Metronomy really outdoing themselves with the videos for this latest album and ‘The Bay’ is no exception. Joe Mount struts around Torquay, which on a good day looks like California. Quite a jarring look at tropical England. Get the deck chair out and sit down for this one.

Very interesting few questions with Planet Notion recently. Have a read. We have the man back soon.

Interview- Iain Woods a.k.a Psychologist

After Psychologist’s spell-binding candle lit performance at St. Matthias church in Stoke Newington a few weeks back, Tim Robins catches up with Iain Woods- who was joined on stage at the church by a motley crew of musicians, from keyboard players to beatboxers and choral singers- to talk about his choice of venue, and wanting to avoid the stereotype of the “tortured artist”. Enjoy!

PlanetNotion: Why the name ‘Psychologist’? Is music a mode of self assessment for you?

Psychologist: Psyche means ‘breath, spirit or soul’ in ancient greek, ‘logy’ means ‘the study of’. It’s pretty much unanimously agreed across all languages that breaths, spirits and souls are things that are metaphysical or unquantifiable, but we treat psychology as if it’s something really rigid and we refer to it as a science, when it actually kind of means ‘study of the unstudy-able’ and I just love the absurdity of these linguistic mistakes within our culture.

PN: You recently played a magical gig at St. Matthias Church in Stoke Newington where you recorded your EP ‘Waves of OK’. What was the reason for recording here, and then playing your premiere gig in the same location? “Returning to the studio” is not something many artists do for their live gigs…

P: Not many artist’s get a studio as beautiful as that to record in, or I’m sure they would! Haha! To be honest with you, that whole thing was purely conceptual; it was for me about the power of imagination. That church is at the end of my road and it looms over the surrounding streets like this amazing presence. I worked for a year in a bar round the corner and I would walk past this building at 5 in the morning, covered in alcohol (me, not the church), unbelievably knackered, having served drinks to trendy twats all night and feeling deflated and pissed off, and then I would walk past that building and just all of sudden get this ‘wave of ok’, like, even though I’m completely one-billion per-cent not religious in terms of an organised religion, I just loved this kind of feeling of a ‘parish’ and became really interested in the enigma of that particular building and why it radiated a goodness to me, a non-religious person. It was kind of like that scene in the film adaptation of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory’ where Charlie becomes fascinated by this building where ‘nobody ever goes in….nobody ever comes out…..’! I just imagined creating music that was about me coming home deflated and pissed off but being secretly excited to be a poor artist in London and then taking that music and making and performing it in the building that in a way is the back-drop for that chapter of my life. In short, I imagined turning the situation on its head and showing everyone I love the inside of that building, and six months later I was stood on stage in there!

PN: Is playing concerts in slightly unusual venues something you want to make a habit of?

P: Yes, but I also love a good club with a big fat sound system. I like Plastic People’s sound system and I like Digital in Brighton as well.

PN: Your EP ‘Waves of OK’ is at times quite ghostly and haunting. Track titles like ‘Together Clinging’ and ‘A Possession’ infer themes of religiosity and community. Does your music touch on this kind of issue at all?

P: This is the second time someone has asked that! I think maybe people are getting an idea of me as some evangelical pastor or something! I quite vehemently don’t like organised religion, or at least any of the ones we have available to us on this planet, but I believe that life is a religious experience, I mean, the chances of you or I being here are literally an infinitum to one and that is a thing I find truly amazing. Going back to what I was saying about that church in particular; even though some of the EP is ‘haunting‘, it’s actually really positive subject matter. ‘Together Clinging’ is about the beauty of the mundane, the vocal swirls and ambience represent the bigness of the world spinning around us and the voicemail messages represent reality and the comfort of normality and of just waking up and having a regular day’s work to do, voicemails to answer, letters to open, bills to pay. I find great comfort in those things. You’ll also notice that, with the exception of ‘A Possession’ all the tracks end in a major key, the happy key! so I really don’t find it that haunting.

PN: Can you explain your choice to make the ‘Epidural’ double EP- ‘Waves of OK’ consisting of “tender and pensive songs”, and ‘Propeller’ the darker, more electronic ones- rather than put all of these songs on the same release? Did you feel that the two moods would not cohere on a record?

P: It was just a way of presenting the songs that I could make by myself with my limited resources, I had a copy of logic upon which I was making really stark, syncopated, unfinished sounding electronic music and then by contrast I had this idea for this really super-organic sounding thing that I really wanted to record on the fly in that church one day. If I speak about it in a dead boring, selfish way, it was just a good chance to have a practice at making two mini concept albums, which is kind of what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. I think of them as related, and yet different and I definitely don’t think of them as an ‘album’, even when put together.

PN: Your press release says that ‘Propeller’ contains lyrics “based on characters ranging from Lady Macbeth to a mental health patient”. This model for lyrical creation doesn’t seem to fit with the songwriting on ‘Waves of OK’, which seems so personal and introspective. Is ‘Waves of OK’ a completely different, more personal lyrical process? There seems to be so much of your own personality in the work, but are these just characters you have created?

P: When I sing, I don’t feel like it’s me that’s emotional, I feel like it’s the world, I’m sorry if that sounds cheesy-willy! but it’s just how I feel. Similarly, when I’m writing, I start with a feeling that I’ve had, and then I build from there upwards, so the very very root of the song is based on one person’s experience of being a being, but 98% of it is just the world and is based on a million things I see or hear in the space of a day or a month or however long it takes for the song to be finished. ‘Comes in Waves’ is a good example in that it is about me feeling like a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed newby in this shit-scary massive city and yet at the same time it’s about an episode of David Attenborough that I saw where a male seahorse was pregnant and I found it really amazing. At the same time, three of my friends were all popping out babies and it just felt like a very fertile time of year, I was pregnant with my first EP and my friends were pregnant with babies (one of whom plays my baby in the video). So yes, the songs are about me, and no, they are not.

PN: Is songwriting a cathartic experience for you? Do you try and work out things that are troubling you through your songs? ‘Waves of OK’ sounds very emotional, but from what is said about your upcoming ‘Propeller’ EP- “venomous lyrics” etc- it sounds like we could see an even more heart on sleeve approach on your upcoming release?

P: I don’t like the word cathartic, I‘m not some troubled poet and I don’t buy into all that suffering crap, I’m pretty happy. I like watching Glee and eating ice-cream. ‘Waves of OK’ is completely atypical of the type of music that I’ve been making for the last ten years, when my friends heard it they were all really really shocked that it wasn’t a big rave and was more like a big cuddle. A few months ago I had a bit of a freak out and called my manager and told him I didn’t want to go through with this and that I wasn’t cut out to be an artist. I sort of realised that before too long, if this all went well, people might want to start asking questions about me as a person, and I honestly couldn’t feel less enthusiastic about me being scrutinised as an individual how they do to other singers or artists or whatever. and so I sort of decided the easiest way to not be a singer-songwriter was to just not be one. But then I decided that that was the coward’s way out and that if I want to go for my dream job (which is making interesting pop-music) that I had a duty to myself to get over all the things I was scared of about the job. The thing I was most scared about was just all the clichés of over-earnest male singer-songwriters hunched over pianos lamenting over how hard their ridiculously cushti life is, or walking around in their videos with a face like a slapped arse. So I chose to make a video where within the first 30 seconds I was crying, pulling these really ugly faces, unshaven, nose hair, spots on show, all of these horrible, ‘woe-is-me’ type clichés and then to completely undermine it with this absurd situation as to why the guys so down. And I hunched over the piano at my gig. I just thought I if could get all of the things I was most scared of out of the way in the first release, then everything else would be a comparative doddle.

PN: ‘Waves of OK EP’ was hand delivered to our office in a beautiful wax sealed card CD case, with a personally addressed letter to the recipient, and your gig invite was wonderfully designed too. It’s obvious that a lot of effort has been put into the design and general aesthetic of Psychologist. Did you come up with these ideas yourself, and if so what was your motivation behind this way of distribution?

P: Those envelopes are getting a lot of good press! Haha! It was just a plain black envelope! I thought it was kind of obvious, but I’m glad everyone was so taken with them! And, yes, I designed it myself. As for the delivery thing, most of the blogs and mags are based near my house and I hate the royal mail. A rogue postman once expertly slit down the side of an envelope that my poor, hard-working mother had sent me and stole twenty quid and a pair of good-luck cufflinks she had sent me for my graduation! C*nt.

PN:Surely touring will follow this release; are you planning on getting a full live band together? At the gig you had a beatboxer, for example; will you be using a real drummer or at least someone working a drum machine for your upcoming shows?

P: I had fourteen people on stage! If that’s not a full live band then I don’t know what is! Or is it just anything less than Polyphonic Spree isn’t good enough for you lot haha?

PN: What does 2011 hold for Psychologist then?

P: I genuinely had to think for a second before answering that question because I couldn’t remember what year it was. Maybe that will give you some idea as to how awful I am at time-management.

-Tim Robins

This new one from Spank Rock is produced by Boys Noize and has a certain something to it. Take a listen to it and prepare for their return to UK shores in July.

Wonderful stuff. Tickets went onsale this morning, hope everyone that wanted one snagged one!

RSVP

SBTRKT is launching his album next week with us at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen. The masked man’s debut is chock full of goodness and you can hear previews up on iTunes right now for anybody a bit overly excited, as we definitely are.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/preorder/sbtrkt/id440011983