Interview with The Blackout’s Gavin Butler
The Blackout's Gavin Butler (Photo by Kev Grange)
It has to be accepted that some things in life don’t seem fair. One of those things was the ability of the unspeakably cool Gavin Butler to take a break from writing new material with ‘The Blackout’, to seemingly effortlessly belt out a set of poignantly simple acoustic songs in only his third ever solo gig. The saner half of The Blackout front pairing played the Macbeth Acoustic Stage at the Slam Dunk Festival; and despite being a world away (that awful pun will make more sense in a few seconds) from the live performance of his band, the quality of Gavin’s songwriting and the emotion it captured easily made up for the less energetic setting.
Noise News sat down for a chat with Gavin just moments after he walked off stage at Slam Dunk North at Leeds University.
You’ve just come off stage from playing the Macbeth Acoustic stage here at Slam Dunk North, is it right that was actually one of the first times you’ve on your own?
“Actually it was my third ever show, but the first that I actually enjoyed. The first two I was so nervous. It was strange, when your in a band and if I make a mistake with The Blackout, then there are five other people there who can pick up the slack or iron over the creases that I make. Which I do on a regular basis I’ll put out there. When you’re on your own it’s just you and your guitar and if you make a mistake singing you pick it up like that. The first two shows were so nerve wracking, I made so many mistakes. Today was the first time that I really got into my flow and really started enjoying it. I think hopefully whenever The Blackout has down time I’ll be doing something like this.”
You said that was the first time you felt comfortable playing on your own, do you see the irony in the fact that you did that playing on a stage surrounded by England flags?
(Laughs) “Maybe that’s what it was. Well the first show was at the Barfly on Friday. A friend of mine books shows in Cardiff and I was like have you got any shows I can jump on? I don’t want to do a massive show I just want to do twenty minutes and kind of find my feet. She put me on a show with Every Avenue and Me vs Hero so there were a few kids down there anyway. I put it up on Twitter that I was going to be down there. The people that I don’t know I can deal with I think because you can get away with like a stage persona kind of thing, but then most of Lostprophets came down because they were in town. My parents came down, my girlfriend came down with all her work colleagues and I was like fucking hell there’s a lot of people here who I know and respect and love, this is going to be hard. I always find hometown shows, even with The Blackout, the hardest because you’ve got people there who you know and whose opinions you really take to heart. Today because there were the two shows I’ve already done I got into it a bit more. There was only Sean and a couple of the We Are The Ocean boys there so I really enjoyed it.”
You just broke out a rather good cover of Oasis’ ‘Half the World Away’, do you think there’s marketing room for ‘the welsh Noel Gallagher’?
(Laughs) “If I ever become as good at guitar and vocals and general wit as Noel Gallagher, if I was half as good as that, I’d be a happy man. The guy’s a genius. I love him and I love Oasis. It was a song I’ve always loved and I thought I may as well cover it badly and enjoy playing it live.”
Your acoustic songs are sounding really impressive. Do you have any plans to release an E.P.?
“Hopefully, I was talking to Epitaph ages ago about maybe releasing some solo stuff, if not through Epitaph then through, oh Christ what’s there other label called? They do like pop and electric stuff. They said just send us some stuff over, but I think for now I’m just going to do some demos back home and maybe shove them on the web for now. Maybe down the line if it goes well I’ll do an EP and a little tour, like a pub tour or whatever.”
During your set you revealed you’ve been working on a new Blackout album, how’s that going?
Really well. We’ve all been writing stuff personally on our laptops, so when we went into the studio to start jamming together we all had a good four or five songs each anyway. That’s 25 potential songs just there already and we jammed out pretty much five songs in a week. So it’s going at a good pace. We’re all really enjoying being back in the studio to be honest. As much as I love touring I love writing as well. I really like creating something and everyone coming together. You think oh that’s wicked, then someone else comes up with another idea and you’ll be like that’s ten times better then what I thought was wicked. I just love that organic process that we have as a band when it comes to writing. A lot of bands have their main focus, say two writers or one writer or whatever, and no-one else has a say. What I love about The Blackout is we all have input and song ideas are split down the middle. It’s cool.
The last record had a good balance between darker songs like ‘Children of the Night’ and the more angsty relationship songs like ‘Silent’. What direction is the new material heading in?
“So far it’s not too dissimilar from ‘The Best In Town’. It’s a bit early to tell what we’re going to go for because we have so many different types of songs in the mix at the moment. It’s going to be a case of sitting down and picking the best ones. Whether they be a darker song like ‘Children’ or a lighter song like ‘Silent’ or something like that. Whatever the best songs are will go on, not the heaviest songs are or whatever.”
On ‘The Best In Town’ and in interviews after it’s release you were quite outspoken in criticising the attitudes of people in your home town (Merthyr Tydfil). Have those attitudes and the way people react to you changed since the album came out?
“I don’t know because the people who used to say that sort of stuff I don’t really see that often. Although there is a lot of the small town mentality thing going on, there are still a lot of friends back home who are proud of what we do and love the fact that we’ve got out of Merthyr and tried to do something, rather then saying oh whatever we’ll never make it there’s no point trying. A lot of the younger kids there, it’s cool for them to see that you don’t have to like coast along. If you want to pick your head up and have a go at something just do it. It’s not even just music, its anything. But like I said I don’t really see the people who are negative towards us. If we do see them they never say anything to your face anyway.”
Things have been fairly quiet from The Blackout camp in the last few months, were you at home taking stock of everything or have you been busy with other things?
“We’ve been touring with Lostprophets for the last month basically, in Australia and Japan and then we did mainland Europe. That was awesome, that was just like twelve friends out on tour. It felt like a holiday more then anything else; more so then any other tour we’d been on because we went to places that we’d never been to before. In Australia we went surfing every day and it was amazing. When we came back we went into the studio because we had so many ideas and we were all dying to start putting stuff down.”
Do you have any particularly memorable experiences from the tour?
“Australia was just awesome. I’d only been surfing once, in Newquay at Boardmasters, and I loved it then. I was like this oh this is awesome. We got up at seven o’clock in the morning one day to go. We were in Melbourne, I think it was Melbourne, and we had to drive for an hour to get to somewhere where it was decent surf. It was me, Jamie, our TM at the time Rich and Matthew came out. A bunch of us went up and spent the morning in the gorgeous weather surfing. It was the best surf. Jamie’s been surfing for years and years and he said it was the best surf he’s ever had. It was amazing being there, in the sea, on the other side of the world with your best friends.”
What do the next few months hold for The Blackout and can we expect to hear any of the new material anytime soon?
“We maybe, we maybe, doing, and this is a first, a tour towards the end of the year. But at the moment the plan at the moment is just writing, all the festivals, Download and then into the studio around September time. Then the album out in the New Year, January or February.”
Keep an eye on The Blackout’s Myspace and on Twitter for news of the bands tour dates later in the year. Also lookout for the posting of demos of Gavin’s solo work, which if Slam Dunk is anything to go by should be well worth the wait.
