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X-clusive: New Turin Brakes Album Almost Complete

added 04 August 2004 at 15.57

Prior to their gig at Somerset House, Olly and Gale of Turin Brakes dropped into Xfm for an exclusive chat with Lauren Laverne and spilled the beans on the making of their new ‘Summery’ third record.

Following the success of their major label debut and second studio album ‘Ether Song’, the duo toured the world and then disappeared to work on their third LP. Olly explains where Turin Brakes have been for the last few months.

“We’ve not played though for about nine months,” Olly says. “We toured extensively and ended up going to Australia, and then we built a studio in Brixton.” “We’ve been putting little bits of foam around a room in South London and making an album on our own,” Gale adds.

“We’ve just finished our twelfth song and we’re aiming to write fifteen. It just sounds more summery,” Olly continues. “It sounds a bit more like our first album, for those people that know what that sounds like. It’s a bit more concentrated. Because we did it on our own, we took everything that we learnt off the first two albums and distilled it into the most powerful thing we could do. It’s essence of Turin Brakes.”

The pair also explained how, after such a long break, they’ve prepared for the live date.

“We’ve been doing a lot of running and screaming,” Gale reveals, “Which always helps before a big gig. We did a very quiet gig last week in a very small pub called the Water Rats…”  “We called ourselves Slightly Fat,” Olly adds, “Which is an in-joke for us as every member of our band has suffered from being slightly fat at one time or another, and it was just friends and family [that came to the gig].

“But now the forum people got upset because they think there’s a secret fan club when really there isn’t, but its been fun watching them getting wound up. Basically it was just our mums and dads. We’re sorry weblings, you’re deeply loved. Plus, it means Thursday will be a big surprise for them cause we’ll be playing at least five new tracks.”

Which leads to the unavoidable question of when will the new album be hitting the shops? 

“We’re hoping the record will come out early next year,” Gale says, “Like January, February, March, April…. Any time before the end of the tax year.”

“We’re a lot more relaxed [about releases] this time around,” Olly concludes. “Before the second album it was all a bit scary going from a really tiny label to a massive label. Everything went nuts, but we’ve got past that era now, and we’ve worked out how to do it in kind of the same way we were doing it before which I think everyone was really happy with.

“It felt a bit like the control just got dispersed into a million different areas and we weren’t quite sure we know what we were supposed to be doing, but I think we’ve worked it out now. We’ll tell you in a year or so.”

Turin Brakes play a sold out show as part of the Grolsch Summer Set at Somerset House tomorrow evening (August 5).

Tagged as Turin Brakes, archive

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