing to 20 or 30,000 people in one go, and a lot of the people may never have seen you play live before, it’s a massive opportunity to make an impact with them and gain new fans. And a lot of bands have their pivotal shows at festivals, and it goes down as a defining moment in their career.
So I’ve really enjoyed doing the festivals, especially Coachella, which was the first festival for us this summer. It really kicked things off for us in a great way, to go and play in the middle of the desert, somewhere we’d never been before. It was such a different environment from any other festival in the world, and it was a great way to start the whole summer off, really. We had a great time this summer doing all of the festivals but, at the same time, it’s also a lot of fun to do your own shows and play in venues and do your own headlining shows where you have the benefit of being able to use your own lighting and stuff like that, because when you’re doing a festival it’s kind of hard to make it look amazing, especially if you’re playing in the middle of the day or whatever. Both have their advantages — personally, I think I’ve had one of my best summers ever just doing these shows all around the world at different festivals. Getting to see the world in that way has been great.
VM: How would you describe your sound to music fans who haven’t heard White Lies before? You have been compared to Interpol and Joy Division, how would you respond to that and do you agree with those comparisons?
WL: It’s always hard to describe your own sound, but I guess as a band we always have said that we don’t really understand the Joy Division comparison that we get a lot, because it’s music that we never really grew up with and never really have had a passion for at all. Interpol is a band that we all quite like. But I think that generally, I’ve found [us] to be a bit more uplifting than that, you know, [our music] definitely has dark elements to it, but I think the music itself is quite positive and quite euphoric in places. And it’s … it’s quite big music, you know? It’s quite spacious. And, yeah, I would say it’s rock music, but it’s quite wide-screen and hopefully a little bit different from most rock bands.
VM: And who would you cite as your musical influences, then?
WL: I think that as a band we have a few checkpoints which we always say are the places that got us to where we are now. The first band that we ever listened to that really inspired us to begin writing music was the Talking Heads. We listened a lot to them when we were still at school learning to play our instruments, when we were like fifteen or sixteen, and they remain to this day to be one of our favorite bands. But then, when we started White Lies, there was an album by the Secret Machines that had just come out, and that was really an important record to us. It was one that we all loved. There’s not that many albums for us which we all share a passion for, but that first Secret Machines album is definitely one of the records that really inspired us when we began White Lies.
VM: Do you guys have any artists that you’ve been listening to lately, any contemporaries that people should keep an eye out for?
WL: Yeah, definitely … we’re often trying to keep our eye on new bands. We did a show in New York about a week ago, actually, where we had a band support us called Violens, and they’re a band we’re massive fans of. They’re going to come tour with us in the UK, as well, which is great. And then also, another band from New York called Asobi Seksu who are coming to tour with us. They’re two bands which are really kind of important to us at the moment. And there’s a band from the UK as well called Wild Beasts who we’re listening to a lot, and they’ve just had their second album out, and that’s a really great album.
VM: As far as the history of the band, I know that you were in a band called Fear of Flying until 2007 — what made you guys decide to become White Lies, and what is the difference between the two?
WL: The main reason that we felt we wanted to change the name of the band and start writing some new songs again was because when we were in Fear of Flying, we started that band when we were fifteen years old, and we were just kind of messing around on weekends and playing the odd show, and we did really enjoy it and we put our time and effort into it and spent all of our money that we made trying to make sure that it was something that we could keep doing. And then by the time we finished school we were all kind of … we felt like the songs we’d written when we were fifteen or sixteen didn’t bear any relevance to where we were at at that time. We had all grown up a lot, and our tastes had changed quite a lot, and it kind of felt like the songs that we were beginning to write didn’t really fit in with the songs Fear of Flying had written before.
And for that reason we wanted to give ourselves a clean start and not have any baggage or anything, and kind of just wipe the slate clean. We had never made any impact in terms of getting anywhere in the music industry or anything like that, we were never signed and we released a couple of very limited edition singles on indie labels. But we just felt like it was time for us, if we really wanted to dedicate our time and effort to [the band], it should be something new and something that we could really focus on from day one. So, yeah, that’s why we changed the name, and it was a really important decision for us because it kind of gave us a new leaf of life as a band, and it meant that we would be happy to dedicate all of our time to it. And it was something that really paid off for us.
VM: Why did you choose “White Lies” as the name?
WL: We don’t ever have a really solid reason for this. I think it changes gradually, as we get asked [that question], but the honest answer is that we never really had thought about what we needed to call the band until we started writing some songs. We thought, okay, we’re going to get a new name, but we hadn’t thought too much about it. We sat down at a bar one day in London, and we just literally sat drinking until we could think of something which we thought didn’t sound awful. It was the hardest thing in the world, you know, we often compare it to naming a child or something. You have to pick the name which is going to stick with it for the whole of its life, the whole of its career. So it was a tricky decision, but White Lies just felt like it fit with the music that we’d already begun to write, and it was something that we were happy with and felt comfortable saying. And at the end of the day that’s the most important thing, you’ve just got to be able to be comfortable with the name. Other than that, there’s no real reason for it.
VM: As White Lies, what do you consider to be the band’s greatest triumph and what do you consider to be the greatest struggle? After becoming White Lies, you all shot to success — “To Lose My Life” was No. 1 on the charts in the UK the week of its release, which is obviously a huge deal, and the band has won so many awards and things, so what do you think is the band’s greatest success?
WL: That’s a good question, actually … definitely the album going to No. 1 was a real highlight, but I think for me a bigger highlight than that was the fact that we got to make the album in the first place. I mean, when we signed our record deal it was amazing and it was a massive rush, but then when we got sent to the studio where we decided we were going to go record the album and we actually got into making that happen, and that whole process … I think that was definitely the best moment for me. It was such a proud moment to finally have gotten to a stage where we had that freedom and we had that opportunity. I think that was probably my high point, but, you know, there’s been loads — we’ve gone all over the world, and we’ve seen some amazing places, and that’s always a highlight, but I think that making the record was the highlight of the whole thing for me.
And, strangely, I would also say that making the record has been the biggest struggle, because that was two or three months of our lives when we had to just pour all of our energy and all of our emotion into this very new process … we had never done anything like that before. We had done occasional demoing, but we had never done any kind of professional recording like that. It was a really stressful process, and one that we all left exhausted. There was blood, sweat and tears on making that record, and that’s why I think it has turned out as well as it has for us and is something that we’re proud of. We know that we couldn’t really have given anything more to it. But yeah, I think that definitely was a massive struggle for us, but one that turned out to be really enjoyable in the end.
VM: What’s next for White Lies after this tour?
WL: We’re going to finish this tour in America with Kings of Leon and then we’re heading back to the UK for one quick one-off show, and then we’re doing a big European tour, which is really exciting. We haven’t really done too many headlining shows in Europe yet, and they’re all selling very well so we’re really excited to get out there and do those. But the end of the year for us is the UK tour which we’re finishing on. And that’s a massive, massive thing for us, because the venues that we’re doing are venues that we went to when we were growing up as kids, and they’re big venues and never did any of us really think that we’d get the chance to play some of these places and get them sold out. And to do two nights at Brixton Academy is huge … it’s just a massive way to finish the year for us, and it feels like all the hard work has definitely paid off. And that’s really how we’re going to end the year. It’s going to finish around Christmas time, and then we’re going to have a little bit of time off, I think. But I’m sure that we’ll get bored pretty quickly. We’re going to try and start writing the next record early next year and get involved in that process again.
