InMe exclusive interview
InMe outside York Fibbers
If ever there was a band whose circumstances and attitude some up the times that band may well be InMe. After enjoying considerable mainstream success in the years surrounding the release of debut album ‘Overgrown Eden’, the following decade has seen the band become a very different, much more economically challenged beast. However line-up changes and an ever developing sound has the InMe of 2010 in positive, if realistic mood. Noise News found this out first hand when we met Dave, Greg and Si on the band’s tour bus before their show at York Fibbers last week.
How is life in general for InMe at the moment?
Dave: “It’s good. We’re a happy band and we finally have a line up that we’re happy with. Things are on the up, we could be doing pretty good next year, financially. I’m hoping so. We’re surviving and I think a lot of bands that were out when me and Simon first broke onto the scene in 2001-2002, all those bands are gone except us. Apart from Lostprophets but they made it in the States.”
How has the current run of shows gone so far?
Dave: “Every show so far we’ve had a great time. It’s just been hot with the heat wave.”
Greg: “Luckily that seems to have ended today.”
Dave: “I think we might be alright today.”
Dave: “It’s nice to watch Gaz as well because he’s new. He’s just done one tour before with us so it’s still new experiences for him. If we have bread and cheese he’ll take a photo of it, he’s amazed at the rider, people coming up to him and being told to go wander off, have a beer in the sunshine then come rock out for the evening. For someone who has just done a day job like he has it’s a completely different way of life. It’s nice to see someone else experience it.”
Gary and Dave on stage
It’s about a year since ‘Herald Moth’ was released now, how do you think it’s been received?
Dave: “It’s done really well all round really, there are some critics out there that aren’t going to like it and some that do. But that never really bothered us. It’s nice to hear nice words about it where credit is due. Same as anything you can criticise it in some ways.”
Si: “To be fair all of the critics liked it didn’t they?”
Dave: “Pretty much, the ones that we care about did.”
Greg: “A couple of little internet people, little kiddies, gave it zero out of ten. But I never trust a zero out of ten review personally. That’s just not accurate is it, if you can play your instruments in tune that’s one out of ten at least.”
Si: “Zero is just holding a grudge isn’t it?”
Greg: “Yeah against the band.”
Dave: “We must have given them glandular fever or something. Sales wise I think it’s done better then the previous album which is always what a band wants to hear.”
Greg: “We’ve turned a corner to an extent.”
Dave: “We can see what other bands have sold and we think it’s done alright. It’s been nice. We’ve not had much promotion.”
How did the more technical sound go down with fans?
Dave: “I think we started to introduce elements of that on ‘Daydream Anonymous’. The shock of the change of sound kind of died down a bit. It was quite a bold album in the respect that we wanted to do something for ourselves, something dark, a bit more metal and a bit progressive with the riffs and challenge ourselves as musicians. I think at first people were a bit like I’m not too sure about this because they were worried that we were compromising the actual songs. The songs are still there we just wanted to build lots of interesting stuff around it.”
Greg: “We like to have fun as much as possible.”
Dave: “I think now they’ve seen it live they see where ‘Herald Moth’ stands, that it’s a live album essentially.”
How well do the songs off the new album fit into your live set with your older songs?
Dave: “I think it feels more natural to us to play the new stuff as it does the old stuff. We’ve had to change the old stuff to make it up to date with where InMe is at now. We like to push ourselves.”
Greg: “We don’t like half the old stuff and the half we do we find a bit boring to play. So we jazz it up and give it a new edge so that we enjoy it in the set and don’t find it tedious.”
Dave: “It’s important for us to fulfil what the fans want to hear which is the old stuff. You’ve got your ‘Crushed Like Fruit’, your ‘Underdoses’ and your ‘Faster the Chases’.”
Greg: “But at the same time it’s also really important for us to enjoy it. We try to find a way of doing both at the same time.”
Si: “There isn’t much point otherwise.”
Greg: “We’re not going to play songs that we don’t enjoy just to go through the motions. We don’t do that.”
Dave: “I think you can tell when a band is just doing it for the sake of it. Except for later in the year when we’re doing a best of album. In conjunction with that we’ll be doing four nights at the garage where we do each album front to back. I’m not quite sure what we’re going to do about the songs that we don’t like but we’ll see.”
Dave goes acoustic
Was the change in sound on ‘Herald Moth’ a natural progression from the line-up changes?
Greg: “Ben was just a straight rocker; it was us three, that was the direction that we wanted to go in.”
Dave: “Gaz compliments that.”
Greg: “Obviously we’ve got rid of Ben now and got Gaz in which is a lot better, he fits in with what we want to do a lot more.”
Dave: “I just think we want to do something different with every album and I think people are starting to realise that. The second album people were like I don’t like it, it’s not the same as ‘Overgrown Eden’, third album, fourth album you still get a minority of people saying I want them to do ‘Overgrown Eden’ again. We’re never going to do that again. The fifth album’s not going to be anything like ‘Herald Moth’, its going to be something completely different.”
Greg: “We’re going to make a different album every time, we always will do.”
Do you feel you’ve had to adapt your lyric writing at all to fit with the new sound?
Dave: “Well I don’t like my old lyrics. I’ve never really liked my work to be honest. I think that’s a good thing to never be satisfied.”
Greg: “You’ve got different life experiences to write about then whatever you were writing about when you were sixteen.”
Dave: “I think it was fantastical escapism. I’m very into poetry, I’m into a lot of American poets actually, Ted Kooser who was the poet laureate for a few years I got into his stuff. Then I dug out all the stuff I studied at college like Sylvia Plath. I think now I’m writing like poems and trying to syllable-istically trying to put them into the songs, which is interesting and challenging. With my I-phone it’s great because I’ve always got gadgets to hand to put stuff down. I’m constantly working on things until they become a finished product. People probably listen to it and it’s gone in a second but there is a lot of work that goes into every little detail.”
Si from InMe
How has technology changed the way you work as a writer?
Dave: “It helps me as a writer, it’s completely different. Me Si, and Joe used to go up to London and spend two months wasting money on very expensive rehearsal studios to write together. Now we can’t afford that.”
Greg: “Now we find other ways to write music.”
Dave: “It doesn’t work that way anyway because you’re forcing it every day, maybe you don’t feel creative every day. Now if I have an idea you’ve got Macbooks everywhere, your I-phone for writing lyrics and voice memos. You can always get your ideas down whenever you feel you want to put it down. It helps as long as you use the tools to your advantage.”
Where can you see things going on the next record?
Dave: “At the moment it’s bold, very epic.”
Greg: “It’s too early to tell. We are writing it but we’ve only just started.”
Dave: “It’s still going to have very much a technical feel to it. I’d say it’s going to be probably the most uplifting melodic album we’ve done. Not uplifting as in happy happy, joy joy, but melody wise there’s a lot going on and a lot of hooks.”
Greg: “We’ve done the dark album. Let’s do something else this time.”
Dave: “We’ve never done an album that makes the listener feel better about themselves after listening to it. So we want to do that.”
Greg: “Especially when your first album is all misery, misery suicide.”
Dave: “Yeah so we’re going to do something different in that respect.”
How much different is it being on tour with the economy the way it is?
Greg: “You get fewer people in the venue unfortunately.”
Dave: “The music industry has been suffering.”
Greg: “For longer then the actual recession.”
Dave: “Because of downloading. Musicians, record labels, people within the industry used to rely on record sales and record sales have been hit by hard because of downloading. I think they are all still trying to figure out ways to earn. I think we have though. Merchandise, you can’t download a t-shirt, you can’t download a gig ticket. You can watch a gig online but it’s never going to going out with your mates and getting pissed.”
Greg: “A band of our size ten years ago would be earning a living. A band of our size now has to have day jobs and juggle it with the band because you don’t earn the money anymore.”
Dave McPherson
What kind of balance do you have between the day jobs and the band?
Greg: “Too much time dedicated to the day job I think.”
Dave: “Luckily for me being the writer”
Greg: “His day job is professional musician.”
Dave: “My day job is pub gigs and selling my own stuff so that helps. If I was out of action doing a crappy job that made me miserable then I wouldn’t be able to write as much and the band would suffer. So luckily in the daytime I can still work on the music.”
How does writing solo material compare to writing songs for the band?
Dave: “It’s a lot easier. In like half an hour I can write a song and write the lyrics, whereas with InMe it’s a long process.”
Greg: “The lyrics can be a lot more in your face and obvious with the acoustic songs.”
Dave: “It comes a lot more naturally and easily whereas InMe is, and I think it should be, more hard work. It takes a good couple of years to get an album going and you should be working your arse off to make it the best it can be. With the solo stuff I can work on a song and play it that evening.”
How do you feel about being an influence on other younger bands?
Dave: “That’s nice, that’s nice to be part of the establishment of the British rock scene. To be influential is an honour really. It’s humbling; I’m not very good at compliments. When people come up to you and are like its amazing to meet you, you are like a god and stuff, that’s a bit too much and you don’t know how to take it. Someone came up to me the other day and said I’d just like to thank you because you’re the first band to make progressive metal music sound like it has emotional meaning. That to me is like a really nice compliment because it is kind of what we’re trying to achieve.”
Greg: “You get all the crazy compliments which put you on a pedestal, I think you take those with a pinch of salt or you don’t know how to take them at all. I had one guy say to me that I’m the reason he picked up a bass guitar. That is the sort of compliment I think is really nice.”
The Brothers McPherson rock Fibbers
Festival season is upon us, will you be hitting the festival circuit this year?
Dave: “Sonisphere, we’ll be headlining the Strongbow stage which is an honour. I remember last year seeing it going off. I thought that’s a festival I want to be part of, like Download. I’ll probably be going to Download but just as a punter. I’ve got a new agent guy working for me. He’s trying to get me some mini tour dates through July and August. I’ll take whatever I can. If someone offers me something and I can make it work financially so I’m not making a loss then I’ll play anywhere. The same with InMe really.”
Finally what can we expect from the gig tonight?
Dave: “Loads of new stuff, some secret stuff that we haven’t played in five years.”
Greg: “Secret stuff? Well it won’t be when this comes out will it, so you might as well just say what it is.”
Dave: “We’re going to play ‘Crushed Like Fruit’, we’ve reinvented that and put like an evil metal breakdown in the middle, we’re going to play a couple of songs that we haven’t played before, ‘Captain Killjoy’, ‘In Loving Memory’, something from every album but predominantly ‘Herald Moth’.”
InMe headline the Strongbow stage at the Sonisphere festival at the end of July and have a best of album coming out later in the year.
