White Lies in The Ambassador on 03162014 By Yan Bourke 017White Lies have been around since 2007, with their debut album released in 2009. However, despite the fact that they have been around for a while, they are really only starting to see the success they deserve, getting more and more attention with their latest album ‘Big TV’ gaining a more positive critical reception than their previous two albums. They have the curse of that band ‘that you’ve heard of but have never really gotten in to’, but there’s no better time than right now to start.  Drummer Jack Lawrence-Brown took some time to chat about the last year, music videos and what makes a good live show.

With ‘Big TV’ being released in August of 2013, the band have had a year touring on it, and the last year has been a busy one. Hailing from London, the band have been relentlessly touring, and Jack Lawrence-Brown looks back on the year fondly: “There’s been lots [of stand-out moments]. It’s been a really tiring, really busy year. We’ve been touring constantly and we managed to get what I would describe as close to a world tour  you can sort of do on an album campaign. We managed to get to Australia, we managed to get to parts of Asia that we’d never been to like Taiwan and South Korea and stuff. It’s been really good, tiring but it’s really nice now because we had a really busy June, we had a tonne of festivals,but July and August are a lot more relaxed pace of festivals, there’s one every two weeks or so. It’s much more like time off at the moment with a few shows thrown in.

With the newest tracks being relatively fresh, crowds around the world have responded well to them, some tracks have received more of a reaction than they were expecting, “We’ve been quite pleasantly surprised by the reaction to some of the album tracks off ‘Big TV’,; it’s always a bit tricky when you finish off a record to figure out which tracks people are going to like. They usually tend to be ones that you haven’t thought of. When you’re making the record you have your own favourites and you sort of determine that they are the best tracks on the record and they’re the singles. But actually sometimes it takes you going out to a gig and playing to a couple thousand people in a field or whatever and then you actually understand what the hits are on the record, what the songs that people actually want to hear are.

Talking about their live shows, Jack explains how sometimes there can be a song that gets a surprisingly good reaction, in this case he is very happy with the crowd’s choice : “We all loved the song Big TV, but if we’re being honest we weren’t fully prepared for it to be much of a success live because  it’s quite a long song, and there’s some very slow bits in it as well as lots of upbeat dancy bits, and we were sort of unsure  whether that one would take off or not, but that’s become one of the best tracks off the new record to play live if not the best track to play live. That one has been a real eye-opener for us, I’m very pleased  people get that one, because it’s a very important track in terms of what we’ve been up to.”

As well as standing out in a live setting, the singles are usually accompanied by some very creative videos. Jack explains the process of making their videos. He believes that their first three videos stand above every one they have done since,  “We’ve never matched  the success of the first three videos we made, because  on the first album for various reasons I think our record label were just chucking money at us to make videos so we could make really expensive  like trippy/weird music videos, and you need money to do that.  We worked with this Swedish director called Andreas Nilsson  who agreed to make all the videos for that record and he  is an absolute genius, he’s gone on to do all sorts of other, bigger and more expensive stuff with Nike and Kanye West and stuff […] We would get to the time where we would pick a single and send it to Andreas and when he had an idea we would just do that because he was totally bonkers.” Even if he doesn’t think White Lies have ever matched their first album’s videos, he explains that there is one recent one that he really enjoys, “We did a really good one for First Time Caller on this record and that’s one that I’m really pleased with. We shot that in Paris last summer at some point, and it was really fun to make and I think it’s one that stands up to the other three.

Touring has been a big part of the band’s career, with years of live experience, both in festivals (including this year’s Indiependence) and their own shows, Lawrence-Brown explains that both platforms have their advantages “When it comes down to the summer and the weather is good and you’re playing to a lot of people out doors it kind of is the best time to do festivals and that’s when I enjoy doing festivals. Obviously not all the festivals you play are going to be like that, we’ll play some festivals in some weird part of Belgium or something and  yeah it will be pissing down with rain and the mood will not be as good. When we do a headline show we can be pretty confident if we play the show well and if we are enjoying ourselves, it’s going to be a really good gig; with festivals a lot more can go wrong but having said that you can also get the best moments at festivals.

However, as much as they love touring, much needed time-off also means a lot, and some things really stand out as being important, “Catching up with friends is good, booking holidays is good. Trying to make the most of my time off I want to go and do a bit of relaxed travelling. I’m probably going to buy a cat to be honest, I’m really into the idea of a cat for my flat! So that’s quite high up on my agenda, I think that might happen in September-time!

In their touring lives there is one band that they strongly admire and believe that they have mastered the art of the live show, and that is Kings Of Leon, “I think a band that we get inspiration from, I would never compare our music to this band but a band that we’ve toured with a lot and that I find really inspiring to tour with is Kings Of Leon. We’ve done a bunch of touring supporting them and there’s something really great about the way their live shows work which is similar to what I imagine if White Lies ever got that big we would put on a show quite similar. Our front man plays the guitar so he’s not going to be running aruond stage in a  sort of Chris Martin style, throwing himself about, it’s just not how we’ll ever be as a band. But Kings of Leon  pack themselves really tightly  together on a very big stage and just play all these songs that are properly fantasitc rock songs. They don’t really have to do anything, they just play the songs really well and they are charming in their manner and it’s clear that they’re having a good time when they’re doing it. And the music is good enough for people to absolutely lose their mind over it. I like that, I like the idea that  youu can be  confident enough in your performance that the show is going to be good if you put the best setlist together. I think watching them live is quite a good thing to do for any young band. What they’ve done is master their songs before they try to master anything in terms of ridiculous showmanship or anything like that.

With this in mind, the future holds more live experience for the band who are set to continue doing a few festivals up until the end of August and then  start thinking about new material, but first there’s one thing that takes priority…  “[At the] End of September/October time we’ll start working on new music and yeah just see what happens… I’ve gotta get my cat first though! We’ll start taking things seriously once I’ve got a cat.”