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Interview
by SashaS
14-3-2002
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| Level of expansion: Six By Seven |
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Causality sphere
Six By Seven’s new album is an excursion to the dark side of a shaped loop
It starts rather unpromisingly: the interview gets postponed for 90-plus minutes but the time will not go a-waste as the band soundchecked all the way through, ending up performing the entire set. “The first time we’ve done that,” singer comments to no-one in particular. A gig for me and a few crewmen!? Delish, cubed! But then, just before getting down to some crucial inquisition, this Walkman-bearing-person overhears singer Chris Olley telling his fellow members, “I gotta do this f**king interview!”
My suggestion to re-set it for some other day is brushed aside and Olley answers copiously as if to prove that I was unduly presumptuous. Whatever, it worked… Six By Seven is the band witnessed in a marathon-soundcheck (which doesn’t impair the actual performance later on) on a mission to discuss the band’s new album, ‘The Way I Feel Today’. It is a timely portion of diversity, reaching out to the furthest corners of soul, going where few rock-soldiers dared warp to.
Not that the odyssey has been without its pitfalls.
“The last couple of years have been rather turbulent,” Olley explains as soon as the tape was spooling, “with Sam (Hempton, founding member) leaving, we had to re-assess what we were doing, write another album, record the album… We had Tina Blower to play some keyboards for us but she left.”
“You know, a lot of people say, and it is soul-searching, a lot of critics write, that we should be much bigger. It becomes really frustrating when people say so, and I haven’t answers for it, it could be that it is our lack of a visual aspect, we have no image… That’s why we tried Tina, she was there for that reason alone, but it didn’t work out on a personal level… We know that what you see is what you hear.”
“It seems to bother our fans, it concerns other people more than us, we are just happy to be playing music, gigging, in however small or big venue. It’s all the same… You know, in 1998 we were nominated for a Brat-award (altern-Brits) and none of the other four bands exist anymore, so…”
Beyond the emo horizon
Video for their near Top-40 ‘I.O.U. Love’ single is homage to the ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ and a copy of it even reached the lead in one-of-three versions, Donald Sutherland. The same people who worked on ‘Aliens’ and ‘Gladiator’ movies supplied the special-effects.
“We were presented with different treatments,” Olley shrugs his shoulders in a way indicating fair disdain for the video-promotionship, “and this one looked like fun. That’s the whole point, and I don’t really care much about it, it is a visual aid that limits musical interpretations. Yeah, I know that Donald Sutherland’s got a copy and he likes it, he, he.”
“The most important thing for us,” Olley continues without a sip-stop, “is the music that we do; the way we play music is very honest, and that is reflected in our way of dressing. If we ever step out of that it would not work because that wouldn’t be what the band was about. It would alter the balance…”
Galaxies without frontiers
While the hype-blitz of ‘Pop Idol’, stew’n’spuds-rocking of The Cooper Temple Clause and the rock-rap-crap crowd all the attention of young and susceptible, great bands remain underground. Six By Seven battle the same introspective fields as Radiohead, Joy Division, The Pixies, The Undertones, Talking Heads even… Six By Seven, the Nottingham-based band, named after a scientific fact that “The universe is expending all the time and it expends at the rate of six-by-seven,” according to the signer.
“Sometimes we start a song quietly,” Olley looks into a deep space, “and then they go up and up and when you think it can’t go any louder, you turn it up beyond it! That’s what we think about our music, it is expending, maybe not at that rate, but we named it so. The added bonus is that the result is 42, the answer to the meaning of life in ‘The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’… It ties in nicely.”
There is dichotomy to this band that manifests itself in a more varied sound captured on the album that is opposed with an aggressive, confrontational and non-stop stage assault.
“I guess that is something that has to do with not being able to see the band,” Olley theorises, “and listening at home, on your system… When you go to a gig to see a band, there is procedure, have few bevies, get into mood and when we come on, you don’t know what is going to happen. I think Frank Black (ex-Pixies) said, “Nothing beats live’s volume and drunken people.” We recorded our album live, no overdubs apart from vocals, because we believe that you should never record anything you can’t play live. Still, when it comes to playing it live it can change, like get faster due to adrenaline-rush, the atmosphere, the vibes.”
“Nothing really beats live’s loud and drunken people, truly.”
SashaS
14-3-2002
Six By Seven’s album ‘The Way I Feel Today’ is released 11 March 2002 on Mantra Recordings
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