It’s festival season – the best time of the year for live music. But Vaccines guitarist Freddie Cowan says all this gigging means bands can’t be as creative as they’d like. Here’s what he has to say about how demand to be on the road can slow bands down…
“The process these days is to only make an album three years after your previous one, once you’ve toured an album to death and made all the money you can from it. I hate that approach and we’re looking to go back in the studio this year.
I like the way it used to be, where you’d make one or two albums a year and have control. That’s when you put your energy and craft into making music, not just touring existing songs. We want to get back in the studio as soon as possible – maybe not for an album – a single or EP or something, because being in a band is about making music, not just being on the road. That’s got out of balance.
The Beatles would never have been able to have their psychedelic phase or develop so much if they were on the same treadmill. People say “It’s insane how much The Beatles did in seven years”, but they didn’t have to tour ‘Revolver’ for three years to make any money. OK, maybe The Beatles could have found a way to escape, but when bands and labels make money from touring rather than records, it’s so much harder to insist on actually making new music, which surely is a band’s most important job as artists.
“The live side of music has got out of hand. When The Stone Roses toured [second album] ‘Second Coming’, they did two Brixtons. Now, Ed Sheeran is doing three nights at Wembley Stadium and even Queen didn’t do that. The live industry has gone nuts.
“I’d love what we do next to be an extension of ‘English Graffiti’ rather than the start of a new chapter. But with the timeframes the modern music industry operates under, I wonder if it’s still possible to bookend one period of your creative output. It should be an album plus a couple of singles and an EP from the same stage. Without that space to create, you wouldn’t have had The Beatles’ ‘Sgt Pepper’s…’. That all happened in a small amount of time and I want to explore that more. Once you’ve found something that works, you’re forced to move on, rather than having lost interest.
“I feel like we’ve really hit our stride towards the end of ‘English Graffiti’, and we’ve really got a lot of creative energy in that vein. We’re far from tapped out and only started to reach our potential towards the end of making that album. We still have that potential, so why not make use of it?”