5Q

What inspires Day For Airstrikes to continue creating music?

I’m not sure really. We just enjoy writing together as we’ve been really good friends for a long time. We tend to take inspiration from things that at are going on in our lives – we have some songs that are about our friends and others about problems that we’ve been facing or whatever. But it’s more about just challenging ourselves and trying to expand on what we’ve done in the past, which is the most exciting thing.

Your last release, Widows, was a great success, what’s next?

We’re currently recording a new album, we’ve been working on it for about six months, just slowly putting it together in the studio. It should hopefully be ready by the end of this year or, at the latest, very early on in 2009.

Post Rock generates creative (and often lengthy) band and track names, how does Day For Airstrikes come up with these?

A lot of our song titles are just stupid jokes, they’re not really meant to be taken very seriously. On the new record though, we actually had ideas and stories behind the songs, so we came up with names that went well with them. Our band name is a bit of a bad rip off of one of our favourite bands though, it’s from the English translation of a Sigur Ros song title. We had our first gig when we were like 19 – we had no band name so we just used that to put on flyers. We had every intention of changing it, but we couldn’t come up with anything decent, then it just kind of stuck. So sorry Sigur Ros, we didn’t mean to steal from you for such a long period of time!

How does Day For Airstrikes decide which tracks will be on a release? testing them at gigs, or a different method?

In the past we just used to write a song then not change anything about it from its original structure – then we’d just record it as cheaply as possible. With our newer songs, we’ve had several different versions of each one and we’ve worked it all out by doing it live. It’s usually when we play something in front of people that we’ll start to notice that a particular section doesn’t work, or that we’re not all totally happy with something. There’s one song called “Reichstag” that’s taken us pretty much a full year to write – we’ve had about six or seven different versions of it, which has been really good as it’s now my favourite song of ours (and it was also the most fun to record too). Also with this new record, we kind of had an idea of what it would be like from start to finish planned out in our heads before we went to record it. We knew how many songs it would need and the order of the tracks etc. So while we were writing it, there’d be ideas that we had that were *good* but not good enough. We just worked on the better elements until we thought that we had a really good album to record.

What have you been listening to recently that you would recommend to your fan base?

Well, we all tend to listen to the same music, so at practise we tend to listen to a lot of Deerhunter, Pink Floyd, Genesis (everything up to And Then There Were Three is so good), Portishead, Deerhoof, Cave In, Minus The Bear, Camel, …Trail Of Dead…. basically anything that’s melodic gets listened to at ridiculous volumes (often with mass sing-alongs). Personally at the minute though I’m in love with the new Pivot album “O Soundtrack My Heart”, “Islands” by King Crimson, this really awesome experimental stoner band from Massachusetts called Blacktail, and “Selected Ambient Works vol II” by Aphex Twin, which is one of the best records in the entire world.

The obligatory political question: Can politics (whichever side of the road) solve global social problems? Discuss

Well, I don’t think that the UK government can solve any global problems when they can’t even sort out the problems going on on their own doorstep. Personally I really believe that Britain is a horrible place to live – especially in Manchester – we have really high crime rates, high drug dependency statistics and terrible public transport. We live in a culture that encourages binge drinking and idiocy. However, I don’t know how to solve these problems and I’m pretty certain that our government doesn’t have a clue either. David Cameron’s “Hug A Hoodie” campaign is just patronising and so ridiculous, although the photograph of him walking around Moss Side with some utter degenerate doing some gun gesture behind him was pretty hilarious. Basically, I’m not the best person to talk to about politics – I can’t string a decent coherent sentence together to form a valid argument!

The obligatory digital media question: We all know that digital downloads (legal or not) are changing the music business, would you say this is a challenge or an opportunity, and why?

Well, I think it’s difficult – regarding my band, I don’t really have a problem with people downloading our music for free, but it’d be helpful if people came to our shows and bought our merchandise too. With a band like us, everything we do is funded by the money we make working shitty jobs. We have nobody helping us out financially when it comes to recording or pressing CDs, so everything we do is funded by what we earn or what we make on selling shirts and CDs at shows. So, obviously I’m going to want people to come down and support us, but I also know that not everyone can afford to do so, and I don’t really have a problem with that. It’s kinda awkward, but you can’t be a music nazi and demand that people only buy your records and don’t download them, because people are going to do what they want to do. Personally, I do download music and don’t always buy the records of something that I’ve got for free, but the majority of stuff that I’ve downloaded I will buy on vinyl. I don’t have a CD player at home, and I am totally shit with them – I lose them so easily – so I like getting something that’s really big and difficult to misplace! I think that digital media hasn’t been fully explored to it’s full potential either – there are some sites that I would happily give money to in order to get a digital version of an album – the main one that comes to mind is www.bleep.com, the Warp Records digital site, which is awesome as they have their entire back catalogue online for reasonable prices. I’d like to see some form of site created where you can download digital versions of albums for a reasonable cheap price, especially if you got some sort of bonus with it that you couldn’t get with the physical releases. I think that it’s an avenue that labels, both independent and major, should explore in more depth, for sure. However, I don’t think that taking legal action against people who download music is a good idea, obviously! Taking somebody to court just because they downloaded the new Take That or Kanye West album to keep their ratio on a website at a reasonable rate seems absolutely fucking insane to me!