PS: I know this music has been sitting around for awhile, so I’m glad to see that it’s going to see the light of day. But I also know that the idea of this band dates back more than just a couple of years. Can you tell me how this whole thing came together?
Jamie Backhouse: It was at Glastonbury during a Candie Payne show we did. I’d only known Ned probably a matter of days, but immediately we were forming a band. We spoke about music in the same way.
Ned Crowther: I love American music, but there’s this other side where I’ve always had an interest in British psychedelia, British folk music, and Jamie and I really connected on that level. At the time, it was before the folk revival—the Mumford and Sons-type thing—we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to bring some of that back?” To write in a very British folk style, but keep it rock and not twee with ukuleles and such. A few artists have been doing that in America for awhile – Devendra Banhart, Fleet Foxes. We just wanted to do a British version of that.
Backhouse: That band never happened. Every time we’d meet, we’d always say, “We’ve got to make that band happen.” It almost became a bit of a running joke. Four years go by, we’d meet up. “Oh yeah, we should still do that band.” There was kind of a sense it wasn’t going to happen, which felt like a bit of a shame. Myself and Ozzy got a bit sick of sessions—we were driving to rehearsals, and the music was fine, but we were just thinking, “You know what? I just want to play my own stuff.” I mentioned to him I’d been writing quite a lot and recording and Ozzy said, “Yeah, me too.” So we started to get together and come up with ideas.
Austin “Oz” Murphy: Life was catching up with us and it was a matter of: “We better do something before it’s too late.”
Crowther: I think we were often frustrated by the session life, where you’re very much at the mercy of changing whims and changing schedules. You’ve got no real creative outlet—you just do what you’re told. If you’re lucky, you get paid for it.
Murphy: Jamie and myself started playing in my loft trying to get some stuff together. We had a couple of bits. The first thing we got together in a demo form was “The Liar”—Jamie had this kind of folk guitar riff, but it didn’t have that bass behind it. We got a beat going behind it and a bit of synthesizer. He put down the guitar solo and I put down the bass, and then we thought, “This is quite interesting now.”
Backhouse: Ozzy and I realized that these ideas were just becoming songs. Three, four minutes and verse/chorus structures. They needed words, so we thought, “Well let’s get someone in to write with us who can sing.” The first person we thought of was Ned, which was quite a strange choice because he lives 300 miles away. [Laughter]
Murphy: We’d kind of lost touch with Ned after the Candie Payne thing, but we were always kind of thinking, “Do you think Ned will be into doing stuff? Is he busy?”
Backhouse: I don’t even think Ned fronted a band as a singer before, and I don’t know that I’d heard him sing prior to that. But I had a strong sense—and Ozzy did too—that Ned would be just a great fit.
PS: What effect did being separated by hundreds of miles have on the creative process?
Backhouse: The first thing we did was “Is This Man Bothering You?” Ned had a lyrical concept and it just fit straightaway. From there on, he’d come up every two months and we’d have a manic weekend of “Gotta finish a song! Gotta record a song!” Every session was just magic. He’d go away back home and we’d work on it in our own little sort of insular way. It was two processes, really: These mad weekends of intense creative group energy and then two months of me taking it away to do mixing and editing. Ozzy would whack a sax part down here and there.
Crowther: It was a really wonderful process. I would come up, we’d write or record a song, go away and live with it for a bit.
Murphy: A lot of the record was done over email. We never would’ve got it done otherwise, but it’s quite a hard way to work. The songs were all written as they were being recorded. Ned wrote all the lyrics with little tweaks from us—“Change this,” “Lose that verse,” etc.
Backhouse: We were never like the Beatles going, “This is the song—record it, finish it.” These things were growing over a period of three or four years. It was quite a weird creative process, but we had a sense early on we could come up with something quite special.
Crowther: When you make an album and there’s no expectations, you can say exactly what you want. It’s empowering.
PS: How long was the music around before Ned started adding lyrics to them?
Backhouse: Lots of the songs I brought in I’d tried with different writers. I’d tried the backing chords and picking for “Next Time Around,” “The Liar” and “New Brighton Sigh” with other writers and they didn’t quite work. I think it’s because I’m not a wordy person and I’m not a singer, so for me, it’s all about the initial feel of the music and where it comes from. “Fernweh” translates to trying to get to a specific place rather than general wanderlust. I think when I write, that initial feel takes me to a specific place. If I’m writing with someone who’s going to try to put words into that place, it has to fit. Whenever I tried to bring these ideas to other people, it was incongruous. The joy of working with Ned is that I’ll play him something and the first thing he gives me back is just, “Yes, that’s it.” That place I had in mind was specific but quite abstract. Ned has made that place accessible to people. He puts people into it. He has context and a story, whereas when I tried to write with other people it just has not fit. That’s why I held the ideas back so long. I thought, “Well, they’re quite special to me, so they have to be right when I do something with them.” Myself and Rob Stringer wrote the melody and chords to what became “New Brighton Sigh.” We gave it to Candie [Payne], who wrote a lovely thing with it, but we didn’t do anything at the time. Like lots of songs, it went by the by. I told her she should keep it cos it’s a nice piece of music, but I gave it to Ned and he went straight in there with this thing about this lovely old seaside town in the Wirral called New Brighton. As soon as he showed me what he was thinking lyrically, I said, “That is it. That’s perfect.” It was like it had always been like that. I just know that piece of music now as “New Brighton Sigh,” which is all you want from the songwriting process, I suppose.
From: https://transatlanticmodern.com/2018/11/12/interview-the-fernweh/
