Interview with Lewis Bowman of Chapel Club in Berlin - English Version

(Chapel Club)

13.04.2011 von Jessica Franke

Since 2010 London based band Chapel Club causes quite a stir. And the media seem to be agreed that Chapel Club is more than just another Indie band. Their debut album "Palace" has been released in the beginning of the year, and since then their fan base seem to increase more and more. Today, Chapel Club’s singer Lewis Bowman was kind enough to meet Musicheadquarter-Editor Jessica Franke at the Lido in Berlin and to answer some questions about their music as well as being on tour and his passion for other languages.

MHQ-Editor Jessica Franke and Lewis Bowman of Chapel Club

First of all, thank you for your time. How was your day so far?

Lewis: Good so far. We had quite a fun day because we have been going to a radio station called Motor.fm.

When did you arrive?

Lewis: We arrived this morning. We drove from (thinking)... I don’t know where we were. We left Cologne last night and stayed somewhere in between.

Please, can you give us a quick introduction to yourselves, for example how do you know each other and how long have you been making music together?

Lewis: Well, it depends on who you mean. The whole band has been together for two and a half years. And we have been making music together since two and a half years. We have been playing live for about one year and a half. We spent the first year with writing songs and not really playing and doing a lot of drinking and stuff like that when we should have been working (laughing). But we have known each other a little while before that. Some of us have known each other much longer, like Alex and Liam have been best friends since they were six. We all met in London. We all live in East or North London and went to the same parties, pubs and clubs. We met through friends.

How would you describe your music and yourselves as a band?

Lewis: Oh that’s really tough. At the moment, the first album we have done and the live shows that we are playing at the moment are loud and lush. It’s quite a lot going on in it, it is quite rich and I think it’s very emotional music, maybe a kind of grand or kind of scale. And how would I describe us? We are just five idiots (laughing). We are just five guys searching for some kind of secret and maybe we are getting closer to find it.

Who is involved in the song writing process? What inspires you?

Lewis: We are all involved fairly. Equally, I think we all write what ever is what we play. I don’t play anything but I write all the vocals, melodies and lyrics. And there are a lot of opinions and we are all democratic. There is no person who wants to take the lead. Which in a way I am starting to think maybe there should be. I’m trying to encourage them to fight a bit more and to have big ideas and to really push them. But they are all very polite. They have always been polite and nice to each other. So, I am trying to make it a little bit more temperamental, it ought to be better for the music. So we will see what happens. But at the moment it is all very equal and nice.

I’ve read that you’re afraid about the question with which band would you compare your sound and now I’m asking...

Lewis: (laughing) When we first attracted interest in England we hadn’t played live more than two or three times and I thought it was a little bit early for trying to describe us. You never sat down and said, "That’s what we want to sound like and these are our influences". We didn’t feel any pressure to do anything because no one knew who we were. We didn’t even have a name for a year. So there were no pressure on us and we were very lazy about that and we never come to set down that’s the plan for the music or anything around the music. And suddenly when everything started to happen it happened so fast and we didn’t have the time to work out what the answers are to this question. So I felt uncomfortable to answer it because we never considered it and I don’t really know what honestly I would say. I know what other people think we sound like and sometimes I think they have got the point and sometimes I think they are crazy. And I know what we want to sound like and all the things are changing all the time as well. We’ve got some new material we haven’t played to anyone yet and that sound quite different to the old material. I can tell you who my favourite bands are at the moment. It’s not that we really want to sound like them but one of my favourite bands is probably Deerhunter, it’s an American band, and there is a guy from New Zeeland who lives in Britain and called Connan Mockasin. I think those two are to me at the moment the most exciting bands in the world. The Horrors are pretty good as well actually. They are also a London based band and their second album is amazing and I know some guys of the Horrors.

Is your album already released?

Lewis: Yes, I think it is released (thinking). Yeah, it’s in the shops.

So, what can you tell us about it? What can we expect?

Lewis: This is our first badge of songs we ever wrote and when we got signed we kind of went to record them very quickly and we never recorded demos of most of them and we didn’t really know how they would sound like. So, the whole idea was to catch up these early songs as well as we could. Because they were written over appear about a year or a year and a half before anyone knew who we were. They were written as individual songs rather than as a record, like a whole album. Yet, looking back it’s kind of the certain things that linked up. It’s kind of an album about looking back and about our collection, about memories and reminiscing, a relationship and looking back on a relationship. Because I have been with my girlfriend for a long time and it’s a kind of end it up story with a relationship in a way. And also of growing up and coming up of your teens, out of education and into the whole world as well and feeling like you have wasted a lot of time and the way live is going and you are a bit scared and feel a bit kind of lost. Yeah, it’s a kind of album about that. Sonically, like musically it has got a whole kind of grand, kind of sweep to a big search and sweep of emotions. There’s a lot of chastising guitars and things like that.

Paul Epworth (Adele, Bloc Party, Friendly Fires, Florence + The Machine, the author) has produced your album. How was it to work with him?

Lewis: It was amazing. Paul is as close to a genius as anyone I have ever met. He is just a master of what he does. I think he has done pretty much every job in the practical side of music. He has done the sound in venues, he has been in a band, he founded a band, he has been a DJ, he has been an engineer in a studio and now he’s a producer. And all of this comes into the play. And he is very positive, active goer and he has got an incredible knowledge of music. You can’t name anything that he hasn’t heard and he doesn’t know really inside out. And it was really amazing to do our first album with him. He is one of the biggest producers in Britain, maybe in the world. He has done the Adele album, which is going number one everywhere so he has become one of the biggest producers in the world. He did some songs on that. It was incredible and he is a lovely guy.

Currently you are presenting your album on tour. So, how's the tour going so far?

Lewis: It is going very well actually. I can’t think of anything bad that has happened or any disasters. Usually there is always one show on every tour where all the instruments break and everything is going wrong. But it hasn’t been that so far, on this tour everything has been really good so far. Few of the shows have been sold out and people seem to like it. It is good for me as well because we played a lot of shows last year but I didn’t feel really comfortable until probably about last winter. It took me a long while because it’s my first band and I was just learning the riffs. But now I feel a lot more comfortable and like "Yeah, you can do it". I’m looking forward to the tonight show as well. It’s such a nice venue.

Which bands have you supported before?

Lewis: On tour, we have only supported Two Door Cinema Club last year. That was a lot of fun because they have a different audience to us. Their audience is mainly a kind of teenage girls and they scream and shout things like "You’re so sexy" and I was up on stage and thought "WHAT?" But usually people watch us quieter. But it was really much fun, they are really nice guys. But apart from that we haven’t really supported anyone. Apart from some festivals we played on the same stage. We managed to play on the same stage as Arcade Fire in Italy last year. That was amazing. And Win Butler is very nice, he asked me to play table tennis with him but I said no because I was scared. And we are supporting Suede in London in a few weeks, which will be nice.

Where do you see the differences between a support and a headline show?

Lewis: The differences between for me are when you support you play a shorter show and you have got more time to get drunk afterwards (laughing). It’s less pressure. But I suppose there is a downside if people don’t turn up. If you support someone in England people often don’t go to see the support band. But when we played throughout Europe with Two Door Cinema Club the clubs were always full from the moment the doors were opened. The People here seem to be much more polite and they seem to see the show up on time. So, it is lovely doing it here. But when we did it in England we were a little bit upset that no one was there.

If you could choose a band you can go on tour with which one would it be?

Lewis: If I could wait six month until we have worked on our second album and we have some more songs then I would choose (thinking) uh, whom would I choose? That’s a tough one. Well, Deerhunter I said before I love. They are an amazing band. I really like to be in the position to support Spiritualized. They are a British band. They haven’t released anything for a couple of years but they made an album called "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space" and some other great albums as well. That was massive album in the UK in the 90s. They are incredible. If you don’t know them you should check them out. They do big massive shows with gospel choirs and crazy stuff.

Are you still excited before playing a show?

Lewis: I don’t get excited in a kind of way I got excited the night before Christmas when you are little because I am always quite be aware that anything could happen and things could go terribly wrong. But I don’t get horrifyingly nervous, not anymore. I just wait for it to happen and then we are okay.

Do you have a kind of ritual before playing a show?

Lewis: No, we don’t have actually. Back in the very early days sometimes we tried to get everyone into a huddle but it made me too tense and I couldn’t do that. So, I literally I go outside and I have a drink and a cigarette and they can call me when we about to go on stage. So that was the end of the rituals.

What can we expect from Chapel Club in the future? What are your prospective aims?

Lewis: Wow, I’m not sure. Because this is a German website and I don’t know what Germany can expect from us because we have only just started here. I’m hoping that the people will bit by bit hear about the album and get into it. We want to come back and play some more shows. This summer we are playing some big festivals, we are playing Rock am Ring and Rock im Park. Then we are working on our second album this summer. So, who knows what could happen. We are very open-minded about what we are going to do for our next album. But I think it is safe to say that it will be very different from the first one. We are not going to stick with one kind of sound we have already done. There are different ideas flying around at the moment. So, we will see.

What do you like more: Being on tour or in the studio?

Lewis: I don’t dislike being on tour but I prefer being in the studio. For me the most important or most amazing thing about being in a band is writing songs and hearing them recorded, tinkering with them and getting them to sound exactly as you want them to. We haven’t had the change to do that because we did our album very quickly last year and in a bit rush, so we had no time. So, it really has got an odd for me, so I like being in the studio. Being on stage can be great but everything around it is just a routine. You get just carried from one place to the next and you are in a van for eight hours a day and that can get very tiring. And I miss my girl and my dog and stuff like that. For me it’s all about writing songs and trying new things, trying new ideas.

Which city did you like the most and which one the least and why?

Lewis: Uh, that’s a good question. There haven’t been many places I really hated. I was very surprised by Brussels. I have never been to Brussels before. In the UK there is this kind of thing because it’s where everything is centred or based and I assumed it to be very boring and kind of full with men in suits but I didn’t realised how beautiful it is. I am big into statues like classical kind of statues or neoclassical statues. So I just wandered around Brussels in the day and was looking to that amazing architecture So Brussels was a nice one. The worst place we have been (thinking). It is probably somewhere in Britain (laughing). If I say that then we’ll get in trouble next time we go there. Probably Wolverhampton or somewhere. But only because we went there on a very grey and rainy day. And it was long ago, maybe one and a half year ago and we played a gig and everything went wrong. We were pretty terrible then. That was back in the days before I had a tinnitus, I couldn’t hear anything. The guitars were so loud. So we played a terrible show and I remember the next day all the people in the Internet saying how terrible we were live. Nowadays everyone can publish on the Internet, which is a nice thing but it means that people can make a massive judgement very easily. But yeah, that was probably the worst experience we have made. But I’m sure it wasn’t Wolverhampton’s fault.

Where do you see the differences between the audience in the UK and Germany?

Lewis: So far, I wouldn’t say that the differences are so massive so far. This is not based on much experience but for what I can remember, the German audience seem a bit more like in the UK than the rest of Europe. Like in Belgium for example everyone arrives really early, comes right to the front, right next to the stage, likes really claps and cheers. In Italy it’s a really the similar kind of vibe. But in Netherland and Germany it is a little bit more like in the UK. There’s a semi circle in the front of the stage. People are a bit slow at the kind of let it go. I don’t know why that would be. I don’t know if there is a massive difference. I haven’t noticed one anyway.

Currently, People can read a lot about Chapel Club in the press. What was the weirdest thing you have ever read about yourselves?

Lewis: I don’t know about the weirdest thing but I don’t think I have ever read anything where I didn’t sound like a completely different human being. Like I read stuff and I thought, "Oh, you’ve cut out that bit." Even just like in England, where they put the commas and stuff like that and I think, "That’s not how I speak." So it’s always weird in that way and I try not to read it because I get quite upset if I feel like I’ve been in any way taking out of context. I can’t say that anything particularly weird has been written. Someone was on our Facebook the other day saying how much she fancy one of our guitarist, Alex, that was quite funny, saying how attractive he was. Maybe the weirdest thing I’ve read was on Youtube, the comments on there are always weird like people calling me a tadpole, saying they really love the show but they are sure that I’m a junky and I just sat there and thought "Uff". But I quite enjoy what people think about the way I look. I think I scare them a little bit. A skeleton, yeah, I get that quite a lot. That’s kind of weird. But I don’t mind that at all. I get more upset if they say that I’m unfriendly or something like that.

You live in London but are originally not from there.

Lewis: I am from London but the other guys are not.

Can you imagine moving from London and when yes where would it end up?

Lewis: Oh yes I can. I want to move out of London as soon as possible. London is amazing but I have been living there since I was born and I have worked there after University and stuff like that. London has got an amazing stuff in there and beautiful parts and places but it is not a very friendly city, it is not an incredibly polite city. I think it’s getting less friendly as times goes by. And I love it very much but I think it’s good to travel around and experiences new places. I did like some French and German at school so I can understand a little bit of French and a little bit of German from what I remember and I really regret having not followed up on it. So I really want to move to places where I can learn other languages. Basically, by the time I am 40, which is like 13 years away I want to speak French, Spanish and German fluently, maybe Portuguese as well, so I have planned to move out from London next year hopefully. I’m getting married and moving out.

What can you recommend us in London, for example places to see, pubs, clubs, everything you think should be recommended?

Lewis: It’s a bit out of the way but you should go to East London, which is where the music scene has kind of its base anyway. There’s a pub where we played our first ever gig called the The Shacklewell Arms in Dalston. And we are playing a gig there again in May actually for our next single release. This is an amazing pub. The front is just like an ordinary old pub but when you go to the back there is like a hidden dancehall and every wall and all the ceilings are painted with kind of psychedelic raster’s. It is better than it sounds. So that’s quite a special pub. Is there a gig going on it is very cool. If you want some little bit more peaceful: There’s a place I really love called Holland Park which is a really posh park near Notting Hill. In the centre of Holland Park is a garden. It is amazing, there are peacocks everywhere and little bunny rabbits. They just run around and are not scared of anything. I don’t know how they survive with all foxes and dogs. Being there is a bit like being in a children book. So those are my two recommendations: The Shacklewell Arms: 71 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London E8 2EB and Holland Park: 37 Pembroke Road, Kensington, London, W8 6PW.

Thank you very much for your time. I wish you all the best for your album and the tour. Enjoy your gig tonight. See you there.

Musicheadquarter also thanks Knut Claussen (mindofmusic.de) for his support!

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