Delphic are a group comprised primarily of Richard “Rick” Boardman, Matt Cocksedge, and James Cook. The band’s debut album ‘Acolyte’ was released in 2010, and the follow-up ‘Collections’ was released on the 28th of January. We caught up with Rick to talk about the new album.
Collections is out this week, and from listening to it, the sound is a major shift away from what you had on Acolyte, was that a deliberate move?
“Ya, we did, I mean we’re rebels really, although we don’t sound like the Sex Pistols we make points in our own kind of geeky way. When we made Acolyte we were rebelling against everything that was on the radio at that time, which was NME guitar music and we thought we want to find our own pocket and we want to get euphoric dance builds and synths and all that kind of stuff and create a sound that wasn’t being heard at that moment. Anyway, three years later, we turn on the radio, and it’s absolutely full of synths and euphoric builds, although in a more chart-friendly way with your Calvin Harris and David Guetta stuff like that with a similar aesthetic, and we want to find our own pocket again. So we went about building a sound we thought was new, and that wasn’t existing at the moment and we pulled that in from so many different places to try and find that.”
What kind of influences did you draw from then to create that sound?
“Well someone asked me this the other day and I jokingly said the influence is the internet, but it is. If you look at scenes developing in previous decades in popular music, you’d see certain sounds develop because of maybe the records they got from that record store. But now there’s no real need to do that because you’ve got spotify, the internet at your fingertips, so I can listen to Brazilian samba music, in the space of five seconds, I’m not limited to what I’m presented with, I can listen to anything. So I don’t understand why you would not be influenced by all that’s on offer, but people don’t expect you to be, I think you’re still judged in the way you would be in the 60’s, 70’s and 80s where a pop scene and pockets of music develop, but now it’s different.”
But people are still limited by genre, they mightn’t listen to everything…
“Well they are, and we’ve always wanted to… well we never look at ourselves as a band, we don’t call ourselves a band. Well maybe other people do, but we look at ourselves as three songwriters, three producers who aren’t limited by ourselves what we listen to, or what we’re expected to do. In that way I don’t see ourselves as a band. We’ve got all sorts of different musicians on this record, we’ve got rappers, different singers, different bass players, three or four different drummers on this record. It’s not a band that’s going into a practice room and jamming out some tunes, it’s producer driven pop music.”
How do you go about writing the songs then if you don’t see yourselves as a band?
“Well they’re definitely not jammed in a room. We feel that we’re modern musicians in the way that we use the computer a lot. When you look back at certain decades, I think the 60s we saw the electric guitar and the amplifier make its way into pop music, and then late 70s/80s you see the first synthesizer and all that kind of music. I think we’ll look at our era as the pro-tools era or the logic era with music made solely in the box, you have a tune like Empire State of Mind which is made completely in the computer. We see ourselves as modern in that way because that’s how we generally write, and we’ll use pianos and acoustic guitars to strum down melodies, ideas and songs. We love song-writing and have studied song-writing, and in our heads we want to compete with the best out there, the Bowies and the Elton Johns, those classic songwriters. We take bits of that, like on Changes and stuff which are quite classic in its melody, but then we do it in a modern way on the computer with production and synths and all that kind of stuff.”
We were talking about the change of direction on this album, do you think that’s going to alienate some of your old fans?
“Ya, yeah, it absolutely will, hopefully we’ll gain more, gain others. (sigh) I don’t know, when we were writing it, we had a bash, we had a go at writing things that were similar to Acolyte, and to be honest we pretty much wrote the techno album, which was kind of a post-Acolyte ambient-techno record, we had nearly seven tracks. It was kind of cool, but it would have (a pigeon-holed us too much and (b we weren’t really feeling what we were doing. The three of us are very strong individuals, three opinionated people, and you can’t hide, you can tell when someone’s not feeling something, you know. I can look into the other two’s eyes and see that they think it’s boring, it’s not exciting or pushing things forward. So we scrapped all that stuff and got going on something new. And when we were doing it, we knew, we thought this will alienate fans and we were there laughing about it, ‘ha, isn’t it funny that we can do this and just piss everyone off!’ because it’s a bit of dark humour. But it’s like, we’ve written Acolyte, and we hope the people who did enjoy it, bought into us as artists, what we do as artists. I think, I wouldn’t expect that from a band or a group or whatever. I would want the artist to push themselves into new territories.”
It’s probably a bit premature, but are there plans for more material? A fusion of the styles from Acolyte and Collections perhaps?
“I joked with the lads the other day saying that’s exactly what we should do, just combine the two and see what happens. Knowing us it would be stupid to try and predict what’s going to happen and we can plan all we like and it will just change. The only thing I can say is that we will seek some kind of innovation in music, in an era where everything has gone before, so much good stuff has gone before. And we will try and continue to do that, whether that is finding new sounds, or juxtaposing sounds that aren’t usually put together. I don’t know how that will sound, but we will strive for that.”
Have you read any of the reviews about Collections yet?
“Ya, it’s generally been misunderstand. We don’t really read them, but my Dad tells me bits and bobs. As I said we sort of expected it, people don’t like bands changing. People expect certain things and don’t like you to meld certain things together. All we can do is do what interests us, and we trust each other as song-writers and producers and either everyone will catch up or they won’t.”
So basically you’re writing music that you, yourselves, can be proud of
“Ya, absolutely, ya. And it generally depends with journalists whether you get let into their little club. On Acolyte we did, and on this we haven’t, and they generally say the same things as each other. We are very proud of Acolyte but we feel this a much more honest one, and probably a stronger one, but it could take people time to realise that.”
You also wrote a song for the Olympics last year, how did that come about?
“Well we were in Atlanta and it happened quite quickly without much of our knowledge,but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We had just finished the record and sent a couple of tracks off to our management, and they must have sent it off to the Olympic people or whatever and they said ‘look, we want to use the tune for it’ and we’re like ‘ok that’s fine’ because it’s a pretty special event. But, yeah, it was done by our management really and we thought ‘why not?’”
And that track wasn’t included on the album.
“No, it wasn’t. It was actually one of the tunes we wrote first in the writing session and it didn’t really follow quite the same themes as some of the others, so it was quite useful when they wanted to use it because it meant we could put it out there but not on the record.”
Well that nearly wraps everything up, do you have anything you’d like to add about the album, or anything else?
“Well… Just go and listen to Atlas in-depth because I think it’s the best song we’ve ever written. It’s an interesting one, and we’ve got loads of reviews, and people can say what they want, it’s fine, but people kept mentioning Atlas as dub-step. We can’t understand how they’d even call it dub-step, some kind of modern day Fleetwood Mac yes, but dub-step, we can’t understand it. And we deplore these people to tell us exactly where it is, but we feel Atlas is one of the strongest things we’ve ever written. It’s obviously going to sound different to people’s ears initially, definitely with what people are expecting from us, but take time with it, it’s just a great tune.”
Check out our review of Delphic – Collections, their brand new album which is out now.