Orkney Bands

“Y’know, nowadays, we just like saying yes to things really.�
Embrace headlined the Saturday of Magfest, a new side project of the famed St Magnus Festival. I caught up with guitarist Rick McNamara before the ‘these are our greatest hits from ten years ago aren’t you people lucky’ show.

MM: Is this your first visit to Orkney?
RM: Yeah, we just got in on the propellor plane about an hour ago. The crew came by boat and started out two and a half days ago to get everything ready.

MM: And are you going to fit in some sightseeing?
RM: We’ve got some time for it tomorrow. Steve wants to see the puffins and there’s some wrecks we’ve heard about as well, masts sticking out of the water.

MM: You’ve just come off a tour round a load of forests, and play many unconventional gigs. Is that why you were keen to play up here?
RM: When anyone asks us to do a gig way up North we say yes, because they’re always an absolute bash. We did a gig in Oban before and that was just the craziest Orkney gig that we’d done because people were actually getting off on the music that was in between the bands as well as the bands themselves. I think it’s that kind of Celtic mentality that when you want to go out you go out to have a good time, y’know, and everybody expects everybody to have a good time so it’s self perpetuating.

MM: Most bands, when they leave a major label, revel in the idea of producing their own album and taking things back. Embrace seem to have done the opposite, in that you produced your first four albums yourselves, but have had a lot of outside input on the recent two.
RM: Some people say that producing yourself is like doing home dentistry: you kinda think you know what you’re doing because you do it the least painful way. I think we realised at the end of the writing sessions for ‘Out of Nothing’ that we’d never really done a jam and put it on a record before, and that was a really new approach for us, and a really painless way of coming up with stuff that was great. So we went to the studio again in Spain, working with Youth, because he’s built his own studio out there, and we had four days in, then a Tsunami benefit gig, and then a few more days in the studio. The main bulk of it was written in that first sort of bash.

MM: And at what point did Chris Martin get involved with writing Gravity for you?
RM: It happened quite near the end. Danny said ‘Chris played me this song last night, this new song Gravity’, so we were like ‘aw all right how is it?’ And normally we’d expect him to say ‘ah it’s rubbish, it’s not as good as what we’re doing’, not because he’s an arrogant guy but because that’s kinda the frame of mind you have to be in, like suspended disbelief. But he said ‘actually it’s really fantastic’, so we though oh right he’s raised the bar, we’ll have to try harder sorta thing, and later he played us the song and we thought ‘ah that’s great, sounds a bit like us, but yeah it’s amazing, can’t wait for the next Coldplay album’, and we kinda thought nothing more of it. Then we’d finished recording the album with Youth, and we were in mixing it, and doing a couple like little overdubs and stuff, and Chris came down to the studio to see Danny, and played it again on the piano when he was playing us some other songs. Danny came back to us later and told us he’d offered us the song, and at first we were like ‘uch, we’ve been away for three years, we don’t wanna come back with a Coldplay cover, you’d have to have balls of iron wouldn’t you?’ So we dismissed it originally, but when we all came back in the day after and were kinda going you know what we should really take this gift for what it is. Y’know, nowadays, we like saying yes to things really.

MM: Was there any undercurrent in the band of thinking, well if the likes of Coldplay and Keane can make big albums with this sound, then we should keep on doing it?
RM: Yeah, well we don’t claim to own that type of song, it’s something that we do, but one of the reasons Chris said he wanted to give us the song was that he said it just sounded too much like us. I think he’d had review that said they sounded like us and that’s what had stuck in his head when he gave it to us. In the early days of the band we’d say no to absolutely everything, you know, we’d not do Top of the Pops, we wanted to do it our way and sod everybody else. Danny’s been asked to judge Miss Essex and he’s like ‘no I’m not doing it, it’s cheesy’, but I’m like ‘go on do it man it’ll be a right laugh’. We’ve learnt that you shouldn’t sculpt yourself out as to what you want to show to people.

MM: And was it along those lines that you agreed to do the song for the World Cup?
RM: When we were first set onto it, similar to the Gravity thing, we thought ‘oh can’t do that’. But then we thought it might work because we’re always on Match of the Day or the Tennis or Cricket and it seems to work when they have an Embrace soundtrack to them. We figured that Embrace doing an anthem, it’s what we do best. It’s just our theory now that life gets more interesting when you say yes to everything. We’ve kind of turned around over the three years where we were without a record deal and it changed our whole perspective of what it’s all about, and now for us it’s about making music and connecting with people.