Conversation With - Frank Carter

Frank Carter @ Rescue Rooms, Dressing Room/ Closet, Nottingham 06/11/16

As we stand waiting in a cold magnolia hallway, with breath that is bated, we can see shadows rippling through the doorway and echoing down the corridor we overhear the Rattlesnakes talking about tour logistics, planning radio appearances and organising merchandise pick-ups. There guys seemingly don’t have “people” sorting all this stuff, it gets hammered out amongst themselves in the few minutes they find between shows…

In a separate room, Frank is working on some artwork whilst wrapping up another interview…

For a band that are still under two years old,  they have done everything by the book to reach their current position, there has been no diva antics or big “don’t you know how I am?!” type behaviour. This is a band that have started at the bottom and are confidently and authentically grafting their way to the top.

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Let’s start with the cliched question- how is this tour going?

Tour has been amazing. Absolutely amazing. I mean we are seeing now the connection that people have got with ‘Blossom’ a year in, it’s been mind blowing, really overwhelming to be honest.

You’ve sold most of the shows out?

We get an update tomorrow, but by all accounts there are about three tickets left for Wolverhampton, so I think yeh, that’ll go as well. 

And you’ve still got a week to sell it out?

Yeah, it’s mental, I don’t know what is happening. It isn’t a small venue, we with thought that venue we’d have a really hard time, like I never thought that a lot of these places would sell out. Manchester, Leeds and a few more sold out on day one,. London went the next day. There are like five-hundred people in Wolverhampton, we’ve never played Wolverhampton, it is crazy to me that  that is happening but it is a testament to what is going on around our band.

By all rights you could have started in this size of venue straight off, but you decided to start in the really small rooms and work up, that’s so commendable, but why?

We wanted it to be exciting and we wanted for people to feel like they were “in” on the ground, it is still early days. Although we are about to release our second album, our second album will come out before our band is two years old. That’s a crazy amount of work to have done in that time, but we were really certain from day one that we wanted to under-play, selling out shows was never an option we just wanted to make sure the shows were small because that’s what I loved as a kid and I wanted to show to people, and I know I’m good in a small venue. The fact that they are selling out, shows that people know where we are in the world, it feels amazing. 

It’s interesting you worry about Wolverhampton, and it is probably another of those statements on the mentality of some British fans because it’s only twenty minutes away from Birmingham which you’ve sold out twice. Was there that worry that people wouldn’t travel?

The thing is they don’t, the percentage of people who travel here compared to the US or Europe is ridiculous. We are incredibly lucky and spoilt, our little country is little, it is so small. We were going to do a drive from Aberdeen to Nottingham, we didn’t even think about it because we’d just come off a European tour and we were doing eight hour plus drives everyday just to get to the next gig. We were like we’ll just do the seven hours, and then we were like “hold on we don’t have to do that here, let’s just go to Newcastle and have a day off in Newcastle.” So we split it up like that, and it was perfect. When I used tour the US, we would play shows there and people would tell me they’d driven eight hours to see us play and would think “if I left my house, I could get to Germany” I could drive through three countries and you’ve driven eight hours to see us play in Jacksonville. So I think the UK there is less of an independence in mentality, it is also much younger crowds than anywhere else I think who are into rock, and fervently into rock. That is all down to magazines like Kerrang and Rock Sound, they are guiding people into rock at a young age. We’ve sold out Birmingham twice, and I think we will sell out Wolves.

I’ve had so many people message me saying “why aren’t you playing this place?”, I had someone the other day say “I am gutted, because I don’t get to see you because you aren’t coming to my city” and I replied with “I’m gutted that you aren’t going to get to see us play, because you won’t travel to any of the places we are playing” and he replied with a thumbs up as if to say “fair play.” We’ve played your city three times, we need to play somewhere else because there are other people in the world who want to see us.

Like where we are based, we are never more than an hour away from Birmingham or Stoke or Nottingham and every band will play one of those. So there isn’t really an excuse. 

But the younger kids, they’ve got to find a parent, they’ve got to get a train and because of our public transport situation if you get to ten-thirty or eleven you are getting into that realm of “I need a hotel”. But we are just going to continue doing what we are doing, and fielding off the people who are like “why aren’t you coming here” because we’ll back the next time.

Like you say, it has been two years and you are making sure each time you are playing a different place.

This is out third headline tour, and we did the Kerrang tour in January and we are going to be back doing a headline tour in March.

This is so personal, with other touring bands you can’t always feel the passion, but I feel it in the way you do everything…

I really appreciate that, I really do because it is incredibly personal for me, one of the reasons is because of the things I’m writing about, I’m writing about what I know, I write about my life and I leave it all out there. Also it is personal for me, because I had this all a couple of times, I’ve had bands who’ve had major label deals and we’ve had chart positions and toured the world. I’ve toured the world a lot of times, I’ve toured the US five times, I’ve been to Australia and Japan, I’ve toured a lot and I stopped it all because I felt like I couldn’t move forward in Gallows in the situation I had, it wasn’t healthy for me and it wasn’t healthy for them so we stopped that.

Pure Love just got dealt a very short hand from the beginning, the people who signed us to the label got fired before the label was released, then Vertigo got dissolved into Mercury which was then dissolved into Virgin EMI and we were just given as a project to some people who didn’t give a shit and didn’t know how to build the band. Then I just got incredibly depressed and felt like I’m just going to focus on being a parent and a good husband and find some security and I was miserable because what I am best at in life is writing songs and performing, I’m good at some other things, but this feeds my soul.

So now it is personal, I’m making it personal, when I was younger I didn’t give a shit, I was arrogant and obnoxious, it was fucking handed to me on a plate and I was scared of it and didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, so instead I came across as really obnoxious and like I didn’t care and I just didn’t know and didn’t respect what I had. Now I’m older and totally understand what opportunities I have, and the potential of this band. I understand more who I am and what I’m capable of, for the first time in my life I am enjoying performing and that is like night and day. I used to hate performing, it used to scare me because people expected blood and violence, so that was what I felt like I had to give them. You are very much in a corner and fighting defensively, you’re not going to win like that. This is all out attack, but it is considered and thoughtful, I’m now just incredibly appreciative of the position that I have, I respect my fans massively they are giving me easily the best life. I feel like I’m in a place now where I can deal with this situation, because I wasn’t before, I was too young, there was too much money involved, too much stress, too much responsibility and I just crumpled under the weight of it all, so now it is very personal.

Because this is your passion and you know yourself better you feel less defensive, is having more control a big aspect of that?

From the start of this we didn’t have a manager, we’ve got a management company now that are amazing, I share management with Nick Cave, Radiohead and PJ Harvey, amazing acts that are some of my favourite artists, but we still don’t have a contract because we kind of refused to sign one for the first two years, I was scared because my previous management deal was sour and was mismanaged completely. We don’t have a record label, we have a label service company, they provide everything a major label would but without the big money and they don’t buy your record, you retain your rights and they just give you marketing, but you are in control of where that is spent. They say “this is the marketing plan we have, what changes do you have?” and we are constantly involved in every decision, we are making the videos ourselves now, I’ve always had ideas but I’ve always had to outsource directors or DOPs, now we are shooting it ourselves. If you want something doing properly do it yourself, there is too much at stake for me now, I can see how this is building with fans on the ground floor. To play a show when you aren’t even two years into being in a band to three hundred people in Aberdeen, to play to five hundred people in Manchester, all singing your songs it’s madness and I feel like we are keeping people hungry, we sold Manchester and Leeds out in a day, we probably could have sold double the amount of tickets we did, but that’s not the point.

Arguably you could have gone next door and sold out Rock City, but it wouldn’t have been the same…?

Why miss this, it’s here and it’s the perfect venue. I think everybody know at our shows, there is a good level of mutual respect with all of our fans, there are kids who’ve come because of hardcore and they love that, but they are very much outnumbered. Once they realise that, they are very good at appreciating everybody else and respecting each other. What we have is that we have songs that have this punch and aggression, but we deliver it in a way that is very much about togetherness. This is a load of people celebrating life, everything about it is all the positives, all the tragedies and all the beautiful moments you can have, that’s what our records are about, all of those parts of being human and trying to make sense of all of it and why we here. I think I’m here to write and ask questions, and hopefully I don’t find the answers because I don’t really want to.

You mention the Hardcore thing, and the tracks you’ve released from the new album are very different. You’ve done Gallows and Pure Love, which are both different things so you’ve clearly got different interests. Is that just a natural progression of you wanting to try something new?

Blossom had an explosive theme to it because it had to, I needed to get stuff out because I felt very pent up. There is a lot more to me than hardcore, I grew up on Phil Collins for gods sake, I grew up on Madness, I like all styles of music, so for me the important thing about this band was to show people very quickly “whatever you think this is, it’s not” this is going to change passionately and quickly all the time, I’m a man who likes different things, I’m a complicated guy! I want to be able to do whatever the fuck I want and like at all times, and I’ve worked hard to monetize the things I love. I loved drawing as a kid, so I learnt how to be a tattoo artist, I loved painting so I learnt how to paint and now I’m painting kids books, and I love it, I sell prints and if we have a quiet month in the band I try and sell some paintings.

We always wanted to get this second album out quickly, and we wanted to change the sound because we wanted to challenge all the fans who came, and we wanted to grow our fan base. I could have wrote you fifteen hardcore albums in the time it took to write ‘Modern Ruin’ it is a much more complicated record than anything I’ve done.

I don’t know if you’ve heard the record yet, you should get on to that, I’d like you to review it, when I meet people like you that have an understanding of me, I want you to hear our music, it is very different to it being sent out to all the same channels because these people get given records every day and there is no context and they don’t understand the importance of it.
This record is my life. It is literally two years of my life, condensed into twelve songs, it is all about the nightmare that I was living through, all about what, at the time I was seeing on the news, in magazines and papers how countries were bombing innocent civilians in other countries and when they were flooding to them for help they were being turned away. Tat was perfectly mirrored in my actions towards my family and friends- I was bombing all of the people who loved me and when they came holding out their hands to help, I was turning them away, and it isn’t an easy thing to do to process that behaviour. But I’m doing it now and I have a much better understanding of myself. I’ve had to say a huge amount of apologies to everyone, my wife included, we almost broke up and it’s not an easy thing, life is really complicated and this record is really complicated, but it means more to me than anything, what I think is happening is these songs are connecting with people and it’s about my life.

It’s this weird juxtaposition I’ve been writing about all these things that I’ve lost, my life was kind of in tatters and I’d lost my sense of self and identity. Then this band started connecting, and that started making me feel great, but I’m singing these songs about losing everything that I’ve ever loved and with ‘Modern Ruin’ that’s what it’s about, it’s about modern relationships, but ultimately it is a hopeful record. The way I wrote it, is I wrote it in these stories about this character (who is ultimately me), it is very autobiographical but I was able to push the events that happened onto this character way further beyond what was happening to myself, I was able to feel out situations of safety for myself and of how people would react if a person acted like this, and that’s why we’ve got this book version coming out, whenever I’ve written lyrics in the past, I’ve written these big fucked up stories and prose, there might be a few paragraphs that rhyme and then when Dean comes in with the music I’d sit and read through the stories on my own and a word and line will just fit, and then this song is and whatever works I use as the lead and then use the story as a reference to write the song. That’s how I’ve written my whole life, and then what I’ve done is when we’ve released the album I’ve burnt all the extra lyrics and all of the poems, because it is the only way I could think to stop myself going back to it in the future- which is what I did in the beginning, I would dredge up this fucking writing as what I thought was a head start and it was actually the completely wrong mindset because it was two years ago or whatever, so once I learnt that lesson I would start a fresh. This time round Dean was like “why the fuck do you do this, it is madness and you’ve got really great lines that you can’t sing, (and you should never speak to anyone!) but they are fucking great” so we’ve got this book. We’ve poured everything we have into this project, and especially this album and the most exciting thing is that it is connecting, Lullaby our single which we just released has had half a million streams on Spotify, Snake Eyes has been out since February and it has three-hundred thousand, Lullaby just got c-list on Radio One, which is fucking mental to me! I’ve never had a play-listed single, and people hear it and say “yeah, but it’s a single” and it is a single but the video is me hanging upside down painted silver, it’s fucking mental!

You aren’t a person who’s set out to make a radio single in anyway

Fuck no! But even Juggernaut had a lot of plays on Radio One, Snake Eyes has a lot of plays, at one point there was only one song on ‘Blossom’ that hadn’t been played on Radio One, which is mental. I don’t know what’s happening, I guess it is just that bands now are shitter than they used to be! Or they don’t care, or the dangerous thing has happened where they’ve gone “I can see a career here” and what the fuck is that, we are artists, we’re not professionals, nothing about this is professional, we’re complicated, manic, savage individuals, we think with our heart not our mind. I just want to keep thinking with my heart and my soul, I say that but I’m not as fucking loose as I used to be, because I have to be business minded because it is my life and my career, it pays my mortgage and looks after my child and wife, it gives me the freedom to keep doing this if it is going well, and unfortunately for me I had a few bands that I left other people to manage and they fucked it up, and the person I was most angry at was myself. So now I’m a bit more stressed because I’m taking a lot more of it on, if there are mistakes now I hold my hand up and say “that is my fault, and we’ll go forward” and so far it is going as well as it can go.

I just fucking ranted at you guys for twenty minutes.

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And that’s where we left it with Frank Carter. Frank is an emerging icon, a strong and amazing figure in British Rock Music, he is a superstar and soon the world will know, people are twigging on already. As you can hopefully grasp from this typed conversation, Frank is a wonderfully articulate and thoughtful individual, a wonderful contradiction to the madman we later saw on stage. 

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