The Rakes interview
HUCK talks to Jamie Hornsmith from indie post-punk band The Rakes about their new album, Berlin and coming home to East London.
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HUCK: I understand you current album Klang was recorded in Berlin, could you tell us a bit more about that?
Jamie: Well, we wanted to get out of our comfort zone of London. The intended nature of the third album was for it to be a live album so we wanted somewhere to be pretty industrial. Our producer recommended this studio called The Funkhaus that used to be the centre of broadcasting before the DDR collapsed. This place where secrets were kept and propaganda was made, and now it's just derelict. It's a very eerie place to walk around. There's an atmosphere there that you just can't compare to anywhere else.
And what did you make of the city?
We basically lived there for several weeks and loved it. We've toured there before but all have personal connections to it as well. My grandparents are actually from Berlin so it made it quite a strange place to record.
Klang is your third album, is it difficult to decide what direction to take?
It seems like such a common cliché for people to get to a third album and decide to put loads of string arrangements, xylophones or bleepy techno noises on it. I think you can be a bit more original than that though. We had improved as a band since the first album and the best way to show that was to play the whole album live. We'd worked on the songs and toured them around the world so they were pretty polished.
You tour extensively, is it hard to keep that passion alive?
It's pretty easy because you get inspired by the audience. We've played in some really crazy places around the world and when you play the first few chords, and the audience goes crazy - you don't get bored of it! Also, we've all worked pretty crap jobs in the past so we appreciate what we've got.
Does the digital revolution in music make being a musician harder?
For us as a live act, it's had a real silver lining as it's opened up whole new audiences for us. Last year, we toured in places like Brazil, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. We had 3000 people turn up to see us in Singapore. The show was so over-subscribed that people had to enter competitions to see us! That just wouldn't have happened a few years ago. This new access has worked in our favour. You don't tour where you sell records anymore, you tour where you sell tickets.
You are playing The 1234 Shoreditch Festival this summer. As you began in East London, does the place have a special feel to it?
We haven't played a gig there for a long time so it will be like a homecoming. The guy who organises it used to boom us for some of our first gigs. We used to live in a shithole flat in Shoreditch cos it was cheap. It wasn't trendy then, it was rough. And Pete Doherty used to be our barman. It's still cool but no one can afford to live there anymore!
The Rakes play The 1234 Shoreditch on Sunday July 26, London N1
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The Rakes interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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