4 or 5 Magicians

We recently had a chance to catch up with Dan and ask a few pointless questions. So, without further ado, here they are!

I could, but there is no substitute for actually listening to us! www.myspace.com/4or5magicians. There are six songs up there at the moment:

Ideal Man - A song about your new girlfriend's friends instant suspicion of you when you start going out with her. Or your instant suspicion of your ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend. Basically a song about hypocrisy, rumour, and materialism.

Change The Record - A song about the repetitive nature of daytime commercial radio playlists, and how listening to Julian Clary read a story on Radio 4 is preferable to listening to the top 40. This was the actual inspiration for the song.

I'm In The Band - A song about rockstar cliches and cliched rockstars. Believing your own hype. This song is about me if you want it to be. But it actually isn't. Though it might be if we actually had any hype. Though probably not. We'll see I guess.

Your Fictitious Character - A song about being a confused teenager. Well, it was at the time. It is still relevant to me now as a 24 year old, and I suppose to anyone who has been in a relationship and wondered why they were putting themselves through it.

Behind Each Others Backs - A song about how your best friends can also be your worst enemies at the same time due to living in each others pockets. The moral being : at the end of the day EVERYONE hates each other (see Leviathan by Hobbes for a more detailed response to this social phenomenon), and you realise this as you get older, but if it happens to everyone then that's OK, though essentially the opposite of OK in general terms. But that's OK because we get on because we have to. OK?

Forever On The Edge - This is a song about wasting opportunities and making bad decisions. I have wasted many opportunites and made many bad decisions. Opening line "I wasted my youth playing cricket ... pinned all my hopes on a lottery ticket" is just one example. This could easily have read "I wasted my youth playing Nintendo ... my forte then, now my diminuendo", but I wasn't as clever as I am now when I wrote the song.

These songs all sound exactly like Pavement, according to 1 in 3 reviews.

Are you fed up of the seemingly-constant Pavement comparisons yet? What's the strangest comparison you've heard?

It's always nice to be compared to a great band like Pavement, so no, I'll never get fed up of that! What I am slightly tired of though are people questioning our originality, or inferring that we are ripping off Pavement or Dinosaur Jr or Sebadoh or whichever band they arbitrarily choose, this simply isn't true. There isn't any single band we sound anything like, or any band that sounds like us (that I've heard) in my opinion, and as an objective fact as someone with ears and a brain, and people suggesting we are unoriginal rip-offs riles me a bit. Yeah I have strong influences, but then so does every band who has actually listened to music. Just because I like all the early 90's American alt-rock bands rather than The Clash or Blondie or Spandau Ballet or whoever cool bands are influenced by shouldn't make any difference. No, we don't have Hoover solos, or pointy shoes, and yes, we use light distortion, and most of our songs are in 4/4, but that's just how we are! Sure we could add a load of crap in, and dress up like Laurel and Hardy, but what's the point?

As far as strangest comparisons go - we got a review for our first single Forever On The Edge last year in Playmusic magazine that compared us to The Twang, Mumm-Ra, and Bromheads Jacket and gave us 2/5. To be fair to these guys though, six months on, we have just won their annual award for 'Best Unsigned Indie/Rock band in the UK', so they are either absolute cretins, or they have changed their mind after actually listening to us properly. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

Any signs of an album, as yet? Who would be your ideal producer for that?

It's tough to envisage releasing an album this year due to our situation of having no manager or agent or anything like that, let alone a long term label contract, so we might have to wait until next year for a full length. However, we have another single out through the nice people at This Is Fake DIY (who released our last single Change The Record / Ideal Man in April) in August, probably Behind Each Others Backs. And maybe I'll be able to persuade them to release a longer EP in the Autumn, who knows?

As far as producers go, we'd love to go to America to record, and we'd love to work (even though this will never happen!) with Guy Picciotto (of Fugazi) who has found a great sound with Blonde Redhead and Blood Brothers amongst others. I also think Rob Schnapf (Beck, Guided By Voices, Elliott Smith etc.) would make us sound good - though he's maybe a second or third album guy. I'm a massive fan of Dave Fridmann's work with The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev too, though I'm definitely getting ahead of myself now! There's a guy called Ryan Hadlock who owns a studio called Bear Creek in Washington state who has had a load of cool bands there recently. Send me there and I'll make you a half decent album!

On your last tour, you played a couple of gigs with Los Campesinos! and Johnny Foreigner. How did that go?

It was our first taste of playing reasonably big venues, and we had a blast. Both crowds seemed to really dig it too - we got a really enthusiastic reaction at both shows. We need to get back in venues like that with proper PAs and monitors that work, but are still intimate enough that the crowd is in your face I think it definitely suits our sound. It was great to be playing with two of the best bands in the UK at the moment - big thanks to Gareth Campesinos for picking us to play with them! We're good friends with Johnny Foreigner too, and have played around the place together - I haven't heard their album yet, but I'm sure it will be one of the best of the year - hopefully we'll get to do some more shows with them later in the year!

What's next for 4 or 5 Magicians?

Next, I sort out some of these ideas that are floating around my head into proper songs. We reconvene (after Sam and Ilja finish uni) for a week of rehearsals at the end of June to learn the new songs and touch up some of the newer existing songs. We do a few dates around the country in early July to roadtest them. Two weeks into July we meet up again with the guy that did our most recent recordings, Ian Button (Death In Vegas), to record six or seven new songs. We hopefully get booked last minute to play the Latitude Festival. We probably don't. I probably go to Truck instead. We finish off the month with a few dates in the north. We continue playing into August. We release Behind Each Others Backs through This Is Fake DIY in early August. After that, who knows? It really isn't up to me!

Looking forward to the new tour, will we hear any new songs?

Absolutely. I've tried to keep it to the same eight songs every night until now because I hate leaving songs out of the set. Everyone we ask or who speaks to us seems to have a different favourite song of ours, so it's worked alright so far just having the same amount of songs available to play that we are playing. Also, it might be an horrendous cliche, but I love all my songs the same, they are like my children. So I hate leaving certain songs out of the set in that sense too, but I guess I'll have to pick and choose from now on! I have loads of ideas swimming around my head driving me mad, so I need to get them out. By the time the July dates come around I think we'll have four or five completely brand new songs for everyone to listen to, and a different set every time we play!

What are you listening to right now?

There are always the classic bands that I'll listen to pretty regularly, probably for my whole life - Guided By Voices, REM, Sebadoh, Tom Waits, Fugazi etc. ... but right now my favourite band is a band from Ohio called Times New Viking. They create a ridiculous noise at the same time as having the most brilliant tunes. Ends up sounding like a kind of middle point between Royal Trux and Bis. Lo-Fi pop heaven. There are also a few bands we've encountered around the country that I'm really into at the moment - Dutch Husband from Bournemouth, Giant Robot and the City Of Tokyo from Norwich, Sunset Cinema Club from Birmingham, UltCult from Castleford near Leeds, Laura Sings Liver from London via Leeds... these are all unsigned and totally ace. There are others too - just have a look at our myspace top friends for a few examples of great up and coming British music. I've also been listening a lot to a guy called Jake Thackray recently - a singer/songwriter who was around and about between about '68 and '86, though his music is pretty timeless. He's a big lyrical influence - I love the way he writes such touching songs about completely inane subjects - see 'The Blacksmith and The Toffeemaker' - lyrical genius. This guy could have been poet laureate, instead he'll probably forever be remembered as the guy who sang the news on 'That's Life' with Esther Rantzen, which makes me a bit sad.

Can you tell us a good joke?

Q : What did the A+R scout say to his boss?

A : Let's sign 4 or 5 Magicians!

Posted 27 May 2008

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