Orlando: This heart is red hot and on fire!
Hugo: I said, "Just keep playing your Legos!"
SUPERSWEET has finally managed to catch the tail end of the Maccabees whirlwind. And now that they're winding down so sweetly with 'Toothpaste Kisses' - exactly the last song on debut album Colour It In - as their last single, Orlando Weeks (vocals, guitar) and Hugo White (guitar) tell us about the triple-breasted monsters and how they could lead you into the sea... maybe... 'ish!
SS: You started off playing small gigs and you talk continuously about how there were only 5-6 people at your first gigs. How did it feel rounding things up at the Roundhouse?
Orlando: Oh it was a massive event for us. With each tour we’ve done a bigger venue which means we’re getting somewhere. We played Café de Paris and we played ULU, and then we played Astoria, and then we played the Roundhouse and it was sold out. There have always been queues which is always a good thing.
Hugo: [London] always seems to end our tours, the last gigs are always London because it’s like a big circus and everyone’s really worried about it so we just leave it to last but it’s always worked out.
SS: Have you adjusted to the change in venue size every time it gets bigger? Do you prefer big or more intimate venues?
Orlando: First they’re different, but hopefully since then we’ve got better as musicians and I suppose we've got bigger shows now and we’ve got a lighting guy so we can talk to him about how we want it to look and lights play an important part in it.
Hugo: I wouldn’t know but hopefully we’ve become better at playing to more people. We absolutely love playing live but we always love coming back to small venues and stuff and playing to those people and it’s nice to do that. But we’ve always worked really hard to achieve in order to play these bigger venues and bigger shows. In the big room you know it’s gonna sound right, and you have everything sorted but it’s not a challenge whereas in the small rooms you’re like, it’s so hot, you can’t even really play or hear, there’s no space and you’re collapsing on each other and stuff.
Orlando: But at the end of the day, we treat every gig the same though, that if people have bothered to come and see us it’s our responsibility to make them feel like we’ve given it everything we can to help them have a good time.
SS: Is the writing process of this second album still pretty much the same as the first, or has it changed?
Hugo: Not really, Orlando writes a lot of the spine of the songs and ideas that we all put in when we all get time to spend together and we then turn it into a Maccabees song.
SS:Do you feel much more pressure now?
Hugo: We’ve sort of put pressure more on ourselves, we want to get it out quickly and we don’t want to hang about but we haven’t got enough pressure on us to be honest.
Orlando: No.
Hugo: Not too much any way.
Orlando: There’s expectations from fans of the band and from the record label in a way, but not something that you’d say a pressure. It’s just like people want to hear another album they want to feel like the faith that they had in us from the first record is justified by us making a better second album that’s generally pressure but I’m not feeling pressurised to write an album.
SS: Have they started asking you to make music the way they want yet?
Hugo: No, they won’t be or I’ll tell to fuck off (laughs).
Orlando: They kind of figured out that with things like 'Toothpaste Kisses' that it’s so detached from the songs that we were writing when they first signed us. They signed us when our big songs were 'X-Ray', and I don’t think we’d even really written, I think maybe we had 'Latchmere', and 'X-Ray' and I think they were fairly removed from each other and from 'Toothpaste Kisses' and the other songs/ So they’ve kind of figured that it’s best to just let us try and figure out what we wanted to sound like. We still have no idea you know and we still don’t have a formula, so we just write songs for song’s sake and then from that we work it out to make them feel approachable live and for the record.
SS: How long did it take you altogether to write the first album?
Orlando: The earlier songs we’d probable written 2 and a half yeears, 3 years before we even finished the recording the first album.
Hugo: Quite a long time. It charts 3 years of being in the band, right out to the last day of recordeding where we were still doing one more song. That’s the only thing in terms of pressure – we haven’t got as much time.
SS: Do you have like a time scale?
Hugo: well we’ve got to do it 2 years quicker than we did the last one! (laughs) But it’s fine you know we’re better at it now, and we know before we never went into a studio recording an album - the whole thing has been quite something and we needed to adapt to and learn how to deal with. Now we know and are more confortable with those situations.
SS: So now you know all the technical side of things in the recording studio?
Hugo: Absolutely not! (smiles) None of us are good at that technically and we’re not whiz kids or sound engineers (laughs).
SS: In many interviews there's a story of how you were all from London and Orlando moved to Brighton and the rest of you followed. That must have been a big dedication. Was it purely so you could all be together in this band or you were planning to move there any way?
Orlando: The first 6 months I was commuting back to London every weekend to rehearse and they all thought they could come and try the university, I told them that Brighton is pretty good fun but I was just more thinking it would save me on train fares and they all moved out there and they all live there and I’ve moved back to London and now I’m commuting again (laughs). I think that I want them around and now I get them around and I think I better start moving again (laughs)!
Hugo: No, we went to uni for like a year and all the rest of the band just spent the last year of our student loans on rehearsals and didn’t go uni but then managed to get a record deal and drop out.
SS: What did you study?
Hugo: I did Product Design.
Orlando: I did Illustration, but I finished mine so fuck you! (Laughs)
SS: Anyone else finished theirs?
Orlando: Nope! I was the only one! I’m the geek!
SS: Do you like living in London now, Orlando?
Orlando: I love it! Honestly, Brighton has a big place in my heart but I couldn’t live there, it was too much. I miss it, but all my friends from uni, they all live in London now.
Hugo: It’s really hectic there.
Orlando: See, it pretends to be this kind of relaxed and easy-going place that people seemingly are never at work - you can go down to the beach in the summer and it will be crammed, on a Tuesday afternoon and no one works! And then you’re starting thinking... but actually it’s quite hectic and kind of precious because it’s such a small thing. But I’m happier in London.
Hugo: I think I’m doing another year or so, we’ll see, I’ll give it another year.
SS: But by the time you’re back, he’ll be somewhere else again.
Hugo: Yeah yeah... it doesn’t matter. Right now it’s not just the place to put a home to. And we’re going to be away recording the album and stuff any way.
SS: Your music is really tight, everything fits in together, even though each piece is doing its own thing, but it’s like puzzles that fit. Is this something you agree to do together as a band?
Orlando: Yeah, definitely. Like you said, I don’t know, we don’t sound like bands like Interpol or Arcade Fire or anything. But from the point of view of how they manage to have every going on at the same time but nothing is more important than anything else and that’s kind of our ethos to writing that everything’s as important and equal to everything else and make sure that everything gives each other enough space so that when the bass is doing something there and guitar needs to bulk up at the bottom and the other guitar can highlight the top bit and that’s kind of what I think feels easier about writing at the moment is that we’ve kind of sussed that out a little bit more, We have that sorted and we kind of understand the space and everything and how the drums and the bass need to work better together and how the vocals need to sit on the top but not feel like they’re more important than everything else.
SS: Lyrically, you write them altogether?
Orlando: I write all the lyrics, that’s the only thing that’s definitely done by me. But having said that on the new record Felix has written a song that he plays he sings the words but the original part was by me. But the main thing when you listen to it you’ll remember like this ia Hugo’s part and I play the accordion and it’s all changing, whatever the best bit comes from is what we’lll keep and it’s irrelevant of who wrote it or did it.
SS: They’re all so vivid visually. Would this have something to do with that fact that you're an illustrator?
Orlando: Songs writers that I admire, or lyricists, tend to be people that... I still think Billy Bragg writes some of the best lyrics around, but I love The National and their album Boxer, the guy just writes such brilliant lyrics, and Thom Yorke writes The Eraser which is an amazing album. We’re just trying to find the balance between telling a story and making it not... you can get too worried by trying to tell a story and also writing things that are relevant to you because they deserve to. Because to write lyrics, I find any way, it takes me forever, so I want to feel like it’s worth my time. Because I could probably be doing something better with my time than writing about something I don’t care enough about.
SS: The artwork is amazing, are they images from before the band? All those little curved beings have been used throughout the whole art direction from the first vdo till the last, it’s really clever.
Orlando: When I first started doing the drawings for the band and stuff, I’d do loads of monsters and no one liked it. And that was the first thing that we all agreed we liked it.
Hugo: 'Cause they were horrible, they were like monsters with 3 breasts and stuff like that!
Orlando: You know, looking back it probably wouldn’t have fitted but at the time I felt like this is the way forward! I’m gonna make loads of monsters and I’m gonna make little female versions of them in videos and stuff (smiles).
SS: Are these little people supposed to represent something?
Orlando: They were just kind of symbolic of the crowd, I suppose. Like when you look out you just see the shoulders and the heads and I like drawing them and maybe I’m autistic or something but I can spend hours just sitting and doing them over and over and over again.
SS: Just like doodles?
Orlando: Yeah exactly, and it’s kind of worked in a way, it’s become symbolic of Colour It In in the first album so we’ve used them for the artwork.
SS: Can you sum up this whole experience since you first got signed - both good and bad?
Hugo: When we first got signed we’ve been touring a lot. We’ve done so much since we first got signed, didn’t we? It’s hard turning back.
Orlando: The good point though is that you’ve got a whole bunch of people with fresh opinions and understanding music that you didn’t have before and the bad side is that you’ve got a bunch of people with opinions and ideas of what they think it should be like. So it’s a double-edged sword and everyone’s opinion is valid but at the end of the day you’ll just have to live with it and for any consequences - we’ll take that responsibility.
Hugo: We’ve sort of managed to hold it and keep it for our own as much as we possibly could. So they haven’t got so much of the interference.
Orlando: But we wouldn’t have signed it to the people that we’ve signed to unless we felt that their opinions were worth taking on board so it is a kind of the team, (smiles) but we’re the Captain of the team. I suppose... maybe… 'ish! (Laughs)
Photography: Burak Cingi