Interview #164: Ghosts

Ecstatic melodies, sugar-spun choruses, underwired by brooding emotion, sweetness and turbulence combined. That's Ghosts. You might not be familiar with them yet, but trust us - in 2007 their harmony-drenched guitar-pop anthems will be impossible to avoid.

Newly signed to Atlantic Records, the London-based foursome's vast potential is signalled by their debut release, download-only EP Tales From Studio Six. Highlights include Musical Chairs and the eponymous track Ghosts, which takes the chiming, arena-filling melancholy of Coldplay and channels it into a delicate, swooning moment of perfect pop.Despite all still being in their mid-twenties, Ghosts have been playing together for a decade and have almost completed work on their debut album, due in the Spring. Their single, Stay The Night is out on March 19th 2007.

I Like Music caught up with, Ghosts lead singer, Simon Pettigrew to talk about their new single, having a horse as their audience and appearing on the Friday Night Project with Steven Seagal.

“I like music because… there’s no limits to what can be done with it and you can always be surprised. Simon Pettigrew, Ghosts

ILM: Your debut single ‘Stay The Night’ is out on March 19th, and is already A-listed on Radio Two. It’s a cracking tune. Can you describe its whole vibe and how that track took shape?

Simon: Basically, we started our publishing deal in March last year and just jetted off to Sweden for a few months to write some songs, and sat in this little cottage for three weeks not really getting anywhere. And I think the origination for it was that, we were listening to I’m Still Standing by Elton John and thought we should try and write something with a drum beat like that. I don’t know quite how it happened. We were all just stood in a room and I had a mic in front of me and Robbie set that beat running, and the melody came out.

And we were kind of obsessed with key changes at the time, hence this weird key change chorus thing, and the words just seemed to spill out really naturally and seemed to fit the vibe of the track. There was nothing contrived about it; it just seemed really natural, the whole thing. But we spent ages trying to make that chorus work. We had an original chorus in there and we were like, 'no, let’s throw a weird chord in there'. We’re quite obsessed with the key change at the minute and that’s one of the first illustrations of that.

ILM: You were featured in the hugely-respected BBC Sound Of 2007 poll alongside the likes of Mika and the Klaxons. That must be a nice confidence booster, or don’t you take much notice?

Simon: I used to sit at my desk job and read those lists in January every year and get really depressed that nobody really cared who we were. We’re flattered that we’re in it obviously, these are people who should know what they’re talking about it. But, you can look at it both waves, because The Bravery won it in 2004 and I’m not sure they quite got that one right. So it’s hit and miss those things, there are 10 people on the list and there will probably be only three or four tops in a years time who’ll still be doing it.

ILM: How was the Friday Night Project?

Simon: It was surreal the whole thing. It’s an hour long show and I think they filmed for about three and a half hours. Bless Steven Seagal's presenting skills. Although he did quite well to be fair to him.

ILM: Must’ve been a bit random?

Simon: Yeah, Steven Seagal introduced our song, although he actually said, 'The Ghosts' and our drummer kicked up a big fuss and tried to get him to do it again. It was quite scary, having to play fully live for the first time on TV, and it was our biggest gig as well, because there were 600 people in the audience, and that’s the most people we’ve played to. I was pretty scared, because you have to sit on the platform for the whole show and you can’t warm up your voice, because obviously they’re trying to film downstairs, so you have to sing it cold.

ILM: Ecstatic melodies, sugar-spun choruses, underwired by brooding emotion, sweetness and turbulence combined. Please can you describe the Ghosts process of making such lovely music?

Simon: What normally happens is, one person or another will have a set of chords that could be a decent verse… Well, the way it worked in Sweden, and half the album was done in Sweden, was that we’d sit around in a circle and just play a set of chords and stuff, and then I’d sit and try and write melodies over it and, once you’ve got a great melody over a verse, then you just spend the rest of the day trying to develop it through the whole song.

So what happens is, you’ll spend a few hours getting the structure of the song right and the basic melody. The lyrics, I’ve never just written a set of lyrics and put it to music, lyrics usually come near the end. So we’ll say, 'these are the chords and this is the melody and the structure', and then put that on the track and jam with a guitar or a piano and a guide vocal, so the structure is there. Then we just kind of sit for a couple of days and throw the kitchen sink at it, and try all the instruments; xylophone, strings, marimba’s whatever, and see what works and build it up like that.

Basically the way we work is, if you go to bed and you wake up the next morning and it’s not the first thing that hits your head, the melody, then it’s not good enough really.

ILM: Sounds like it’s really good fun as well.

Simon: Yeah, it’s wicked when you’ve got loads of time and you can try loads of things out. We had songs that have taken 13 months to get right and songs that have taken three days until completion.

ILM: Your debut release, download-only EP Tales From Studio Six is out now and your debut album is due in the Spring. Can you tell us, of all the tracks on the EP and album so far, which one you’ve had the most fun laying down in the studio?

Simon: I think The World Is Outside, that’s the next single. Just because we wrote it, and me and the bass player were saying 'this is wicked' and everyone else was saying, 'no this is shit', and I thought, 'ok, I’m going to prove you hideously wrong'. And the song just really came together and it’s probably the biggest one, it’s hopefully going to be our big single. It’s got quite a happy vibe on it, despite being in a minor key. And all the instruments just slotted together really well, and it’s quite interesting rhythm wise.

ILM: And everyone in the band came to realise it’s a cracking tune?

Simon: Yeah, they did in the end. We finish our set with it now. You can dance to it and its fun to play.

ILM: You’ve been playing music together since your teens for a decade having met at school. Can you reveal the best and worst characteristic about each of you?

Simon: Johnny the drummer, his best characteristic is his insane level of musical genius. He can’t structure a song for the life of him, but he can make the most beautiful sequences of music. He did music technology at university, and he only went in once and handed in one piece of work in the first week. It was so amazing that they refused to accept it was by him and they left it out and gave him zero, and he never went back. But that song ended up on a Renaissance mix album, and he’s got co-production and co-mix credits on the album. He’s never worked a day in his life, which gave him a lot of time to get good. He’s a nice boy, he hasn’t really got a worst characteristic.

My worst characteristic is that I’m always 15 minutes late for everything.

ILM: Heh. I’m always 30 minutes late for everything. And people now tell me to be somewhere half an hour before the real time, so I’m there on time.

Simon: Yeah, they’ve started doing that to me too. I might shift it to 30 minutes so I can maintain the aura of lateness. It’s a product of living my entire life on best case scenario. You know, 'Oh I can get to work in 20 minutes (if the Tube turns up right away and everything goes smoothly)'.

Mark is such a clean and tidy person, which is so handy, because the rest of us are messy bastards. And he’s quite good humoured about it. When were in Sweden it was a tiny flat and it could have come to blows about the level of mess that I was making. He’s genetically programmed to be very tidy, as well as being f*****g great on keyboards.

Robbie’s just great to have around. He’s kind of an all-rounder. He’s very good at coming up with bits of songs and melodies.

Him and Johnny are quite drunken fools a lot of the time, but in an endearingly good way. We’re not the most rock n roll band in the world, by any stretch, but we get out and about now and again.

ILM: Now, you used to rehearse in a remote barn above a horse. Did he enjoy it? He’d probably be rather proud of you now that you’re heading for the big time? He may want a cut of the royalties in sugar cubes?

Simon: I think the horse sadly died actually. But we did fill its last few years with some joy. It was Johnny’s mum’s horse and it was really old, had a bus pass. But it used to nod its head in time when we were playing and Johnny’s mum seemed to think that it really liked it. Precious, she was called.

ILM: Maybe you should right a song about her?

Simon: Yeah, maybe we will.

ILM: You signed to Atlantic Records, what’s your advice to new artists on getting the right deal?

Simon: Don’t sign a deal until you’re absolutely sure you’re ready for it. Just write bloody good songs, then it’s easier, because then they really want to sign you. We signed to Atlantic before they’d even seen us play live, they didn’t see us play. They literally heard seven songs and wanted it. We could have got signed in 2003 when we were called Polanski and played an A&R showcase and loads of people came. In the end nobody offered… it could’ve happened, but we wouldn’t have been in any position to really; we didn’t have as many good songs, if any, and we were quite niave and young. Basically, don’t sign the first thing put in front of you. Wait until everyone wants it, then you’re onto a winner.

ILM: It was good that you had that showcase though, because, when nothing happened, you did something about it rather than giving up, and here you are now.

Simon: Yeah, it’s that cliché of 'if you want something, you can make it happen'.

We got signed at the fourth attempt, and the whole record industry got to hear our songs. Every time I thought we should have got signed, but now, in retrospect, now we’ve written all these new songs, it’s more of a no-brainer.

ILM: The epiphany came to your band after, frustrated by the limits of electronic music, you began writing songs on guitar - simple, unadorned melodies, sung from the heart. Do you think you’ll ever dabble with electronica again?

Simon: Yeah, go and check out The World Is Outside, there’s quite a few synths in that. It gets compared quite a lot to early Talk Talk. It’s our big one. It’s got this great synth sound as you get to the chorus. Sounds like a donkey. We kept all the synths in every song, so there’s still elements of what we were doing, we just don’t sample beats and cut them up so much.

Check out the B side of Stay The Night on the 7”s, It’s called Dark At Four, it’s just an instrumental orchestral track with DJ Shadow cutting up drums. Johnny did it all on his own.

ILM: After the album release in the spring, what are your future plans, dreams and ambitions?

Simon: Ideally to put some smiles on people’s faces by playing some festival gigs. I really want to play some festivals this summer. You can play your set… well, maybe I’m being naively optimistic, but it seems like you get a weekend off.

Ghosts are: Simon Pettigrew on vocals, Robbie Smith on bass, Mark Treasure on Keyboards and Johnny Harris on drums.