The Star Online: Entertainment: Music

Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:15 AM PDT

Award-winning British rock band Elbow can count a solid career built through patience and pedigree.

WHY would a band call themselves "Elbow"? Were all the other, better band names taken already? And why that particular part of the body? Why not Neck, or Knee or Ankle?

"I know, it's a s**t name! We didn't spend enough time picking it," said Elbow lead singer Guy Garvey with a sigh during an interview in Australia on July 30.

"We had to come up with it because our band already had a s**t name that everyone in the (British) record companies knew. Our music had changed, so we needed to come up with a new one! I think we were stoned when we decided that we should be called Elbow ..."

The Manchester, England-based band recently played at the Splendour In The Grass Arts and Music Festival at Woodford, a small country town 72km north of Brisbane, Queensland, where we caught up with Garvey and bassist Pete Turner. The rest of the band consists of guitarist Mark Potter, keyboardist Craig Potter and drummer Richard Jupp.

Elbow was one of the highlights of the three-day Splendour festival, which is the biggest international music event (more than 100 acts) in this part of the world. Acts like Coldplay, Kanye West, Kaiser Chiefs, DJ Shadow, Pulp and Jane's Addiction were the other head turning names.

For Elbow, a performance on the main Ampitheatre stage on the festival's final day was a fitting tribute to the resilient British band.

The band members have been together for almost 20 years now, having grown up in the same town and learnt how to play their instruments together. They first formed a band named Mr Soft in 1990 (changing it later to just Soft).

"We started out playing jazz folk music, and slowly stopped doing that. We then started doing what pleased us," said Garvey, 37.

This was about the time that they decided to change their name to Elbow.

But why Elbow? Well, the better version is that it is derived from a line in the classic BBC TV series The Singing Detective, in which one character remarks that "elbow" is the most sensuous word in the English language.

The actual story of how they got their name, as told by Garvey to Q Magazine, is less interesting though.

One day, during a meeting, Garvey told the rest of the band that they needed to reinvent themselves. So he told them to go home and come up with names.

At the next meeting, he turned up with a list of names, but the rest did not have a single one amongst them. In the end, he just picked one name by random, which turned out to be "Elbo" (the "w" was added in later) and meeting some resistance from the rest of the guys, challenged them to come up with something better in half an hour.

"And by the end of the night everyone was, like, that looks alright. Ha ha!" he said in the article.

As Elbow, the band finally found the success that Soft had failed to garner. The band's debut album, Asleep In The Back (2001), earned them their first Mercury Music Prize nomination (which they lost to PJ Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea) and a Brit Award nomination. Elbow subsequently released two more albums – 2003's Cast Of Thousands and Leaders Of The Free World in 2005.

Having flown under the radar for most of their existence, Elbow's career was given a massive boost in 2008 with the success of their fourth album The Seldom Seen Kid, which sold 1.3 million copies, and finally won them the prestigious Mercury (prize).

That album, as well as the equally popular single One Day Like This (which soundtracked Britain's failed bid to host the 2018 World Cup) saw the band becoming a household name, headlining festivals and opening tours for Coldplay and U2.

"We've always sold a healthy amount of records, but The Seldom Seen Kid, winning the Mercury and playing Glastonbury (festival) that year turned everything around," Turner recalled.

The success of The Seldom Seen Kid meant that the weight of expectations was greater on their recent follow up – Build A Rocket, Boys!, which was released in March.

Garvey admitted that the success of previous albums meant more people would be listening to the next record. However, the band didn't feel any pressure while making this latest album.

In fact, it was quite the opposite, actually.

"We've been releasing records for just about 10 years now, so there have been all kinds of pressure down the line. It's usually financial pressure, or we didn't have a record label," he said.

"In those terms, this has been the least pressure album for us because we knew it was coming out, we loved the people we worked with and we knew there was an audience waiting. So in actual fact, it was the easiest record we ever made!"

"Build A Rocket, Boys! was a nice album to write because we were all very happy and confident about the album," Turner interjected.

The new album certainly lives up to its predecessor's high standards, with melancholic musings like Lippy Kids, soaring anthems like Neat Little Rows as well as complex epics like The Birds. It also sees the band sticking to their guns musically, instead of tailoring it to more mainstream tastes and for stadium arenas.

"We were already successful enough to be living off music for 10 years now, but when The Seldom Seen Kid came out and more people knew our music, there was the temptation to make bigger records, the ones that would work in bigger stadiums and so on," said Garvey.

"But it was more important to us that the fans who have been with us from the very beginning knew that we didn't turn into a different band just because of some measure of success."

> The trip to Splendour In The Grass at Woodford, Queensland, Australia was made possible by AirAsia X.

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Jumaat, 19 Ogos 2011

The Star Online: Entertainment: Music

The Star Online: Entertainment: Music

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