A LABOUR OF DOVES

Four years in the making, Manchester trio Doves’ fourth album Kingdom Of Rust might also be their best. A blend of icy sci-fi sounds and rock-solid songwriting skills that often suggest Richard Thompson jamming with Can, it was recorded in a converted barn on the windy Cheshire plains. But, as the band’s guitarist and singer Jez Williams admits, when the trio re-emerged from their long studio hibernation last spring, the world had radically changed.

“The musical world had anyway,” he affirms. “The descent of the music industry pretty much started when we were thinking about writing the new album on the back of Some Cities, so by the time we finished it, everything had completely changed, it was kinda hard to get your head around it. Now it’s like the album’s an advert for doing a gig. People don’t really expect to pay for an album. You can get it for free, so it is free. And it means the smaller bands can’t afford to tour, simple as that. There’s no money anymore, so it’s kind of tough for new bands.”
One imagines it felt like crawling out of a bunker after the bomb had dropped.
“Yeah, it honestly did, because we had no idea whether anybody would remember us or care. All these kind of doubts came to the surface. I suppose the thing we did on our part was made sure we put out an album we were all happy with. We felt confident in that, but as to how it would be received was anyone’s guess. We’d been away so long the whole thing felt kind of abstract in a way, it didn’t feel real anymore.”
Given that Doves don’t play up the visual angle or even appear in their own videos much, do they have any sense of who their audience is?
“Not really. It’s quite hard to put your finger on it. Obviously we’re bringing all ages. It’s quite hard to get a definite pigeonhole of a Doves fan, it’s a weird one. I wouldn’t say it’s your typical mainstream person, we’ve never been about that really. We’ve manage to exist as a band without all the media attention, outside all that fanfare. The probabilities are stacked against us, I guess. If you don’t get on the front of magazines or get any radio, then it’s virtually impossible for a band to break through, so I suppose in a way we’re quite lucky that we’ve managed to achieve what we have, not massive, but in our own little way.”
Kingdom Of Rust was begun after the band’s longest sabbatical in 18 years. They took four months off between December 05 and April 06, and on reconvening, pretty much decided to rebuild the band from the ground up.
“It was a whole redesign job, including the studio,” Jez chuckles. “We decided to kind of have a Doves base, and we went looking for that before we even started thinking about the next album. That was kind of strange, to find ourselves in the middle of a field between Manchester and Liverpool, staring at a blank canvas. We kind of knew we couldn’t do what we’d done before, we just had to find something that was a different path for us, and we didn’t exactly know what it was. I suppose it was this long path of trial and error and feeling comfortable with trying new things.”
Watching documentary footage of the sessions, the viewer senses a certain wry resignation that yet again the trio were stuck in the sticks making a record (Some Cities was recorded in Snowdonia).
“I know, we’ve wanted to make a record in the city for fuckin’ years man,” Jez laughs, “it’s quite ridiculous, here we are again. But it’s pretty tricky to actually get somewhere in Manchester City because usually you’re next to an office. The only band I know that have managed to do it are Elbow, they’ve got a studio just off central Manchester. But I think we definitely want to go into town next time.”
How bad was the cabin fever factor?
“Ridiculous. It sent us potty, it did send us mad. It’s quite strange because I’ve got a bit of distance from it now, and it’s not as painful talking about it. But it was never-ending, and that started to send everyone stir crazy. I don’t want to paint a doom-and-gloom picture, there were amazing moments recording it, but the time factor seemed to drag and drag.”
Nothing good comes easy, huh?
“Not in Dovesworld! It never has done.”
And no matter how long an artist spends on a record, there’s always panic at the finish line. Someone always seems to end up overdubbing live as the record’s being mastered.
“Oh god yeah, we’re guilty of that. Even the sequencing of the album took three weeks, and most people download individual tracks these days! We’re kind of stuck in the old days - the order of the tracks on the CD is really important to us. Stupidly. Three bloody weeks! Andy (Williams, drummer) still thinks in terms of A and B sides to the record. But you can ruin an album with the wrong track listing.
“The recording started off with the novelty factor: ‘Wa-hay, fourth album!’” Jez continues. “And then we kind of sunk into despair for about four months and then gradually picked our way out of that despair, and then there was some kind of middle ground where we just kept working on autopilot, going in every day. And I think the best moment for us was three quarters of the way through, when suddenly you see a picture emerging of what you actually have done, and you have a blackboard there with definites, and a massive list of thinned ideas. And then you begin to see what kind of album you’ve made. And what became apparent to us was we were getting into really different styles, but it would still gel because it was us, there was a lot of personality in all the songs.”
One of Kingdom Of Rust’s finer qualities is its synthesizing of orthodox songcraft with sonic experimentation. Even the title tune, one of the more traditional sounding tracks, is thick with atmosphere – mostly due to a wonderfully gloomy end-of-the-world mellotron sound.
“Yeah, if it’s got a shuffley kind of country feel we’ll go, ‘Hang on, how can we subvert this into something that’s interesting for us, paint it in a different colour?’ We don’t have to say it to each other. It’s very natural. We’re a democracy. That’s why it takes so long!”
Indeed, the album’s opening tune ‘Jetstream’ was influenced by Vangelis’s groundbreaking Blade Runner soundtrack.
“Yeah, it was one of the things that we all liked, we watched it when we were kids and it seemed to have a real haunting noir vibe to it, and it always stuck with us as an influence. It’s an amazing film. It doesn’t date either, it’s got a real timeless quality.”
Did they catch the live performance at the Massive Attack-curated Meltdown Festival a while back?
“No! We must have been in the studio. In the barn bunker!”