The Art of Longevity

In this episode of the Art of Longevity, we have the pleasure of chatting with Stuart Braithwaite, a member of the internationally renowned post-rock band Mogwai. Known for their masterful use of crescendos, Mogwai have been making music since 1995, with 11 studio albums that have gained increasing popularity over time, with their latest 'As The Love Continues' reaching the lofty milesto...

Being a longevous, ‘real deal’ music artist requires many things, but being pure in heart is certainly one. And there are few people on this earth as pure in heart as Rickie Lee Jones.  With the completion of Last Chance Texaco in 2019 (her brilliantly evocative and critically revered addition to the vast ‘rock memoir’ library) Rickie Lee permitted herself to look back to those early days and draw...

It has taken Dave Rowntree ages to make his first non-soundtrack body of work outside of Blur, especially when you consider their last album Magic Whip , is almost a decade old. Then again, perhaps it explains why Radio Songs has come out very well indeed - better than the public might have a right to expect, given the track record of drummers stepping out from behind the kit.  The album’s electro...

Gavin Rossdale doesn’t think that Bush's longevity story in the music business as high drama - even though they have had their share of industry shenanigans, let-downs and, for nearly eight years, a split, until the band reformed in 2010.  “It's the inevitability - bands might choose to settle for where they’re at. It might be difficult to go from arenas to clubs, but bands have to follo...

The egoless band can go a lot further than most bands. A strong element of that is embracing creative changes of direction - agreeing on it and being brave about it. Let’s face it, something we know about longevity is that taking creative risks is not an option - at some stage every band must do it. As fans, we all have a favourite Bowie album and a least favourite one. The same goes for every ban...

Let’s face it, there is a patchy record for solo artists that began in popular 90s bands. Some crossed the rubicon to a credible solo career and some didn’t. While Gaz Coombes enjoyed the full glare of the spotlight of the second half of the 90s with Supergrass, his solo work has surpassed those years in many ways. 2018’s World’s Strongest Man felt like a step forward in this third phase of Coombe...

Rumer’s arrival struck a similar chord to that of Norah Jones some six years earlier i.e. refreshingly out of time. Those singles Slow, Aretha and their host album Seasons of My Soul arrived so fully formed although (as with Norah Jones) Rumer was another case of ‘overnight success 10 years in the making’. “It was planes, trains and automobiles, that was my journey to getting a record deal and in...

The Delines’ world is a sprawling, blue collar soap opera. Flawed characters, aimless drifters, chancers and grifters, barroom fights, beat-up cars, parking lots, convenience store robberies, messed up relationships and broken dreams…the characters are never far off disaster - indeed they are predestined. It’s so romantic, it is magnificent. As a recording band, The Delines are meticulous in rende...

In this episode, Fenner Pearson chats to Neil Arthur about his writing process and how he works on the Blancmange albums, with Benge acting as his foil and producer, and his collaborations with Fader and Near Future. Arthur touches on the number of ideas “buzzing and fizzing” around his head that has led to him recording sixteen albums in eight years. This in turn provides an interesting insight i...

After fading from view in the UK after "Strange And Beautiful" (a top 10 hit in 2002), Aqualung was hardly consigned to the legend of the one hit wonder. Instead Matt Hales went to make his name and build his career in the USA - much of it through hard, steady touring - the opposite of his “instant success” in the UK. Aqualung bucked the trend for under-achieving British acts through the...

Suede (or, The London Suede for our friends in the USA) has reached 30 years in the business (well, minus the seven years the band was officially split in 2003). As singer Brett Anderson hits mid-50s, you cannot accuse him, or the band, of being boring. The energy and vitality of Suede’s 9th studio album Autofiction is striking, as are the band's recent live performances. More than that howev...

How to characterise an American indie band over almost three decades and 10 albums, each with a subtly different flavour? One recent review I read described Death Cab For Cutie as “masters of dreamy, emo-tinged Americana” and while that’s rather simplistic, their previous two albums have had a ‘dreamy’ feel, a softer production and reflective almost gentle character (or as Ben Gibbard described on...

Before I spoke with Danny McNamara , he’d emailed me to say how much he loved Brett Anderson’s quote - the one we’ve set out to make famous on The Art of Longevity. Not only did he recognise it as capturing the band’s career but Embrace have been through the cycle at least twice - the struggle (1990-’96), stratospheric rise (their debut The Good Will Out), the crash to the bottom (that first time...

Having helped pave the way, Alela remains at the heart of a very strong current movement for female troubadours - a scene driven by the success of the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Angel Oslen, Julien Baker and even Phoebe Bridgers - but harking back to Joni Mitchell. It was Cat Power that proved an inspiration to Alela herself when she first started out making The Pirate’s Gospel, then aged 19.  It’...

Interpol have honed their craft over 20 years since they ‘blasted’ onto the scene in 2002 with Turn On The Bright Lights - another one of those infamous overnight successes (actually the culmination of five years of hard graft). The album received a 9.5 Pitchfork review, with music journalist Eric Carr expressing unobjective fandom with some pretty colourful adjectives: “Interpol's debut full...

“I’ve recognised that music is sort of like an inner voice that is telling me what to do. When I was younger it was telling me what to sound like. As I became more sophisticated as a writer and performer, the instruction became more original. I just learned to be receptive to that. I’ve chosen to make my life like that”.  By listening to that inner voice, Mike Scott has given the world a lot of pl...

The music journalist Paul Lester described Everything Everything as “a riot in a melody factory”, a perfect description for a band positively clattering with ideas, yet on the new album Raw Data Feel , I get the sense that the band has learned the craft of what to leave out. Judge for yourself but do apply the usual rule - listen three times first! On longevity, singer and co-writer Jonathan Higgs...

After her second album Fires (2005) Nerina Pallot was hot property. She kissed the frog that is ‘fame’ in the music industry, with a BRIT nomination, Ivors nomination and even an appearance on Top Of The Pops. Never quite comfortable with that, her third album The Graduate (2009) was an uneven affair that failed to keep the spotlight shining Nerina’s way. That turned out for the better… When I hea...

Inspired by recent collaborations with some of America's coolest indie A-listers (Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, Danielle Haim, Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver, James Mercer, Jamila Woods ) Bruce Hornsby has been prolific in recent times, making a trilogy of albums beginning with the ‘return-to-form album’ Absolute Zero (2019). This trilogy is a real display of Hornsby’s musical prowess and c...

We spoke to Joey Burns on the eve of Calexico's recent European shows in Brussels and London. Calexico play bigger venues in Europe than they do on their home turf, despite inventing a sound that conveys that land so evocatively. Indeed, it was music journalist Fred Mills who captured the band’s sound so perfectly with just two words: “desert noir”.  What a cool subgenre to have invented. Sin...

When your host purchased The Divine Comedy's Fin De Siècle in 1998, I couldn’t quite penetrate it at the time. Listening again to the record in preparation for this conversation with Neil Hannon  I have to say, I missed out. As Hannon describes himself, the album was “a musical hallucinogen". Essentially a sombre affair in which Hannon exercises all his fascinations with troubadour influ...

After her fourth album The Fall in 2009 proved to be a departure from the well known blend of blues-jazz-country-pop, Norah Jones received a fan letter: “After I made The Fall, I received the sweetest letter from a fan in Argentina, but it was also criticising me as well. It said “I’m a really big fan but would you please go back to singing the ballads, because you do that better and I really need...

If all music artists of longevity have a good book in them, then Belle and Sebastian are more bookish than most - something that’s always been present in the band’s lyrics of course - wry observations of everyday life, spun into song in a way that seems natural and effortless, though is probably the result of hard graft and fine craft.  It was a listen to the band’s latest offering ‘A Bit of Previ...

When Teenage Fanclub formed in 1989, times were unusual in music, and not in a good way. It was pre-grunge, pre-Britpop and the charts were still in the grip of mass-produced pop (much of it naff) as many 80s bands were struggling to remain relevant (Depeche Mode being the exception). Yet something was afoot across the musical axis of the Eastern Seaboard, Washington Seattle, and Glasgow . Maybe i...

Steve Mason first made his name as one quarter (and the frontman of) the Beta Band, one of the most critically lauded acts of the late 1990s. They mixed disparate genres like hip-hop, folk, dub, house, psychedelia to create something beautifully cohesive and arresting.  Their tastes were so eclectic and their desire to make music so compelling that they ended up with something that took the DNA of...