Arc Angels

Devotees of Manchester’s Everything Everything, a sprightly, cerebral act famed for songs that operate like maths equations, will have a certain image in mind of the men at work. You envision them in studio, in lab coats, scratching their heads, scrunching up pieces of paper and scribbling furiously on whiteboards. Not for them kicking out the jams haphazardly, giggling beneath a cloud of chronic. We had assumed.

Their singer sets the record straight.
“Well that’s the illusion we’ve given everybody,” Jonathan Higgs chuckles. “But no, we were just as stoned as everybody else! We did have long whiteboard sessions but they were before the studio, in the rehearsal room. So when we got to the studio, we could get stoned and have fun recording again. Not worry about the songs as much. We knew we’d battered the songs into perfect shape.”
Illusions semi-shattered, then. The finely crafted numbers of which he speaks reside on second album Arc, a collection charged with the task of living up to the massive expectations created by their acclaimed Man Alive debut. But Higgs and his three musical comrades don’t want to simply match that 2010 release (and its Ivor Novello and Mercury noms), they want to open up to the audience.
“The songs mean a lot more to me and I actually believe what I’m saying more,” he confides. “There’s less filler, less wordplay for the sake of it.”
So it’s out with the smart-alecky art rock, in with songs that lay their souls bare.
“Making an emotional connection,” Higgs states. “A connection with the heart rather than just the brain all the time. People think our songs are clever and then that’s it. There’s only so far you can get by impressing people with guitar solos. I’d much rather we were a band that people take into their hearts. To move them, to have them love us. Rather than just thinking that we’re... kinda nerds.”
You wonder if part of the plan is to make Higgs, Jeremy Pritchard, Michael Spearman and Alex Robertshaw less anonymous, more like household names. And inadvertent pin-ups. The boys pose expertly on the cover of Arc. Not that that stopped Higgs going into a record store and purchasing a
copy himself.
“It was surreal!” he laughs. “The guy at the counter didn’t even notice, damn him!”
Be honest, he stood near a rack of them for a good 20 minutes trying to make eye contact with
other customers...
“I did, yeah. Well, two minutes... Didn’t work.”
If loitering near CDs emblazoned with your face won’t catch people’s attention, you better hit the promotional trail. And it sounds like Everything Everything have been promoting the bejaysus
out of Arc.
As we speak, Higgs is stood in a BBC doorway, catching his breath.
“I’ve got one foot in Radio One and one foot in the corridor. Kinda like our band actually!”
It pretty much sums up their strange relationship with pop. Having namechecked the likes of Destiny’s Child and R Kelly as influences in the past, they flit between hip hop sounds, esoteric trickery, experimental time shifts and four-to-the-floor infectiousness. On guitars. It’s a heady concoction, but one they’ve made more elementary. Everything Everything have decided to embrace pop fully and it’s paid off – Johnny gleefully informs me the album’s hit No. 3 in the UK chart. The unabashed anthem is ‘Duet’, which throws down the big-hearted gauntlet for the rest of Arc.
“It’s got a bold melody and a bold arrangement. With Man Alive, we would never have dared to have a song that didn’t rely on some distraction or weird thing. I wanted the song to be straight up and honest. If we consider it to be a good song, we’re not going to cover it in... crap! That’s indicative of putting ourselves on the cover. Make things more open and more honest.”
And keep its roots firmly in the wide pop lexicon...
“Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got to remember the golden rules of pop. You can push things around, be playful, fly in the face of things, but unless you have the core elements that we all fell in love with to begin with then you’ve just got something that no one wants to listen to. Especially us.”
When Everything Everything emerged from the North West of England four years ago, half the questions thrown their way concerned their place in the lineage of New Order, or the defunct Madchester scene. Thankfully for them, that time has passed.
“It feels like the city’s viewed a bit differently now. People are happy to just talk about Manchester as a vibrant place which produces good music. It feels amazing to have seen that change. The attitude particularly in the South – essentially what London makes of Manchester – is changing.”
One constant is talk about the supposed ‘death of rock’. Higgs is part-befuddled, part-philosophical about the panic surrounding guitar music.
“There’s a lot of confusion about what ‘guitar music’ is. I think The Vaccines and bands of that ilk are essentially playing a form of music that was created in the ‘50s. It’s as old as pop itself. The fact that there’s this grand term of ‘guitar music’ and it must always be vibrant, always be alive? That this unchanging genre should always be popular is insane. I mean, why the hell would it be?! It’s not like people are still watching Titanic all these years later.”
I’d point him towards Titantic 3D but you appreciate the point. Why, for example, hasn’t skiffle had a much deserved revival?
“Well, exactly. If it was a revival that’d be fine but people expecting something to be constant is a bit strange really. You don’t expect that from any other art form. Ten years from now, I’m sure people will be itching to hear rock bands but maybe they don’t want to right now. Although that said, The Vaccines are probably still the biggest band in the country.”
Two acts Everything Everything have supported in recent times might beg to differ. Did the Mancs pick up any arena tricks when touring with Snow Patrol and Muse? Let’s hope they arrive on stage in a spaceship just to irk Matt Bellamy.
“There aren’t going to be any spaceships!” he laughs. “We tested a lot of this album with Snow Patrol before we recorded it and I think playing some of the biggest arenas influenced the way we played and the way we presented the songs. We made bigger gestures musically. We recorded in Elbow’s rehearsal studio, which is huge. You can’t play noodly, twiddly stuff in a room like that because it just gets lost.”
A new keyboardist, Pete, has stepped in to relieve the singer of playing duties.
“I didn’t think I was doing a good enough job as a frontman when I was there playing keys with one finger. So now I can run around and be more charismatic. Sing better and all the rest of it.”
He’s getting in touch with his inner Mercury.
“I am. I need one of those canes, don’t I?!”
To finish by looking forward, a large slice of Arc’s lyrics concerns itself with the future, where we’re going as a species. Apparently Higgs is well-read in the field – it clearly plays on his mind.
“I don’t know if that’s because I’m quite an escapist person. I tend to think about massive things instead of dealing with the small things. The future does fascinate me. So does the distant past. Where we come from and where we’re going are the most interesting things you can think about. But, y’know, I should probably be paying my phone bill and stuff like that!”
So does he subscribe to the theory that our brains will eventually be uploaded to a computer and we will live forever digitally?
“When I read stuff I’m convinced but then... I’m not sure you could just upload a consciousness. If I was to fully subscribe to the belief that we’re just neural connections... But that’s pretty heavy
science stuff that I’m not really qualified to talk or think about.”
Music making would be a lot easier – you could just imagine songs into existence.
“That would be brilliant,” he says, before having second thoughts. “But then everybody would be doing it!”
They may be aiming for the heart, but there’s still a part of Everything Everything that wants to control the head to boot.

Arc is out now on Sony.