With lyrics on previous albums, I’d heard you mention how they were
purposely uplifting as if you were pushing yourself to escape what
you were going through personally and to give yourself guidance.
Now that you have had that turnaround in your personal life has this
changed your song writing?
Gary: I have access now to a part of myself that I was always maybe
afraid of, afraid of is maybe the wrong term, but I was afraid that it
would make other people not want to be my friend! You know, like, as
in, if I, if we all had that fear I think, or we all have that fear that our
deepest, darkest thoughts would frighten everyone else, and that’s, to me
that was always the reason why I never talked about it, you know, and I
found quite the opposite when I started to talk about it, when I started
to talk about my demons, I realised that people then go, “oh yeah, you
know, I’ve gone through the same thing” or “I understand what you’re
going through.”
People, at the very least, understood what I was going through, and at
the very best had actually been through the same thing themselves. It
made me feel so much less isolated, so much less alone, and I waited
until I was 40 years old before I opened my mouth about it. I feel like,
I’m so glad that I did, I just wish I had done it sooner in my life. I guess
this was just the right time to do it and you know, when you let the light
flood into those dark places in yourself, you kind of create this space in
yourself, you create this kind of bravery. I don’t really feel like there’s any
subject matter now off the table for me, I could write about anything.
I'm not sure if it’s changed the way I approach writing because I think
that will always be the same, it’ll be a combination of inspirations and
graft. But the subject matters that I can write about now have broadened,
have widened into absolutely anything, nothing is off the table. I think
it will always have to be generated from within, I don’t really take
external forces, I’m not a political writer. I’m not a socio-political writer,
not really. I tend to be more fascinated, I’m fascinated with the news,
how could you not be these days? I’m fascinated and appalled in equal
measure. I think, as far as writing goes, I think it will always be a kind
of inner struggles that seem to be the kind of subject matters that I’m
drawn to.
Your arena tour sees you play across the UK in January but you’ve
played a lot of very small shows around the album release. Do you
find much difference between the two types of shows, you know, the
large and the intimate, aside from the crowd size?
Gary: Yeah, you know it’s funny, when I first started out, I had no
confidence in my stagecraft. I couldn’t even call it stagecraft. I just used
to get on stage and stare at my feet and had a big red face the whole time,
like I was embarrassed to be there. I guess I probably was, I was still
probably questioning what I was doing and I didn’t really have any self-
belief. Then over time, over many, many gigs, many, many years, as the
gigs started getting bigger the confidence kind of grew, that outer shell
began to thicken a bit, and I was able to look at the crowd to begin with
* laughing *, and then interact with the crowd, and then cause a reaction
in the crowd, go out there and try and make sure that everybody has a
great night, make sure everybody has fun and get people singing along.
Sometimes it happens naturally but other times it’s not a bad idea to
start a sing-a-long, you know. Freddie Mercury showed the way on that
one.
Towards the end of 2012 when we were finishing the last tour, I think
I was a very good front man, and getting back into that has been an
interesting thing. I sort of feel with the smaller shows, I was closing my
eyes a lot, maybe feeling a little shy. The sort of thing that took maybe
15-20 years to happen where I went from no confidence to lots of
confidence has happened in the last, there’s been like a microcosm of it
in the last sort of three months, where I went from the first small shows,
I went from somebody whose not really had that much confidence again
to blossoming. We'd been playing festivals over the summer and I felt
“oh, here’s that guy again, I can do this again, you know?” So it was
like this really interesting shift from the smaller shows to the bigger
shows. The smaller shows you really see everybody and sometimes that
34 wirrallife.com
makes you feel like you’re very exposed especially when you’re saying
the personal things that I am. The bigger shows; after the first few rows
everything starts to blur a little bit, my eyesight is not that great at it,
so you’re able to come out of yourself more and I think in the last few
shows, I’ve really felt like my old self on stage again. With January rolling
around I’ll be longing for that, feeling very confident on stage again, and
I’m really looking forward to those arena shows because you really feel
like you have, there is an opportunity where you can make a big arena
into a small space, you can make the people at the back row just as close
as the people in the front row.
We toured with U2 for many years, in 2005 and then in 2009, and ‘10 or
‘11, and I watched them every night, every single night. I watched the
2 hour set and it’s a master class, and then every night I realised I was
bringing what I was learning from those shows into ours, I was doing
what Bono was doing on stage, not as well as Bono of course, but I was
bringing people into this small intimate gig, and I still have that in me
to make a big gig feel intimate and I think by the reverse, we have the
ability to make small gigs feel massive. I think that people came away
from our recent tour of Ireland, and the London show feeling like they
had experienced an arena show in a theatre. So it’s a strange kind of
dichotomy the two shifts, but you learn over time, over a long period of
time for some people. Some people are born great front men, I wasn’t,
I’m an introvert by nature. You learn over time how to make a gig feel
the way you want it to feel. You want the audience to have a good time,
then that’s available to you, and I want the audience to have a f***ing
great time every night, and I feel like they can see us having a great time
and I can transmit that to them.
Anything planned for the live shows?
We’ve been talking about that for a while. We’re trying to finalise some
things for the arena show, that’s how much thought goes into it. We
don’t just turn up with our equipment and a couple of lights on the
night * laughing * and go “Alright, well, where do you want us to set
up these lights?’ We’re thinking about the visuals, we’re thinking about
the staging, thinking about how the stage looks, we’re thinking about
how everything is presented, we’re thinking about the lighting of course.
We’ve got one of the best lighting directors in music (he’s won many
awards) working with us. We call him ‘jock for life’, * laughing *, he’s
been with us for 20 years, so he’s learned with us and we’ve went along.
He’s the best in the business as far as I’m concerned, and the show will be
spectacular. We’ve got some lovely, lovely little tricks up our sleeve and
some things that we’re very excited to bringing out on this tour.
Next year is going to see the 25th anniversary of the band. Is there
a specific date that you guys will have to mark that or have you got
anything special planned?
Gary: As far as I recall 1994, it was October 1st we got together.
Was that just after Fresher’s Week? * laughing *
Gary: * laughing * Yeah, that was Fresher’s Week. The first day of
Fresher’s Week was the day when I met Mark McClelland and we started
rehearsing the teenage songs that I had been writing, the next day. So,
you either can count the first or the second as the date that we started,
and we had an EP out by the end of the year, you know what I mean?
Obviously we didn’t have our first album out until we left university
because * laughing * my mum would have bloody killed me. I had to
get my degree first or there would have been hell to pay. But we started
gigging right away, yeah, so it was the 1st of October and we are thinking
about things that we want to do to celebrate the 25 years and we have
some things up our sleeve, for sure.
To purchase tickets for the upcoming tour,
visit: www.ticketmaster.co.uk.