| Playing the YOU ME AT SIX game... with JOSH FRANCESCHI. |
| Written by Shahlin Graves |
| Monday, 08 February 2010 09:47 |
 For years, the UK fell at the feet of the American Fueled By Ramen and Epitaph invasions.... that is, until YOU ME AT SIX came along and proved that the British powerpop scene had grown sufficient enough legs to rise up on it's own, and debut albums at #5 on their nation-wide charts. But the devotion of fans to the Weybridge five-piece, is not confined to the borders of their homeland. While in Glasgow promoting their new album 'Hold Me Down', riot police were necessary to pacify a excess-capacity situation at a local record store signing. Nineteen year-old frontman JOSH FRANCESCHI has nothing but boundless love for the enthusiasm of You Me At Six fans: "Basically what happened [is], the music store that we did an in-store at today told us that we could have 400 people in the store for when we play, and then 500 people for the signing. Glasgow - the place we went to do the signing today - when we do our tour in March, we're doing a 3000-capacity venue over there. So we've got a substantial fan-base. Today, there's a thousand kids that turned up and there were no wristbands or anything, just people queuing up. There's people pushing throughout the queue, trying to get in the queue to come in - [so] the police turned up and loads of security, to calm the place down. It's a bit sad, but at the same time it's amazing to know that people care that much about being there that they are prepared to - there were people that'd been queuing out there from 4AM - obviously it's crazy! But at the same time, it's an awesome feeling. We're very grateful." Another mark of success - perhaps one that we are much more familiar with locally in New Zealand - are the thorns of tall poppy syndrome. Kiwis know all too well, that what goes up, must be accompanied by a bandwagon of aggrieved jealousy. When You Me At Six graced the cover of Kerrang magazine in support of the release of 'Hold Me Down', online accusations of paid friendship between the band and publication were voiced by a fellow English musician. Franceschi is the first to admit that he can see why some-one he has never even meet before would broadcast their assumptions blindly, but just like the frontman's genuinely emphatic lyrics, he's forthright in explaining what he makes of it all: "It's pretty simple. Kerrang magazine were one of the first magazines - not just in the UK, but globally - to support our band and get behind our band. In particular, I have a really strong relationship with some of the people at that magazine. [But] I don't use that to get pieces. Our label or our press person deals with articles and features and tries getting stuff in there, but basically, we've had awful awful weather in the UK at the moment, and so a lot of people have been put out of going out shopping and leaving their house. So I had a conversation with the guys at Kerrang and was like: 'Hey look, I'm not the biggest person on Twitter but I've got like 20,000 people on there, I'll do as much as I can to tweet about the magazine, about it coming out this week'. Because we were on the cover, and I didn't want our band being on the cover to be responsible for them not selling as many copies, or anything like that. So I pushed it in that sense and I guess they were just doing the same. They know that a lot of the focus of the youth of today is on stuff like Twitter, and Facebook, and Myspace - they're just trying to change and evolve with the times. They were just trying to push You Me At Six as much through their own Twitter campaign this week, because they realised it was important to try and get people out of their house to go and buy it." But at the end of the day, Franceschi - alongside drummer Dan Flint, rhythm guitarist Max Helyer, lead guitarist Chris Miller, and bassist Matt Barnes - boasts honours, awards, and sell-out tours that speak for themselves... and you know that you're really hitting home, when newspapers mince words to re-arrange your quotes for a saucier 'story': "That whole article about The Used - I was on the phone to the person for forty-five minutes and they asked me if one time I'd ever met anyone that had ever bummed me out or didn't meet my expectations. Well not really, but this one time we went to this awards ceremony and I really wanted to go and introduce myself to the guys from The Used... and somehow it turned into that they poured beer on me. Strange! And it's frustrating, because at our U.S. record label one of our really good friends that works there, lives with Jeph from The Used, the guy who I'm talking about in the article supposedly. I've had to talk to kids, saying I didn't say that. It's fine... but it's hard enough being in a band when they mis-quote you out and about in interviews we've avoided doing. It pissed me off it turned into that. But whatever." Then there was also the time that the same paper - the Daily Star - paid further respects to the sparkling reputation of journalists: "There's another article they've just printed. It's a picture of Matt our bassist, but the interview's by me and it's all my quotes, and underneath the picture of Matt it says Franceschi. I'm just like: I don't understand how somebody can be that unbothered about the piece they're writing that they didn't even bother to Google the band's picture, or Google my name and get the right picture for the article. It just really pisses me off. I was like: You're meant to be one of our national broadsheets and you couldn't even be bothered to just fulfil your job properly."  COUP DE MAIN: Don't mind me, but... are you worried about the state of modern music journalism? YOU ME AT SIX - JOSH FRANCESCHI: <laughs> This is the way that I look at it: I think that the whole everything that surrounds music, everyone is trying to figure out a way to sell stuff. Like I know that in the UK, some of the big rock magazines aren't selling even a third of what they used to sell because the Internet has helped the music industry, but has also changed it completely. Kids don't need to go buy a magazine to find out what is going on in the lives of their favourite bands now. There's Twitter, there's Myspace, there's Google, there's Punktastic, Smart Punk - websites that talk about news to do with bands. Sometimes, I think that kids like when a band slips up and gives a bit of gossip almost, it helps sell the piece. But I've also been interviewed by great journalists, and they've written great pieces that aren't, and are really in-depth stories and interesting to read. So I haven't lost my faith at all. It does bother me sometimes [that] there's a culture in the UK of trying to make big news out of small news. Sometimes it doesn't end up good on the people who get interviewed. So you got to be a bit careful-er, yeah? CDM: I was rather pleased to discover that 'Hold Me Down' debuted at #5 on the UK album charts. Number Four on the mid-week charts, even! I bet you're ecstatic? JOSH: I know a lot of people when they get news like that will say that it's completely unexpected and completely unheard of... but for a band like us to be in the Top 40?! We've sold more CD's this week than Lady Gaga. That, to me is beyond ridiculous. It's almost stupid. It's a credit to our fanbase for supporting us in that way and going out and buying the CD. When I got the phone call from the Managing Director at our label, I was literally freaking out. I can't believe it. I can't believe that we're going to be able to say that something we did as a band got that kind of recognition. So it's a very exciting time. We're obviously very, very pleased with it. It's almost even crazy to think that we were 5000 sales off being Number One. That's how tight it was in the top. It was like literally a thousand CD's between us and Number Three, so really, it could have gotten even more insane if things had gone our way even more so. But you know what? Number Four! To even have a Top Ten CD in the UK is a privilege that we're very, very grateful for to our fans. CDM: In comparison to the release of your debut album 'Take Off Your Colours' via Slam Dunk, what have you noticed as the main differences this time round working with Virgin Records on the release of 'Hold Me Down'? JOSH: I think it's like the difference between... you know what the premier league in football is like, right? Do you know anything about football over there? CDM: Other New Zealanders - yes. Me - not so much. But do carry on... JOSH: I guess it would be a bit like the difference between being in the same league as a bunch of Division Four teams - who in their spare time have 9-5 jobs and are butchers and chefs and what-not - and the people who get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a week to play football and to play to some 90,000 people on a Saturday afternoon. I can't stress the difference [enough]. I felt when we were on Slam Dunk that we were running that label. I felt like we managed our own band - we almost set up our own label basically. With Virgin, we were so worried, we told them we didn't want to be marketed everywhere. We didn't want people to feel like our band was suffocating them, but we also wanted people to know about our new CD. We wanted people to be aware of it. I think the balance is just right, they've put a lot of time into marketing and doing well by us in that side. They promised us that if we gave them a CD they could work, that they would work it to the best - and I'm sure that a lot of the chart success is due to the hours put in by the people at our label. I'm very very grateful towards them. It was a big decision to leave Slam Dunk because it was the label that we got managed with. When we left our management, things got awkward working with the label. It wasn't an easy decision for us to choose for us to leave and for us to go to another label. We'd always been dead against major labels because we'd thought that they were ruining the music industry by some of the shit they were putting out and promoting. We didn't know if we wanted to be associated with that, or if we thought maybe we should just set up another label of our own. We felt that maybe we had just hit the right time with the right people - the person that signed us is an amazing guy and the way that he presented things to us wasn't like he was trying to sign a business plan. I guess it's easy to believe it now, but we honestly do believe that he signed our band because he loves our band. And that's why he's getting the people who are working our songs and working our album to work their arses off, because it's almost like a personal challenge for him to make sure that a band that he really likes goes as far as they can. I think we made the right move and it's a good thing. It hasn't compromised what our band is about, which is the most important thing to us, so it's good. CDM: You took a lot longer writing and creating 'Hold Me Down', than your first album. Do you think this affected the finished record? JOSH: For sure. We recorded 'Take Off Your Colours' in three weeks, whereas [for] 'Hold Me Down' we moved to where we were recording. We rented some flats for a few months, we lived and breathed that record for three months. I think you can tell, because we spent a lot of time using the foundations of the songs and settling into them. On 'Take Off Your Colours' we did that, but we wrote the songs, then literally went and recorded what we wrote in the studio. Whereas with 'Hold Me Down' we allowed Dan about a week and a half to two weeks, to literally just get a drum sound he wanted, and to track the drums at his own pace, rather than trying to get twelve tracks done in two days. We gave him almost two weeks to do that, and everyone was given just a little bit more time to lay down their tracks. It was just so much more relaxed. It felt like we were all loving recording it [so much], that we just wanted to keep making it better and better and better, by spending more time and adding more parts to it. I'm really, really proud of the outcome. I think it's an album that's head and shoulders above 'Take Off Your Colours', but not so much so that it feels like two different bands. I feel like it's the re-birth. I feel like we've re-defined ourselves and written a better album - which you have to do with albums obviously, if you're a band with this kind of sound in these times, you have to try and come back with a second album that really hits home. I hope that's how people will see it. But that's definitely how we see it. CDM: Do you feel like the songs of 'Hold Me Down' are quite introspective? JOSH: At the time, I'd just literally gotten out of a two year relationship which is obviously quite difficult. I based some of the album on that. I based some of the album on my experiences in the music industry - not against journalists or anything like that, but more about hanger-on's and the after-show parties. That's the side of the music industry I don't like. I don't pretend to like it. I don't pretend to give a shit about the people that one minute don't care about our band and don't want us there, then the next minute are all over us after the show and we've done a sold-out show or whatever. It's amazing, when we got announced for the Paramore UK tour, the amount of people that were like: 'Oh remember me! We're friends. We come to your shows'-kinda thing. It's sad because... I know who my true friends are. We know who our true friends are. My true friends are the people who want to come to our club-shows, like the surprises that we play for our fans, like playing a hundred-capacity venue in Manchester, like playing in dingy bars. They're the people who have always come to our shows, not the people who just want to come to the arena shows we're playing with Paramore. That's really what the album's about. Because we've been away so much, so many of our friends have changed. Drugs have consumed quite a few of my mates, it's kind of like they're half the people they were before. It's sad. Especially me and Max, we have a lot of the same friends, I feel like that if we'd been at home and things had been different - because I think a lot of our friends listen to us in terms of the fact that that we take life seriously in the sense that we don't think it's a waste - and I don't think you should waste any of your life. I feel like so many of our friends don't meet their potential in what they could have done and they're happy to just sit there and smoke weed all day. Which is fine if that's what you want to do, but I just don't really know if that's what I wanted for my friends. There's a few songs about that. I challenged a few of my opinions while recording - I'm glad we did that. CDM: Being relatively young, do you ever find it weird having your lyrics taken so seriously, and so closely scrutinised by fans and reviewing media? JOSH: I think the thing that sometimes bothers me is... I'm a pretty simple kind of person. I just get on with stuff and I try not to let criticism - I try and work on it and try and embrace it - and try help it make me a better person, better musician, better songwriter. But it does piss me off when an article just goes on about how I'm moaning about a girl in some of our songs. For example, 'Take Off My Colours' - I was sixteen when we wrote that album. What do you want me to write about? Do you want me to write about world politics? Do you want me to write about my family, my kids? How hard it is trying to buy a house? I don't understand. I'm writing about the things that I was doing at that time, and it's the same on this album. It just so happens that - before I broke up with my girlfriend - a lot of the songs were about so many different things, and I just had to re-write the songs. Because I had so much to say, and I had to get it out and I've always used our band as a release, a way of getting out negative vibes out of my system. And it's always been a huge thing for me, it's very therapeutic. So if you break up with somebody that you've been with for two years, I want to say something about it. I want to get it off my chest. I want to write about it. The way we view it is, for every person that likes your band, there will be just as many people that don't like your band. So, you've just got to really value the people that do like your band. That's the way I look at it and I'm grateful about it.  CDM: I noticed that early You Me At Six songs featured screaming in them. Why did you decide to concentrate on just singing instead? JOSH: When we first started the band, we were involved in our local scene which was early hardcore. From First To Last were massive at this time, and a lot of screaming-orientated bands were big. So we all started off being in a band trying to suss out what kind of sounds you want to have, and what your band is, and what you want to achieve with it. When we started off, we were the only band seriously in our local area, or in the scene in the UK, to have screaming and singing in it. So it was a conscious decision that we made, to start involve singing. Then we realised that we love hearing music from our favourite bands like metal and hardcore bands, but we wanted to do something with a bit more melody, which is why I decided that I preferred singing to screaming. And I assumed I was better at singing that I was at screaming, but that's why we went down that route. CDM: Aled from Kids In Glass Houses and Sean from The Blackout provide guest vocals on 'Hold Me Down'. How did that come about? JOSH: They're our friends! They live in Cardiff which is like fourty-five minutes or an hour away from [Outhouse Studios] Reading where we recorded. I literally remember the exact conversation I had with Sean. I sung on their Blackout CD and I said: 'Hey do you want to do come down and do this bit on a song called 'The Consequence'? We want to have some screaming on it, we think you'd be perfect, do you want to do it?' He was like: 'Yup sure. I'll come down tomorrow and I'll record at the same time'. And Alex: 'Do you want to come down and sing on the track?' He was like: 'Yeah'. That's literally how it happened. It was very casual, just getting our friends involved, something that we were wanting to do. It was great. CDM: You made 'The Consequence' available as a free digital download - do you think viral incentives like free downloads are the way of the future for the music industry? JOSH: Our band hadn't released new material for a while, and we hadn't toured the UK properly for almost a year, and we'd been off trying to do America and Europe and other stuff, and I just wanted people to feel like we'd still got it and we hadn't lost sight. We've prided ourselves as a band on developing our new songs and we really care about our fans. We care about the fact that people spend a lot of time coming to our shows and cheering us on. We wanted to give something back. We thought: 'Look, we've got twelve new songs here, why don't we put one of them online free?' We're not stupid. Our album leaked a few days before it was out - our album leaked four days before it came out officially - the album was out and people were downloading the songs illegally anyway, so why not put it on a website and be like: 'Hey have a free song in exchange for your e-mail so we can put you on our mailing list and tell you more about You Me At Six updates'. So I think it works in both our favours as far as us and our fans go. But I think it's a good way to test the album out as well, that was the intent. 'The Consequence' is kind of like a big ballsy rock song - I think it was a good thing to put it out for free. CDM: You Me At Six got to headline the London Astoria before it was knocked down... as one of only five unsigned bands ever to sell it out, that's pretty monumental! JOSH: I think it is difficult for UK bands to really come out. Minus the indie bands, I'm talking rock-pop bands, if you look at the amount of bands that have really broken through onto TV or radio, or the live scene in a big way, there's not many many bands out there that have done that. We played the Astoria - we headlined and sold it out - as an unsigned band, and that again I credit to us touring so much, but also a credit to our fans for supporting us and wanting to be a part of our band as much as the next person. I try and help out as many of our UK friends as possible, we've got so many amazing friends that we grew up playing with at local shows with, that are now bands that are trying to do stuff. It's exciting to know that we could maybe help them out just by putting them on a show that we do. We definitely try and get involved in it in that way, and we definitely try and think of ways we can get more involved in the UK scene and really help bands. CDM: Do you think that venues play a big part in fostering a local music scene for young bands? JOSH: There was big thing, you know when - I know Myspace is still big - but when it was massive, I'm talking like it made and break-ed bands right? You could in the UK... I booked tours for our band with promoters through their promoter pages on Myspace. You can't do that anymore. You can't flyer a show on Myspace - like on my personal page I used to have thousands and thousands of friends on it and I'd see flyers and flyers and flyers of shows happening locally - and I'd go to a lot of the local shows, and that was the same for kids all over the country. Kids don't go on Myspace now to find out about local artists. So it's hard for local bands in their local areas to go out and played to packed shows. I know that when we were starting out in our local scene in Kingston, one of our promoter companies is called Highway 85 and he put on shows in Peel and Kingston, and we would literally sell out Kingston and Peel to 350 kids if we played a show there purely from bulletins on Myspace. But it doesn't happen like that anymore. It's a shame. But it's crazy to think it was like that. I know something else will come along soon. Maybe it will be Twitter. Maybe it's Facebook, who knows. But there will be another way for bands to really push their stuff online again soon and will get involved with. CDM: The question on the lips of all your local fans, is if You Me At Six will be supporting Paramore on their NZ tour in March? JOSH: Oh dude! Well, basically, we talked about it because we are all going to Australia and there is something... I've had people tweeting me being like: 'You've been played on a radio station in New Zealand, I've just seen your video on TV'! There's stuff going on in New Zealand that I didn't even know about. So we sorta thought: 'Oh god! Do we have fans over there?!' It would cost us a lot of money to go over there, but it's something that we definitely, definitely definitely want to do at some point this year! I don't know if it's going to be in March with Paramore, because we have our headlining tour in the UK and we really need to get back and make sure that we're well-rehearsed, and that we've got a few days to just practice and make sure we put on the best show that we can. So I think we might have to miss out the Paramore shows this time round, but as far as I'm concerned, as far as I'm aware we haven't been offered it, or it hasn't even been discussed between management or anything. I know me and some of the guys in Paramore discussed it, but I don't know if it's going to happen or not, at this stage. I guess you'll just have to wait and see. CDM: And lastly, do you have a message for your New Zealand fans? JOSH: I really, really really really hope that we get to come and play for any of the fans that we have in New Zealand at some point! And I'm sure it's going to be in the not-so-distant future. It'll be soon. I look forward to seeing your country and... it sounds kind of lame, but 'Lord Of The Rings' is one of my favourite films - in terms of visually and the landscapes - I really hope that I get to see those kinds of places, that kind of landscape and stuff. I really do hope that we get to tour New Zealand at some point. And I think 'Hold Me Down' comes out at the end of the month and I hope they like it if they pick it up, or listen to it online or what-not. YOU ME AT SIX's new album 'Hold Me Down' is in-stores now - features the singles 'The Consequence' and 'Underdog'. UPDATE: You Me At Six will play their very first NZ show this September - further details HERE. |
