We Were Promised Jetpacks interview

HUCK: Can you tell us about your debut album, These Four Walls?
Adam Thomson: We didn’t really want to make an album. We never really thought about making an album or bothered about finding a label. That was not a big part of why we were doing it. Then FatCat Records came along and they asked us to do one.

You didn’t want to make an album?
It’s not that we didn’t want to, we had just never really thought about it at all. We just started to get songs together and, before we knew it, we were in the studio recording it. We just wanted to make a good record that represented us.

I heard FatCat Records signed you through Myspace. Is that true?
Haha! No, that’s not true. The band Frightened Rabbit had said to their label that we were really good so they checked us out and then they asked us to sign with them. We now have a three album deal with them.

How has it been playing the album live?
It has been great. You start to get more comfortable and you play better live. Frightened Rabbit are a perfect example. They went away for three months touring and when they came back you could tell that they had been playing a lot. They just looked like a better band. You can really tell when a band has only played a handful of gigs here and there.

So can you now get drunk as hell and just play on autopilot?
Haha! It’s the opposite actually. The longer we have been going on the less we have been drinking. I don’t even drink before we play now.

What would you say influenced your sound?
I think if we started our band with the same people now we would not sound anything like we do. We started when we were really young and when you are young, you can’t really see the bigger picture. You just write fast songs that are fun. That’s the kind of path that we followed. But now we are working on making it louder with less spiky guitars.

You were touring in America earlier in the year. How was that?
We had been to SXSW before but we had never been on a proper US tour. Quite a lot of the dates were sold out because of Frightened Rabbit but even they said they were selling out cities where they wouldn’t normally because there were three bands playing. It was something a bit more special because it was us, Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit. It was special because there were three Scottish bands on the same bill. I think when people came to see us they realised this is a one off thing.

Any interesting stories you can tell us about life on the road?
We left the Twilight Sad drummer in a service station for two hours. We were all asleep on the bus and he got off to take a shit or something. I think the driver thought he had got back on or something. He was walking towards the bus and he saw us drive off. He did really well actually. He managed to get on the internet and get a hold of the bus company who got a hold of our driver. It was really lucky actually because we were at a service station in the middle of nowhere in Arizona and we were driving to Texas, which is a 14 hour drive. We would have had no idea of knowing where he was.

And finally, what’s next?
We are touring America again in February and March so we have to record a new EP. We are planning on recording about 5 five songs so that we have something to tour. It gives people something to write about. We have come to accept that this is part of being on a label.

We Were Promised Jetpacks' debut album These Four Walls is out now via FatCat Records.

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