How to Dress Well Had a Fire Alarm go off in the Middle of his Show

Think about the most memorably weird live shows in existence – Slipknot feeding their fans decomposed bird jelly, Jared Followhill receiving pigeon poop in his mouth, and Rage Against The Machine performing with bags on their heads to protest the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; they’re all outside of the spectrum of normality.

It’s easy to forget that everyday safe-for-work things, like fire alarms, exist in the realm of live music; imprinting the gig into your brain forever. Have you ever been to a show where everyone had to evacuate into the rain for half-an-hour only to return and restart later? That’s exactly what happened at last week’s How To Dress Well show, and, strangely, it was all the better for it.

Returning into the 100 Club having just sat in a car-park behind Oxford Street, a small amount of disgruntled fans had already left. This made the show much more intimate because A) I could finally see and B) technical difficulties meant that a cover of “I Will Always Love You” received a wash of love. Debuting material from his third album "What Is This Heart?", the show was jam-packed with feels, as though How To Dress Well’s pores leaked emotion, rather than sweat. It was also, perhaps, the politest and openly grateful performance I’ve seen.

I caught up with How To Dress Well a couple of days after to debrief.

Noisey: Nice handling of the fire alarm and power shortages.

How to Dress Well: Thanks! I was talking to other people in the music industry and that's never happened to any of them before.

Is that the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to deal with on stage?

I don’t think so. The worst is if I feel sick, or if I'm not able to perform as well as I'd like, for whatever reason. When I first started out, I’d get booked for the middle of dance nights, and the crowd just wasn’t in it. The reason it worked the other night was because the crowd was so generous and attentive.

You whipped out a song you wrote as a lullaby and a Whitney Houston cover. Are you thinking about recording either of them?

No, not at all, they were completely random. It was just a snap decision to sing. The lullaby is actually a pretty complex song. It’s talking about when you have a child and your mother becomes a grandmother, there’s a shift in the organisation of generations. The whole idea of generational transmission, of character. It’s not really a song for a child.

Your music is often intensely personal. Do you ever find it daunting trying to convey meaning on stage? It’s obviously different to recording music alone.

Not really. My music’s not personal in a confessional way, it’s more obliquely personal. Somtimes after I’ve written a song, I may not be in the right mood to perform it. Now I’m feeling very chipper, I’m overcoming a hangover, I’ve got some lunch. If I start to sing “Hope There’s Someone” by Anthony and the Johnsons for example, that song will sound sad whatever mood I’m in. People think I have to cry to get it going, but that’s not how it works.

Your set predominantly consisted of new material - was that difficult?

I don’t ever think I’ve seen a band who I love play a set of mostly new material live. I was a little nervous at the first show, but the response was amazing. People really paying attention to the twists and turns of a new song is a beautiful thing to watch.

You played a lot of rap in your Boiler Room set last week. Were you listening to a lot of that kind of stuff when you were putting together the album?

I've been listening to all of those songs in the past six months, as well as a bunch of other stuff, but not all of it makes it onto the record. It’s the same with movies too. There’s a song on the record called "Pour Cyril" which is inspired by a film called The Kid With A Bike by the Dardenne brothers but then again I’ve also watched The Hunger Games 2, and I didn’t write a song about that. I played that song by Spenzo at Boiler Room for a bit of a laugh, but that’s not on the record either. I’m actually going to put out a mix of things that inspired the record soon.

Are there a couple of stand out tracks or records you’d care to mention that did inspire it?

I listened to an enormous amount of Everything but the Girl and I listened to The Velvet Underground a lot for the first time which is kind of embarrassing. I’ve fallen in love with Lou Reed and his music. I also have this playlist of ‘acoustic guitar pop tunes’ which includes “Pieces of Me” by Ashlee Simpson, “As Long As You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys, and “When Can I See You Again” by Babyface. I listened to a lot of Spiritualized and Craig David.

I've never seen Craig David and Lou Reed in the same category together. How was putting together "What is this Heart?"?

I’ve actually become a better producer. When I was doing Total Loss, the demos were very raw, often just a loop and a vocal idea. The demos for this record, after a year, were pretty polished. I basically became obsessed with making a boutique sound for every single element. I spent about two months in the studio aggressively detailing the record.

It sounds like you’re a lot more confident now, too. Does that have anything to do with the fact that the album cover is your face?

Absolutely. That’s definitely why I chose the concept and the image. Initially I was going to have a portrait painted of me, and I did. I really liked it, but it was already one too many levels of removed. I realised I needed just my face.

I want to stay true to a lot of the stuff that I’ve been saying and doing, about being open. There’s one particular lyric on this record where I sing “I want to die in peaceful quiet with the sounds of the truth and the sound of an open face”. I think that the human face is weird because they’re so singular and special and totally unrepeatable. Your face is your face, but then they all have this mark of impersonal vulnerability, the fact that we’re all flesh and blood, that we’re all here on this weird rock floating through space. I fell in love with the idea of the face as this weird hinge between the completely impersonal and universal and shared human experience, and the absolutely unsurpassable index of you as a human person.

That sounds beautiful. I'm looking forward to hearing the record in full.

Follow Tamara on Twitter: @TamaraRoper

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