The Lovely Eggs Interview

Bands don’t get much more wonderfully bizarre than TheLovely Eggs, a married duo from Lancaster that have, for the past five years, been touring their surreal punk rock around the globe. Back with their third album ‘WILDLIFE’ we talk to Holly and delve into the minds of the band that write about sausage roll thumbs and washing line smiles.

For those who don’t yet know much about you, tells us a bit about the Lovely Eggs?

We are a two-piece band from Lancaster, we got together about 5 years ago mucking around really. I was living in Paris and a friend said ‘oh I bet you cant write a song’ because they didn’t believe we had been musicians as me and Dave have both been in bands before. There and then we wrote a song and we quite liked it and we have never stopped really.

You are very prolific; does song writing come naturally to you?

Yeah it does, we don’t even think about it we keep writing and then if we have got a particular song we want to release we just release it, we just keep writing away. It’s like stories to us about our life and things we have observed.

You have a unique way of looking at things.

We do wear a different pair of spectacles to most other people I think. The way we look at life been inspired by other authors and other writers and musicians, its about looking at the world differently from how you normally would. If you do that you end up with lyrics that are maybe different. I suppose we have a different approach to song writing, as we don’t really write about what other bands are writing about. We write about what happens in our life, we are quite like voyeurs, we see stuff and write about what had happened to us.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being married to your other band member?

The advantage is, if you get married to someone you really love them so you really like to spend a lot of time with them because they are right nice. That’s a really nice quality to spend a lot of time with someone in a band, usually you like your husband or your wife so that’s a positive. A negative would be that sometimes it’s really hard to separate your personal life from band life. Sometimes we can be up all hours of the night doing band stuff, getting stuff ready to go on tour and you think this is crazy, most people stop doing this when they come home at 5 o’clock at night, whereas our job never ends. I don’t know if that’s being married or just because we do a lot of things ourselves.

Your husband even invents instruments?

Yeah Dave really likes making stuff and inventing stuff out of reclaimed materials. He never chucks anything away and he will come out with it 2 years later and reuse it and make some sort of bizarre foot pedal made out of organ bits that connect to this electronic circuit that I don’t even understand, it’s his world and I just leave him to it.

What’s your approach to song writing?

If we want a song to be song to be 10 seconds long then it is 10 seconds long and if we want a song to be 3 or 4 or 10 minutes long then it will be. We just don’t feel that we want to conform as there are too many bands now a days who conform to the norm of what it is to be in a band and what music should sound like and how long songs should be and how long albums should be etc and we don’t really want to live like that as we find it very stifling and you cant be as creative. We always have no rules and I think that makes for better creativity and I think people seem to like that as I think they are sick of hearing the same old shit so maybe we are bringing something new.

Would you ever be tempted to sign with one of the big labels?

I would never say never, it’s not that we have made a DIY rod for our own backs, it’s just that we like the creative freedom that we have at the moment and no one is telling us what to do. We would never rule that out but it would depend on whether they let us do what we want to do.

What can people expect from ‘WILDLIFE’?

Funnily enough we were talking to our tour manager and sound guy the other day and we were like “we think WILDLIFE is the most commercial record we have done yet” and he was like “what you on about, it’s completely fucking bonkers, it’s nuts.” We had spent loads of time recording it and I think it’s the same as what people have come to expect from us but I think there is more of a 60’s twist to this record. Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals produced one of the singles on there and we used a lot of sitars on 2 or 3 of the songs so we have let our 60’s influence come out a lot more on this record, which hopefully people notice.

One word that gets associated with you a lot is fun, are you quite happy positive people all the time?

Well no we are not actually, we get down as much as everyone but I think, we have got this philosophy of ‘fuck it’ basically. Life is shit but just get the fuck on with it and enjoy yourself, it’s not that we don’t recognise that life is shit, it’s not like it’s all a bed of roses but we sort of relish in it really, laughing in the face of the shitness of life and looking at the ridiculousness of it. It’s all a bit of a joke because you can’t take it seriously sometimes, so I think it’s just that fuck it approach to life. When we go on tour we have a genuinely amazing time, we meet so many people, we have met so many friends all over the country so just going on tour is like one big party and that coupled with a bit of a fuck it philosophy. We do feel that we are not a happy go lucky fun people all the time but if you have that sort of philosophy you are going to smile more than most.