Interview: Spiders Eat Vinyl
Formed by two 13-year-olds in Sheffield back in 2005, Spiders Eat Vinyl have developed into one of the most exciting bands in Northern music – we spoke with the band about their newest single ‘Cagliari Dreams’, as well as adapting to lockdown life and the perks of online collaboration.
How was the band formed?
We are all from Sheffield, but now two of us live in London and one lives in Liverpool. Jonny and Jack were 13 when they started making music together under the name Spider’s Eat Vinyl, basically recording CDs full of let us say questionable songs and giving them out to classmates. We moved to Manchester in 2011, and Fran joined the band in 2018 after Jonny met her where they both worked in a bar.
What made you come up with the name Spiders Eat Vinyl?
Jack sent Jonny a postcard when he was on holiday in France with a list of terrible band names and this is the one we chose. It is funny, because people think we are a metal band, which is kind of why we like it – it gives the wrong impression of our music. The actual name came from Jack being sat next to a family who were reading in the newspaper that a local record shop was complaining of moths, but when a pest company went in, they found a load of spiders. On the list there was also “The Snorkels” and that is literally because Jack had been snorkelling that day and thought wow that would be a great name for a band. At a house party once in Sheffield, Jonny overheard a group saying what a terrible band name we had, until the girl hosting the party turned around and said she thought it was a great band name – like yes, we are making music for her.
What inspired your latest single ‘Cagliari Dreams’’?
So, Jack built up the beat and the bassline, and the keyboard part, slowly building it up at the beginning of last year just as lockdown was coming in. Jonny started writing the lyrics to it on the first night of lockdown, after a nice spring day. It is kind of about that uncanny feeling of the first lockdown - not seeing anyone around and remembering only a year before going on holiday to Sardinia and how quickly things had changed; how we could go out and have beers with people but now we are all trapped inside: remembering something that didn’t feel real. There is also a metaphor in there for sleep paralysis, something both Jonny and Jack experience: being caught between being asleep and awake where you have very psychedelic dreams. If you have vivid dreams all the time, you do have moments in life where you have to second guess yourself as to whether you dreamed something or not. Lockdown makes everything feel less real as well because the things that normally link you to reality like the routine of going to work or going to the pub with somebody has gone, all the days blur into one, and it gives this weird unreal feeling, which is kind of what we are trying to capture in the track.
Were there any music influences that inspired your track and to become who you are now?
When we first heard Jack’s demo of the beats and the keyboard part, it was reminiscent of Protection by Massive Attack, and so when different parts were being added like the guitar or changing the beats, we were trying to echo the feeling of that song; moody and giving the song its own sonic world, which sounds pretentious but that was the vibe. Strangely enough, Jack had never heard that song before coming up with the original demo; he had been listening to a lot of Snarky Puppy and Portico Quartet; sort of jazzy experimental things, and kind of trying to write the opposite of that – you get so saturated with these ridiculous baselines and solos in your head and want to get them out of there. A lot of the influences that go into those sorts of songs come from a lot of like jazzy or funky songs, but also from listening to a lot of ambient music, for example Aphex Twin, focusing on a lot of lush pad sounds and then wanting to put them into our tracks. There is a lot of Submotion Orchestra listened to as well; nice swells and rises, and this builds in their songs.
We also bounce off each other; we each have our own individual music tastes and influences, and we mix them together. Often a song tends to go in a completely different direction to how we started writing them, and that is what makes it fun; it is constantly changing, and you never get bored of it. Fran will sing over the track and Jonny will put it into a demo and it comes out in a way that Jack did not anticipate but it sounds great, then Jack might change the chords to suit it better, then sometimes it goes down a rabbit hole… but we are all easy going so we never argue, we just edit and transform the tracks after each demo. It is a good process. We started working on this song in March and it took around 9 months to get to the track how it is now, with a lot of rewriting and editing, but it was definitely worth it. The song also absorbed the vibe; as lockdown got worse, the track got weirder and weirder, so it took a while to digest that into what it needed to be rather than rushing it out.
Have you managed to rehearse and make new music in lockdown?
We did manage to get together once or twice last year when restrictions slackened in the summer – Fran and Jonny came up to Liverpool and we jammed together and shot some photos. Not having to commute and working from home has given us more time to work on music – an extra three hours almost that has given us more writing and recording time, and now we are releasing more music than we usually would. Not having a drummer means we can programme beats, and don’t need to record in a studio, we can just do it all from home. That has been the one big plus of lockdown.
As a life phase, lockdown has been quite difficult, and any slight change in routine life drinking or a bad night’s sleep, can leave you the next morning feeling in a different state or frame of mind and help you find different inspiration in something you see every day. For example, on your daily walk, you see something in a different way, and it inspires you and then you go home and write a really long song. Having so much mental energy and time meant that we have created more and being separated means sending across stems of tracks online, whereas normally we would wait until we saw each other before we shared any track ideas, when we would sometimes forget what we were trying to do – being online means you can keep that energy and send it to someone whilst it is still fresh in your head, which has been a positive. It has made us more disciplined – we’ll be sending each other demo’s and working on different parts of the tracks and working online has made it more constant and much easier, even though obviously we would prefer to do it in person; you can’t quite get the same feeling as being in a room with somebody, but we have adapted quite well.
Are there any gigs coming up?
In the past, we have always gigged in the North, in Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield. When Jonny and Fran moved down to London last year, we were hoping to start doing some gigs – we have friends in bands in London and Brighton, but then the lockdown hit. Our last gig was in Manchester, in the Fuel Café. We would really like to be able to play in London, but it is more expensive down here. In Manchester, we used to host our own nights and invite our friends in bands to come in play for like £40, whereas in London, in order to book a venue in London it is more than £200, because people are trying to get signed basically – the slots are lucrative, and that is not really our scene – we are more into weird pubs with friends’ bands. Then coronavirus hit, but when this is over, we will have to be more creative with gigging. That was the great thing about Manchester and Liverpool; they have a good DIY network of venues, and great promoters and bloggers, whereas the London music scene is more corporate.
We also really wanted to put together more acoustic-style sets, the idea being we only need a keyboard and an acoustic guitar, then it is easier to gig anywhere; now we always seem to have a stupid amount of gear crammed onto a tiny stage, and one time Jonny almost hit Fran over the head with his guitar, so maybe it is time to strip it back a bit. We did a gig in Sheffield at Café Totem on this little stage, and we were on before another band but other people had to play while our gear was out, and there was a real fear that Jack’s two precariously balanced keyboards were going to be knocked down by one of them, so to have less gear to set up would be more relaxing, and our music, which is all quite electronic, would be transformed: our most recent music begins with an electronic beat and then we build the songs up from there over the course of the track, whereas going acoustic without being able to have beats in there will be really interesting, so we can reimagine our songs. We want to be able to be versatile; to be able to do fully electronic sets fully freaking out with beats, and to do melodic things where it is just Fran singing and acoustic instruments. However, this is all dependent on being able to leave the house soon.
We did actually try this sort of “Jamulus” approach, playing online, which in theory is a great idea, but after all the complex computer issues and sound delay, we realised nothing hits the same as being able to be in the same room, and we cannot wait. Being able to ping music across to each other is so efficient and more focussed and going forward we will probably still do that; it has definitely taught us a lot and helped us adapt to now living on different ends of the country.
Words: Emma Bailey
Listen to ‘Cagliari Dreams’ on the Only A Northern One playlist here.