Interview: Echo Lake

On the day The Stool Pigeon meets with Echo Lake at London’s Rough Trade East, Thom Yorke has been handing out free newspapers in honour of Radiohead’s latest album. As the sun sets a few stragglers exit the shop, triumphantly clutching their copy, staring at The King of Limbs. You can tell they’re going to listen to it on repeat all night.

Echo Lake’s very own Thom, Thom Hill, would probably like the same kind of admiration one day, although by his own admission, there’s a lot of hard work to be done first.

He began writing under his current name when he met Linda Jarvis at art college. Bored with their first collaboration — a design project that invented the discography and history of a fictional record label — the pair started recording songs instead of studying, blending Linda’s love of ethereal dreampop vocals with his predilection for the loudest kinds of guitar music.

Switching to a full-band line-up with three of Thom’s friends Kier, Steve and Pete, the band were asked to put out a release through No Pain In Pop at he beginning of 2011. The resulting ‘Young Silence’ EP is bristling with noise but somehow gentle. These are rock songs softened with romantic washes, My Bloody Valentine meets Beach House; a ‘bedroom project’ that breaks most venue’s noise limiters. Despite that, their biggest praise to date has been for a video…

 

You received a lot of attention for the video to ‘Young Silence’. How did that feel?

L: It had 100,000 views in a few days because it got onto a lot of tech blogs! People who read those and were mainly interested in what Dan [Nixon, the director] had done with the Kinect and didn’t like the music very much. They said some horrible things about how we sound and look.

 

Really?

L: They said I had a big nose!

T: I like to think that 5,000 of the people that watched it actually like the song though. For a couple of days I thought, ‘Wow, this really hurts,’ when people were criticising us but then I realised, fuck it, at least they actually heard it. Let’s face it, the people who really slagged us off are probably sat at home listening to Linkin Park and having a wank.

L: They compared us to Evanescence. It felt like a social experiment: what happens when you play nerds this kind of indie music…

T: I realise now that we were in a bubble for the first few months of the recordings being online. Blogs are overwhelmingly positive. Suddenly I felt like we were awful.

 

You felt like Rebecca Black?

L: I was just about to say that! Now I just laugh at those comments.

T: We realised that we had to get thicker skin. They don’t have the balls to write a song do they? One person wrote to us saying “Radiohead, ‘House Of Cards’, much?”. Regardless of the budget, how many bands do the same thing every time? “Oh look, here’s us playing a show, here’s us being topless and jumping around with our mates”. Then one video looks slightly like another and suddenly that’s a bad thing? Nobody says anything about all the other videos that are complete toss.

L: I like our name being near Radiohead’s! It’s cool to be associated with them. Maybe Radiohead have seen our video?

 

You seem like you’re big fans of a lot of bands. Do you think the way that people express themselves as ‘fans’  has changed?

L: I’m not sure, I know that the best fan we have is Simon Raymonde of The Cocteau Twins and Bella Union. He said “I fucking love your band” in a MySpace message.

T: I was so happy I called my uncle and my dad. We replied with, ‘OH GOD THANK YOU SO MUCH! As you can probably tell we’re a massive fan of your band!’ I looked at our MySpace the other day and it says, ‘Simon Raymonde has still not read your message.’

L: I took a screen shot and put it as my phone background for a month.

 

Didn’t you hunt down Bradford Cox to tell him about Echo Lake once, Linda?

L: I casually / strategically bumped into him. I was with my friend Ed at Field Day and he walked over and said, ‘Hi Bradford!’ I was so embarrassed but managed to blurt out that I’d seen him four times this year. He’s one of my heroes.

 

When did you start writing music, Thom? Do you have a hero?

T: It was Radiohead that inspired me, actually. Hearing them was the moment that I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m going to play guitar’. My uncle gave me an amp when I was younger and it’s the one I’m still using now — a Fender Pro Reverb. Me and Keir [guitarist] started learning together around the same time and I started writing music the minute I walked out the school gates.

 

Have you always been in a band, then?

T: No. By the time I was 20 I had just given up. I got bored of it and wasn’t really listening to any contemporary stuff or seeing new shows. I was still in Birmingham and went into the past instead of exploring what was around me.

 

How was it being in Birmingham, compared to London now?

T: It’s what it is, it’s home. It’s an unlucky place for music, really.

 

But it’s the home of metal!

T: Oh, I fucking love that about Birmingham. At a pub the other day I heard some guys say goodbye to each other and they said, ‘Keep it metal mate, yeah, nice one.’

 

So why is it unlucky?

T: It always gets overlooked. My friends Pete Dixon [Calories] and Alex [Johnny Foreigner] were in different bands back then, but I looked up to them so much. Five years ago the Birmingham scene could have been up there with some of the best new UK music.

 

What about you, Linda? What was it like where you were growing up?

L: I’m from Luxembourg and it’s tiny but me and my sister were always hanging out with the boys in post rock bands. They used to drive us over the border to see punk and hardcore gigs! Because the music scene is so small, my friends supported Placebo in an ice arena and another friend supported Mogwai.

T: My old band were once offered to support Mogwai but we turned it down because we didn’t want to look like rip-offs.

 

Would you support Mogwai now?

T: In a second. I feel like we’re a proper band now. As an instrumental post rock band when you’re 17… what’s the point?

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