INTERVIEW: Citizens! @ Parklife 2012

Hailing from London, 5 piece Pop act CITIZENS! have been making waves in all the right places since they formed only a couple of years ago. Being signed to Parisian label, Kitsune, playing all over the world and releasing their debut LP to critical praise are just a small amount of these waves.

If you were lucky enough to stumble upon them during the early hours of the afternoon at Parklife, or you’ve been a fan of them for a long time (like us). You would have realised that these guys are not only bringing Pop back into credibility, they are also taking it to a new level.

Our own Tom Hutchins and Gabe Gleeson were on site at the Melbourne leg of the festival. And were lucky enough to start off their day by stealing ten minutes with Lead Vocalist, Tom Burke and Lead Guitarist, Thom Rhoades for a quick chat about the whirlwind that has been the last twelve months as Citizens! And yes, the ridiculous amount of Tom’s was quite confusing.

Tom Hutchins: This is your first time in Australia, so how have you found it so far?

Tom Burke: It’s pretty big [laughs]. When you fly from Sydney to Perth, it’s a 5 hour flight. If you did that in London, you’d land in Istanbul, which is so different. But if you fly from Sydney to Perth, it’s much of the same. I think it takes a while of being here to get used to it, especially on this tour. The first part of the tour, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, all we saw was the Park, the Hotel, the airport. And it’s only now that we’ve had some time off that you finally start to realise what all the fuss is about.

TH: How has your time at Parklife been? How have your sets been received?

Thom Rhoades: We’ve been so happy to see people standing in a crowd, singing the words back to us – we couldn’t have asked for more for our first time here.

TB: Because we’re quite a new band, we’ve only been together for about a year and half; we’re still at that stage where it really freaked us out to think that someone on the other side of the world could know the words to a little song you wrote in your bedroom. Totally freaks out my nut.

TH: Do you guys enjoy the bigger shows like festivals? Or are the intimate club appearances more your thing?

TR: Obviously it depends on the response. It’s still possible to have a thousand people standing there with their arms folded. But as Tom said, we’ve been together [for a short time], and the more we develop our live sound, the more it becomes suited to the live stage. Although we can still enjoy the small intimate club gigs, we now feel we’re at a point where we can fill those big stages.

TH: Your debut album, Here We Are, is quite raw and honest in its sound, favouring a Lo-Fi vibe rather than an overproduced one; did you make a concerted effort to record in this way?

TB: We made some decisions which I think are different to a lot of bands. We signed to a label (Kitsune) who just wanted to support us and weren’t going to push us down a manufacturing route like a lot of bands do. And then, Alex (Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand), who we chose to produce the album, had a very similar un-cynical point of view. So it’s not like we wanted to record a Lo-Fi album, it was more that we didn’t want to record a cynical factory produced album that was going to sound like The Killers or the Kings Of Leon and all those bands that end up sounding like that – which is really dull.

I don’t think we ever expected it to be a number one hit album, because it didn’t tick those sorts of commercial boxes – but it’s been a first step and we can do what we want from here on in.

TH: As you mentioned, you guys released your debut through Kitsune, which is a massive achievement for a young act, so what’s it like to be signed to them?

TR: They just have such a positive attitude to new bands, and they’re totally willing for us to choose our own producers, choose who we want to work with, write whatever we want to write. They have a really hands off approach until we actually need them for things, like promotion and distribution, then they’re hands in and completely on board with us. And they’re such nice people, like cool Parisians [laughs].

TB: They never tell you what to do musically, but they will criticise you in other ways. They had a party last time we were in Paris, and I brought this girl down with me and the head of the label said to me – “she’s not good looking enough for you” [laughs].

NB: Read the quote in a fake French accent, as that is how Tom said it.

TH: Do you feel it was Kitsune picking up ‘Let’s Go All The Way’ for their Maison compilation that was greatest help in gaining attention as a band?

TB: We didn’t actually have a band name by the time we put [the track] out. When we recorded the album, we hadn’t played any gigs, we didn’t have a name – it was literally a recording project. Then [the label] said, “We want to put this tune on [the compilation]” and that was a really big show of faith from them. They said that it they didn’t care if we had a name, “the name is not important, we’ll just put out the song, you know, is no problem” (read in another hilarious French accent). So a lot of people liked it, but they didn’t know who the band was [laughs].

TH: Since that point you have picked up popularity and praise incredibly quickly, have you had time to sit back and analyse what has happened over the past 12 months?

TR: I still feel like I’m in a washing machine. This tour we’re on at the moment, we’re not going to be home for about another two months. So you have to kind of force yourself to sit down and take stock. The way we do it is from a professional perspective, like how we can improve our live show, that’s when we actually sit down and say what improvements can be made and what people like and don’t like.

Gabe Gleeson: So you’re very analytical about your live performances?

TR: I think you have to be. It’s very calculated laidback-ness [laughs]. You only get out as much as you put in, and when we’re touring constantly it becomes quite hard to look at it objectively.

TH: I’ve read that you guys want to be a real pop band that makes the genre credible again; do you feel you’ve made any headway with this?

TB: I feel there is a bit of a sea change happening, in the UK at least. We sat down before we started the band and had that conversation about how [there was] not so much a gap that needed to be filled, but a role that someone needed to play. And by the time we put the album out, we were aware of bands that we now play with all the time, such as Django Django, Kindness and Theme Park – who are doing a similar thing in very different ways. So maybe collectively if we keep going at, it we’ll get there.

TR: David Guetta will give way eventually and seed his throne.

GG: Is that what you guys are aiming for? To work with big dance producers?

TB: No, no. If we could turn public opinion against Guetta and a crowd would storm his house and steal his collection of micro-synths – then we’d be happy. Basically we want him to be poor [laughs].

GG: You want him to not be successful.

TR: We want people to realise that Pop music isn’t a commercial decision; it’s something that you need to take really seriously. And it’s still possible to make alternative music with a wide reaching message.

Words by Tom Hutchins and Gabe Gleeson. Find their streets on POSSE.COM.

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