Alt-J: interview with keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton

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Alt rock

Britain’s hottest geeks on their (sort of) homecoming show

Reginald D Hunter l Benedict Cumberbatch l Lucy Rose

24 | May 9, 2013 | www.cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

Music

Alt-J:

ᔡ Alt-J, Cambridge Corn Exchange, Tuesday, May 14, at 7.30pm. SOLD OUT.

‘Being in a band is a series of awesome adventures’ On the eve of their Corn Exchange date, Gus Unger-Hamilton tells ELLA WALKER why the Mercury Prize-winning sensations are excited to be playing a sold-out show in the city that, until recently, they called home.

‘I

’M really sorry, my phone is being really disobliging,” apologises Gus Unger-Hamilton after his mobile cuts out for the third time. The charming, disarmingly polite keyboardist of Alt-J has been calling me back repeatedly for a good 20 minutes, as his signal keeps on plunging drastically into nothingness.

I initially worry it’s all a ruse to avoid being interviewed (Alt-J are not known for being the chattiest bunch of lads) but, really, you must be rather lovely if you’re in a Mercury Music Prize winning band and still bother to ring a journalist back.

“I suppose we’re known as a band, a bit, for being quite withdrawn,” Gus admits, when the signal finally tugs back into life. The electronica quartet – made up of Gus, Gwil Sainsbury on guitar and bass, Joe Newman on guitar and vocals, and Thom Green on drums – met at Leeds University in 2007 and moved to Cambridge after graduating to write their debut album, An Awesome Wave.

“We chose Cambridge as a city to live in basically because we thought we could keep our heads down and sort of keep ourselves to ourselves and write the album, and that worked really well,” Gus explains, and it really did.

Aside from the Mercury Prize, they have claimed BBC Radio 6 Music’s Album of the Year award, three Brit Award nominations and whipped up a slew of indie dancehalls with singles like Tessellate and Breezeblocks. They have proved you can quietly go about making incredible music without chucking TVs out of windows and kicking up a fuss in the process.

Nevertheless, their sound is quite tricky to pin down. Gus explains he struggles to describe what they do, even though he’s asked to all the time (taxi drivers making small talk are the main culprits). “I tend to talk about the influences that go

into it,” he says. “A bit of folk, a bit of electronica, a bit of hip-hop, a bit of rock, indie, but other than that I find it really, really hard. It’s something I avoid doing.

“I feel that one of the things about living in the age of music being instantly available on the internet is that you don’t need to do that anymore. You can find music so easily, and you can listen to it yourself without really knowing what it is you’re going to be listening to.”

So he points people in the direction of their Spotify and YouTube pages. Filled with quirky videos and homages to triangles (they’re obsessed: “Triangles are my favorite shape/Three points where two lines meet/Toe to toe, back to back, let’s go, my love; it’s very late/’Til morning comes, let’s tessellate,”), their music has the capacity to make you feel jittery, tearful and mellowed out, or completely ready to jump about manically – it’s hard to turn off.

When we speak, the foursome have just got back from a successful two-month tour of America and a slot at wild-child music festival Coachella.

“Coachella was brilliant,” Gus enthuses. “English festivals are really fun but, undeniably, you take a huge gamble with the weather and often the locations aren’t that inspiring exactly, whereas Coachella is pretty awesomely beautiful.

“It’s funny seeing the people in the VIP area, like Danny DeVito and Lindsay Lohan, people like that, just wandering about, and I really enjoyed watching Franz Ferdinand and Foals; it was just great, two weekends of really good fun.”

A bit of a home-bird, Gus – the gangly, geek-chic-glasses-wearing member of the band, usually found in geometric printed tees making triangle signs with his hands – is glad to be back though. And top of his to-do list, apart from performing at Cambridge Corn Exchange next

week of course, is fitting in “a few pints of good ale” at The Mill in Cambridge; it used to be his local.

It is standard form to ask an interviewee if they are excited about visiting the city, and standard form to receive a fairly generic response, but Gus sounds genuinely ecstatic about coming back. “Oh yeah, absolutely! It’s going to be fantastic,” the former King’s Ely sixth-former buzzes. “Playing the Corn Exchange is awesome. I used to go to gigs there all the time. I saw Kings of Leon there, Bloc Party, The Hives, so many bands, so it’s going to be really exciting.”

However, you can’t quite call it a homecoming gig: “It’s actually our first ever proper gig in Cambridge,” Gus admits sheepishly. “We supported Ghostpoet there once, that was last February, so well over a year ago, but we’ve never played there apart from that, even when we lived there for a year-and-a-half.”

Instead, they were busy crafting their debut album which saw them stumbling giddily, numb with shock, up on stage as the Mercury Music Prize 2012 winners. “We won the Mercury and then the next day we were back on tour playing a gig, so life hasn’t changed hugely really,” he says. “Clearly the Mercury Prize is a fantastic thing for us, but equally it hasn’t turned us into a huge, huge, huge band. We haven’t had a number one album; we’re not like Arctic Monkeys-big. It’s just a really, really nice accolade to have bestowed on you and we’ve just got on with the job and not thought too much about it really.”

It’s a frank assessment of a career-defining moment, but Gus is refreshingly candid about life in a band, admitting it was never really his plan. “I’ve changed a lot as a person between graduating from uni and where I am now,” he says thoughtfully. “I think while I was at

Cambridge News | www.cambridge-news.co.uk | May 9, 2013 | 25

FYI The name Alt-J is an allusion to the Apple Mac quick keys for the Greek letter delta (∆)

LIVING IT UP: Alt-J, with Gus far left in main picture

uni I enjoyed being in the band, that was great, but I didn’t see it as something that was going to be a career. I think I was quite sucked into the whole ‘you need to get a job as soon as you finish university or you’re a complete failure’, that sort of thinking Russell Group/red brick universities drill into you, which is quite sad really. So if the band hadn’t taken off I’d probably have applied to some really boring graduate schemes.

“I just really value the fact that I do something a bit different. Whilst I don’t have weekends and holidays like normal people – that’s a really weird expression to use isn’t it?” he breaks off. “‘Normal people’ – sorry, you know what I mean; people who have normal jobs – I still feel lucky to work in something that is unique, and it’s kind of creative and liberating in some ways.”

But it can have its downsides: “Being on tour is very, very challenging. You’re away from your mates, your girlfriend; you’re constantly moving around and never in one place and you have to accept the fact that you’re going to miss every single birthday party, family event, whatever, for

an indefinite period of your life.

That’s quite tough. Apart from that it’s a great job,” he says, laughing ruefully.

When he’s not working, Gus can currently be found listening to the new James Blake album, (“I’ve been listening to that pretty much non stop”) and Glaswegian producer Sega Bodega’s EP (“That’s really wicked, intelligent dance music with a bit of two-step.”). And a rare day off tends to involve wandering round markets, going to the pub with his flatmates and cooking: “I used to love cooking and obviously I don’t get to do that anymore. I haven’t cooked for myself on a regular basis for a year and a half, so that’s quite strange. I eat out all the time, and it’s quite depressing,” he laughs. “So I like to cook, and generally chill, go to the park, and feel like I’m a normal member of society for a brief period.”

Not that there aren’t amazing aspects to being in a band too.

“Getting to travel is certainly something I’m well aware that I’m really lucky to be able to do,” he says. “Lots of my friends are very jealous of me because I get to go to all these exotic seeming places, often for very short periods of

time, which can be very frustrating, but it’s hard to single out a specific highlight because it’s a series of awesome adventures really, being in a band.

“You get to meet people, e, musicians who you really admire, you get to travel to exotic places e and you get to play gigs to people e, who love your music, all the time, and that’s all one big adventure.”

This summer is set to be a fullon tangle of adventuring for Alt-J, y, with performances at Glastonbury, T in the Park, Latitude and Reading & Leeds Festival to gear up for, but then what?

“From October onwards we’ll probably take a bit of a break,” says Gus, before swiftly adding: “Not a long break! A month or so, just to see people we’ve been missing for the last year and a half, and generally go back to being a bit more sane, and then we’ll start working on the new album.

“I’m hoping that by Christmas we’ll have laid the foundations for album two in a strong, strong way.” We can’t wait.