A couple of songs into the Fuck Buttons set, as part of their European Slow Focus Tour, and thanks to the pulsating rhythms and a brilliantly simple but mesmerising combination of video projections and lights, it feels like we’ve been transported to a strange and unfamiliar landscape. It’s a stunning live show.
Geography and landscape are a good place to start, when we chat backstage with Fuck Buttons Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung (or simply Ben and Andy as they refer to themselves). Lots of musicians take inspiration from their surroundings – a recent example being Efterklang who relocated to the abandoned arctic city of Piramida for their album – but Andy is quick to dismiss it for Fuck Buttons and their songwriting process: ” I don’t think geography is very important to our music – I was thinking about it this morning. We’ve written our music in each other’s bedrooms, and in different cities, and I don’t think its had any effect on the music. You know how you have some bands that attach a sound to their geography and I think that’s quite nice but it just doesn’t happen with us, for whatever reason.
One of the words that crops up a lot in conversation with the Hung and Power, who formed the Fuck Buttons in Bristol in early 2004, is process. When they talk of their songwriting, they talk of a process, and it’s one they’ve been honing since the release of their critically acclaimed first album Street Horrsing (2008). “The process is quite stringent actually,” Andy explains. “The process is about exploring – I guess it’s like being on a ship and having a very stringent way of operating the ship. The point of it is to travel and explore; it gives you the possibility and options, so we surround ourselves with the stuff we’ve accumulated and we play around with it until something happens and starts gelling.” “That’s when,” Ben continues, “we acknowledge to each other that something’s sounding good and that’s where we start to refine it.”
we’d no idea beforehand, but this kind of darkness kept rearing its head as we were writing, and I guess we kind of ran with the idea – it was kind of exciting
It’s a process that’s worked wonders for them. 2008’s Street Horrrsing was followed by Tarot Sport in 2009, which was described variously as ‘overwhelming’, ‘ingenious’, ‘narcotic’ and ‘career defining’. Why then the long gap between album #2 and this year’s Slow Focus? “Well,” Ben explains, “Tarot Sport and Street Horrrsing were turned around in quite quick succession, but when Street Horrrsing came out we had already quite a few tracks for Tarot Sport written. This time around, when Tarot Sport came out, we spent two and a bit years touring and then we were in a position where we could write for the new record in our own time. We were producing it ourselves so we didn’t have to wait on somebody else’s diary or space – we had our own space. We did the writing and recording, and it took the last three and a half – four years.”
Time and space in the studio has been many a band’s downfall, from Fleetwood Mac and Def Leppard through to My Bloody Valentine or the Stone Roses; whether you’re looking for a pristine or dirty sound, often studio space and time can become a trap – was that something that worried the band? “If that’s how long it takes, that’s how long it takes isn’t it?” The answer comes determined and without pause from Ben. Andy continues: “is there the temptation to fiddle a lot? Yes, but because there’s two of us we kind of keep each other in check in that area. We actually went really fast in terms of writing and the production was a learning experience for us, but relatively it went really fast as well I thought.”
Slow Focus has already picked up plaudits left, right, and center, and is arguably the Fuck Buttons strongest release to date. How does it differ from the previous albums, according to the band themselves? “Well, sonically, our palette is constantly changing because our instrumentation is constantly changing,” Ben explains. “We try not to get too attached to one particular sound-making thing, because we don’t want to box ourselves in. Bearing that in mind, sonically it’s very different to both of the other records.”
And in terms of themes or atmosphere? Most critics have picked up on a tension, a darkness in the overall sound and the titles chosen. Is that something the band recognise? “Yeh the mood of it is a bit more intimidating”, Ben agrees. “It’s just the way it came out. We didn’t want to repeat ourselves, We didn’t set out to write a record that had the sentiment that Slow Focus does; we’d no idea beforehand, but this kind of darkness kept rearing its head as we were writing, and I guess we kind of ran with the idea – it was kind of exciting.”
Slow Focus is a great title – does it have a particular meaning? “It was more of an idea that came out,” Ben explains. “We like to sit down and discuss the mental imagery that comes out of the music. And when we were talking about the mood of this particular album, we talked about it like just waking up when your eyes are kind of out of focus and you re-adjust to your new surroundings which you may or may not be familiar with. So that’s where it came from.”
Writing about music is never particularly easy – converting the instinctual reaction to sounds into words and concepts, and it’s harder still with a band where there are no lyrics as such (though, as they’re keen to point out, all the records have had vocals on them to date – just not conventional vocals); in that gap journalists obviously turn to song titles as a short-cut to presenting the songs, and the Fuck Buttons have plenty of brilliant titles. How important, though, are they to the band? “The titles are more of an organisational kind of thing in a way,” says Ben. “we do enjoy the processof giving tracks their title, because its kind of like naming your baby [laughs], but one thing we don’t want to do is have a title there in place to create some kind of pre-ordered imagery – which I guess they kind of do, but…” he pauses, caught in the bind.”Some of the track titles, I’m not even sure as to the train of thought when we were deciding them. It’s almost irrelevant now. I can’t remember what we were thinking.For example, I can’t remember why Prince’s Prize is called Prince’s Prize. It’s a conversation we had at the time.”
We take a step back, to the early days of the band, back in Bristol. Can they remember the first time they wrote a full song together, and what it was like? “The first song?” Andy questions. “I’m not sure of the first one, but I remember the first time we wrote a good song, and that was ‘Sweet Love for Planet Earth‘, and I remember thinking ‘fuckin hell, what have we done!’ I remember thinking I was up my own arse, but I remember thinking ‘there’s nothing in the world like this.This is incredible’. There was a kind of momentum that’s continued to this day.” “The way we write,” Ben continues, “as things change around us, that’s the one thing, the one principle that we’ve stuck by since the beginning – isn’t it?”