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Back Story: Tellison - The Wages Of Fear

Interview

DIY finds out just how their latest album 'The Wages Of Fear' came into being.

Behind every album is the story of it’s inception. Occasionally, it’s actually quite interesting. DIY caught up with Tellison lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Stephen Davidson to hear the story of how their latest album, ‘The Wages Of Fear’, came into being.

About a year ago I was in Henry’s [Danowski, drums] basement in Hammersmith putting the finishing touches to some demos for ‘The Wages Of Fear’. We’d spent the previous three years doing roughly similar things: meeting up on days off and recording whoever happened to show up to practice that day. About thirty songs later we settled on fourteen to record with Peter Miles and his glamorous assistant James “Rhythmic Jim” Bragg. We all went into a rehearsal studio in Shepherd’s Bush and they listened to everything and we pulled all the songs apart and glued them back together. Mostly this involved Pete telling us to take the Oasis guitar solos out and actually work out how to play our instruments.

The start of June saw Henry, Andy [Tickell, bass] and I drive to Devon to collect Pete’s “studio” in many weighty flight cases from under Jim’s house. We loaded up two van’s worth of equipment and drove to the Scottish borders. The house we recorded most of the album in was on the side of a massive hill in Innerleithen. It used to belong to the man who owned Glenmorangie Whiskey.

We spent the next few weeks recording three different drum kits in different rooms, countless combinations of guitars and basses through myriad amplifiers and pedals and committing take after take of vocals to record. One night we ate some Chinese food. There was a lot of pizza and the World Cup going on. I remember an aborted BBQ, a wild dog and a lot of door slamming. We recorded the vocals to ‘My Wife’s Grave Is In Paris’ in the middle of the night with all the lights off and the moon shining through the windows. I think the other guys all went off for lovely country walks, picked wild strawberries and played badminton in the garden. I remember there being a lot of sun. I generally had to stay indoors with Pete and stare at his computer until my brain began to dissolve.

After three weeks we drove back to England and everyone went back to work: Peter [Phillips, guitar / vox] was managing an arts cinema in Cambridge, I was selling mobile phones, Andy was an office temp and Henry got some session work. We took some time away from recording to let the dust settle and then came back together in Henry’s basement for the finishing touches. We recorded over several weeks until the thing was fairly finished and started to show it to various labels. Very few were forthcoming. Happily Simon Drake at Naim Records ended up getting in touch with our management. As a label they’re forward thinking and realise that being in a band now is quite different to how it was ten or twenty years ago. Also Simon, like myself, supports Yeovil Town Football Club so we kind of had to sign with them.

The album’s title, ‘The Wages Of Fear’, comes from a 1950s French film but also references the circumstances of the record’s creation. I saw the film on my first trip to New York in the summer of 2008. Tellison has always had to be a part-time venture to allow its members to complete their educations and pay their bills. It’s forced us to make sacrifices as far as careers go so that we can continue to make music, release records and go on tour. I think the title works as a hook from which you can hang all sorts of elements: working bad jobs you don’t enjoy, worrying about if, when and how we’d ever make another record, the frustrations of trying to exist in an industry that is falling apart. I think it works well as a warning too, it reminds us (hopefully) not to let so much time go before the next record.

The songs on this record are an attempt by us to crystallise what it is we enjoy about making music. In the four years it took to put together we worked our way through two or three album’s worth of quite varied songs. Ultimately we realised that we liked things best when we kept stuff simple, and we concentrated on pairing music that was interesting, impactful and fun to play with lyrical content that was real. Personally I took my cues in terms of song-writing for this record from people like Dave Bazan, Devon Williams, Al Paxton and The Weakerthans. They can all put together a simple three or four minute pop song that really hits you hard in the gut and that you can listen to over and over, finding new levels of meaning and texture.

Tellison's new album 'The Wages Of Fear' is out now via Naim Records. Read our review here.

Taken from the Summer 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.