As the 21st century continues into its second decade, and the business pages are full of stories about the decline of the music industry, it's becoming tougher than ever for musicians to make a living from music. Some bands have responded to the changing face of the business by taking direct control of their careers - not the easiest option for a band that's yet to make the big breakthrough. Yet this is exactly what Fiction Plane have done, and in a time where there's so much bleak talk about the future of music, their third studio album, Sparks, sees them entering the new decade with confidence and optimism. Here's why.
The story begins in early 2009. Following an extended break after a two-and-a-half year touring cycle that took them around the world, from playing in front of 85,000 people at the Stade de France in Paris, to headlining Amsterdam's legendary Paradiso Club, Pete Wilhoit (drums), Seton Daunt (guitar) and Joe Sumner (lead vocals/bass) reconvened in a grimy New York basement and went back to work. "We had no clear idea of what we wanted to do going in, which was kind of unique for us," says Pete. "We had a couple of songs we'd been playing live, but we all felt this new album should be a true collective effort". According to Seton, "about 90% of this album was collaborative, whereas before most of the musical ideas would have come from Joe." There followed a series of writing sessions during which the band jammed for three weeks, working through fragments of ideas and recording everything into a laptop. "We ended up with hours of material, and then we sifted through it all to find those little bits of magic," says Joe. Some of the new material was then unveiled during a low-key New York show at the end of February 2009. "It was important for us to play the songs in front of an audience as quickly as possible," says Pete. "Playing live is our strong suit, so we needed to know the songs would work in that environment."
Satisfied that they were heading in the right direction, the band went into RAK Studios in London with producer Paul Corkett in February and March of last year, before completing Sparks at Moles, the Bath studio above the town's legendary live venue, the following September. "Before we started recording, we asked ourselves; what would we want to hear if we were listening to a band we liked?" says Seton. "We used that as an opportunity to be more imaginative, and try out things we mightn't have tried otherwise" As Joe puts it, "This time we didn't have anybody getting in our ear and telling us we needed a single, or that we'd be cleaning toilets if we didn't sell 50 million records. It was a nice feeling." This lack of external pressure has manifested itself in an album that's as stylistically diverse as it is adventurous, yet still contains the bittersweet melodic edge and strong grasp of rock dynamics that's characterised previous Fiction Plane albums. "All our different influences have come through much more on this record," says Seton. "We're all fans of Radiohead and Queens Of The Stone Age, but I'm a big Dylan fan, Joe likes Pavement, and Pete's into Coltrane and things like that. We're not really like any of those artists, but we tried to take a similar approach to them. It's difficult to sell records nowadays, and you're not going to automatically sell more records because you don't take chances, like putting five minutes of free-form stuff in a song. You may as well just do what you want to do and have fun with it."
Part of the fun arose from the sessions at Moles, which Joe describes as "an amazing, tiny little rock 'n' roll place above a pub and a nightclub", and which gave the band a unique opportunity to road-test Sparks as they recorded it. "Often we'd do a quick mix of something, then we'd take it downstairs, play it in the pub and watch people's reactions," he continues. "If people don't know a song, but respond to it, they've got to be responding to something real about it, and being able to see that right away helps to take you out of the studio mindset and gives you a simpler perspective on what works and what doesn't". The album's opener, You Know You're Good (The La La Song) came out of this method. "We'd been playing it live for the past two years, and it was about eight minutes long with a different title," says Seton. "It had gone through all sorts of changes and weird digressions," continues Joe, "We'd already tried recording it, but in the end we just took the parts that people reacted best to, and stripped it back to three chords and four lyrics", giving the song a hard-edged, punkish drive, combined with a nagging hook that works its way into your brain in no time. Like so much of the album, there's a very natural, live energy to the song. This isn't the work of a band that's ProTooled the soul out of their material. On the contrary, it sounds like a group of musicians completely at ease with themselves and each other, with a sound and a personality that's much more than merely the sum of its influences.
"One of the things I learnt from all the touring", says Joe "is that you can be a lot more expressive lyrically and audiences won't find it weird. When you're writing, there's a tendency to think small differences are very important, but because we're much more confident in our playing now, I know that the music is going to support whatever I'm writing about, and it gives me the strength to experiment with the lyrics." This is evident in Russian LSD, inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's satire of post-Revolution Russia The Master And Margarita, and Humanoid, a smart, cynical dissection of those Walter Mitty characters that can sometimes be found on the fringes of the music business. About the former, Joe says, "I'd read The Master and Margarita a couple of years earlier, and while we were playing the song, it struck me that it would work as a kind of soundtrack to all that debauched bacchanalia near the end of the story." The song rises to a wild, free-form passage where everything falls away to just a kick-drum and sheets of squalling feedback from Seton, which Pete describes as one of his favourite moments on Sparks. "It felt to me like we'd grown into the kind of band with the confidence to do something like that whereas before, we might have worried about losing people's attention", says Pete "Now we'll let it breathe and take its course." There's a similar sense of musical adventure and freedom in Humanoid, which Pete describes as coming out of "of one of those moments in the writing sessions where you just fall into a groove. It starts off with this kind of Radiohead drum pattern that sounds like a loop, and we added things like the music box to give it a more unusual feel. There's a lot of different passages and shifting textures in it, almost as if you're going on a journey, and it's really satisfying musically to have something like that on the record." Lyrically, Joe won't be drawn on whether Humanoid is about several people or one particular individual. "I don't want to name names," he laughs, "But he's definitely out there, roaming the earth. He might be in the music business, he might not - he is, if you believe him..."
There are other weird and wonderful characters in Tommy, a grinding groove-rocker that Seton says is about "a drunken Brit who wanders into a lapdance club and gets more than he bargained for." Joe continues: "We spent quite a bit of time in Paris, and there were always a lot of young Englishmen like him roaming around the Pigalle. Later on you'd see them being taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of seedy little nightclubs". The climax of Sparks comes with an epic rock ballad, Denied, "the most un-jaded love song Joe's ever written", according to Seton, and one with all the hallmarks of a future classic. Certainly, Joe agrees that it's amongst the most personal songs on the album. "I didn't actually sing the lyrics to anyone until we got into the recording studio," he says. "I wasn't sure I wanted to go that far because, as a writer, I think I feel more at ease with darker subject matter, but it's one of the moments on the album where I can definitely hear myself talking." Speaking to all three members of Fiction Plane, it's hard not to be impressed by how proud they are of Sparks. As Seton says, "Even if it all fell apart tomorrow, we've made exactly the record we wanted to make artistically. This is a true representation of us as a band, and we think that comes across in the music". Joe puts it another way: "It definitely captures a moment, and I don't want it to end. A lot of music nowadays is marketing first. No judgement on that - often it's a necessity. But we're going the opposite way, and I think people will find the record and understand it. I mean, I like to be surprised by music. Sometimes you'll go on a website and see one of those "if you liked 'X', you might like 'Y'" things, and almost always it's not the case. I love getting blind-sided by something; it's my favourite way to discover music, and if people end up discovering this record in the same way, that'll be wonderful."
