Stebbing went on to form easy listening band Your Twenties, and later the solo project Night Works; Mount moved to Paris and made ‘The English Riviera’.
If ‘Nights Out’ had been his attempt at cool, his follow up was him buffeting again the preconceived notion that he was a fad. He tells me: “There are a lot of people who are quite cynical in England, and I’m one of these people, and if you make music like I do… I get preoccupied sometimes thinking that people have misunderstood me, and that they don’t think I have any inherent skill in what I do – a ‘bedroom producer’, anyone can do that. I’ve always felt offended by the idea that there’s nothing in what I do that’s unique or special. That’s never been the general opinion, but when I was making ‘The English Riviera’, part of me was trying to show people that I could make a really good sounding record and a record that could connect with people in a bigger way than ‘Nights Out’. Obviously it would be horrible for that to be the idea behind making the record, but all I mean is that the kind of success that that record had, I always imagined that would happen with ‘Nights Out’ and with ‘Pip Paine…’.”
Mount says that while ‘The English Riviera’’s recognition from the Mercury Prize in 2011 was welcome, he’d expected both of his preceding albums to win the award in their respective years. Oscar Cash was certain ‘The English Riviera’ would win once it had made the shortlist; Joe says he knew it would go to PJ Harvey.
I read him highlights from an email I’d been forwarded by his Press Officer from BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Marc Riley. In it, Riley declares his love and respect for Mount by mapping out Metronomy’s career so far with all the enthusiasm of a fan’s first mega crush.
‘From the first album – and in particular ‘Trick or Treatz’ – Joe’s natural pop genius was apparent. In Pip Paine he made one of the greatest ever wonky bedroom albums. A bedroom album that makes sitting still impossible… ‘Nights Out’ was like nothing else. In literary terms – if ‘Pip Paine…’ was Joe’s first well received short story then ‘Nights Out’ was his extraordinary first novel. Full of hit records that would have been hit records if only radio stations didn’t have cloth ears. ‘Heartbreaker’ is one of the greatest pop songs of all time… ‘The English Riviera’ is Joe’s blockbuster. It’s the perfect modern pop record. When people hear ‘The Look’ in years to come they’ll know exactly what they were doing when they heard it first… Joe is the most talented pop music writer of his generation. I think each of his albums are joined only by one thing…his genius. I honestly think Joe is a genius… It’s already Joseph Mount 1 – everybody else 0.’
Joe laughs, but not as awkwardly as I feared he would. I suspect he might agree with the sentiment, if not the hyperbole. But where does this leave ‘Love Letters’?
“In the scheme of the other records, this one is me trying to distil what makes a song down to its purest form. It’s more minimal and lyrically I’m getting more comfortable with lyrics and I’m beginning to see the value of them and the fun you can have with them. I think some people who liked ‘Nights Out’ might have liked the last record but maybe they thought it was a concession to the mainstream. With each record I’m trying to build up this knowledge that can inform the next record.”
Joe Mount is a chatty guy, and I easily digress, so in Brighton we run out of time. Joe had told me that he was nervous to be playing “a few new songs”. They end up playing everything from ‘Love Letters’, save for one track. It was an impressive first show in two years, with the hits reminding everyone exactly why they fell in love with Metronomy whenever they did. ‘Heartbreaker’ sounds like it might actually be the best pop song of all time. ‘Side Two’ from ‘Nights Out’, and ‘Black Eye/Burnt Thumb’ from ‘Pip Paine…’ declare that the group still revels in the skewed as much as the straight-up pop of ‘The Bay’ and ‘The Look’.
The pound-shop lights would look strange now, Gbenga Adelekan and Anna Prior missed if it were anyone else up there. Michael Lovett has been added to the live group as well – a man also known as NZCA/Lines and the brother of Gabriel Stebbing. The five of them wear impeccable matching burgundy suits, by London tailors Beggars Run. “So much of personality is carried through clothes,” Mount told me in Brighton. “It’s nice to have a uniform to make everyone equal.” He likens it to a school uniform, and notes that it unifies the group, making them an inclusive band, not Joseph Mount and bunch of other musicians.
Five weeks after Brighton, I meet Joe in Kingston-Upon-Thames where Metronomy are playing two shows in the evening, for all ages at 6pm and for +18s afterwards. ‘Love Letters’ is out in a week, which means that a majority of its reviews have already been published. Joe has read them all. He tells me that ‘retro futurist’ is a term that keeps coming up, incorrectly, as far as he’s concerned. A French journalist first came up with it in relation to how ‘Love Letters’ takes Mount’s electronics and adds elements of Motown in favour of ‘The English Riviera’’s nods to Fleetwood Mac and yacht rock. “To which I replied, ‘no, if anything it’s retro present-ist,’” says Mount. “It’s not that crazy.”
“I’ve been trying so fucking hard to control the image,” he says as we sit on the Thames bank. “Since I last saw you it’s been a battle. Like, if you reach this point, it’s like, ‘right, now I’ve got no excuses, I’ve been in the game long enough to know that when someone tells me something has to happen that, no, it doesn’t. I’ve been trying to be a lot more dogged at approving stuff and if we’re not happy saying we’re not happy. The suits have helped with that, because last night me and Oscar were doing this radio session at half 10 and these radio stations, I don’t know why, but they always want to film you now. Like, what the fuck, you’re the radio, what’s happened? But last night I realised that our suits had gone back to the hotel, and I was like, ‘I’m really sorry, but the suits have gone; it’s our fault but you can’t film it’, and they were like, ‘oh, really?’, and there’s the camera man there, and I was like, ‘no, sorry’, and I’ve never done that before. But it makes you realise that of course you can say that. If they have the hump it’s only because they’re trying to broaden their social network bullshit. It’s not the end of the world.”
Joe has also spent the last 5 weeks giving interviews, and has found that most people want to discuss one thing – how ‘Love Letters’ was recorded (analogue rather than with computers). In Brighton he’d told me that he’d done so to make it an album completely produced in the studio, and because for a lot of people his age computers are still cheating. It had been the plan for ‘The English Riviera’ but he’d ended up finishing a lot off in the mixing room, as he had when recording at home. “The whole way it was recorded is very important to how the record sounds, but it’s not necessarily something I care enough about to make a big deal about,” he says in Kingston. “But if people want to talk about it, that’s fine with me.”
I want to talk about how melancholic ‘Love Letters’ is, at a time when I imagine Joe, a new father, to be at his most fulfilled. The title track thumps four-to-the-floor, preachy, joyous Tamla Motown and ‘Month of Sundays’ recalls sun-pissed Arthur Lee & Love, but even on these more upbeat spots Mount’s vocals quiver as if there’s something in his eye. The snake-charming organ of ‘Monstrous’ recreates that ominous feeling of video games in the dark; ‘The Most Immaculate Haircut’ (a slow waltz about Connan Mockasin’s hair, and originally intended as a Mount/Mockasin duet) feels all the more obsessive for its muted middle section scored by crickets and a swimming pool; the opening track is called ‘The Upsetter’. But, then, Metronomy’s music has always carried with it an underlying discontent and ennui. For ‘Nights Out’, Mount was sleeping at the studio because he’d recently split up with his girlfriend. ‘The English Riviera’ was largely misunderstood as a love letter of its own, to Mount’s childhood home on the Devon coast, when, really, it was the work of a man trying to reimagine where he grew up as somewhere far more interesting.
“Listen to [‘Love Letters’] at the height of summer and you’ll have a different view of it,” says Mount. “The last record that I really got into was the Kendrick Lamar album, and the feel of that record is quite sombre and intense and murky, but if you listen to it on a beautiful day it sounds amazing and very different. But I think the feel of melancholy is actually quite nice. It’s not depression, it’s whimsical and it’s quite an easy emotion for everyone to relate to.
“Of course bits of the record are autobiographical,” he says, “but the bits that you probably think are sad bits, that’s like taking an idea and running with it. ‘Never Wanted’ is pretty based in reality; the rest are based on ideas and feelings. If you take the experience of being away from a girlfriend or a loved one, travelling around, which is basically what you do in a band, you decide that instead of writing a song about some wicked after party in Brazil that there’s more material in the sadder stuff. Just ask LMFAO… although they did do pretty well from the good times. But you take the more meaty stuff and run with it.”
‘Love Letters’ has a theme (essentially homesickness) rather than a concept that competes with ‘The English Riviera’ and ‘Nights Out’. “When I started to make the record I decided that I didn’t want the same thing as before, where you end up getting distracted talking about Devon,” says Mount. “I enjoy talking about Devon, but it shifted the focus too much. I knew that I wanted a theme of travelling and feeling dislocated from friends and family, but I didn’t want to write a concept record about touring.
“Part of my shtick is to try and keep albums relevant and important, because that’s the reason I got into music and albums. I find it very lazy when people say that the album is dead as a format, because, well, you’re not making or listening to good enough albums then. There’s something that you can do in a 45-minute/hour long record that you can only do in that format. I feel like it’s important to do something within that space of time, and if what you choose to do is bung a collection of songs together without any context, it could just be on shuffle. To keep records relevant and interesting you have to have something – the new Wild Beasts record [‘Present Tense’] has a production and sound and atmosphere that gives it the purpose of being a record, where if you listen to a pop record that has several producers involved, it won’t have that.”
Joe grew up in a literary household, where his father was a writer and his sister was good with words also. In spite of that, and to some degree because of it, writing lyrics was always his chore. Only one track on ‘Pip Paine…’ (‘Trick or Treatz’) features vocals, and even then they’re swathed in black static. For the following ‘Nights Out’, Mount was cajoled by his label into writing a few more songs with words. By ‘The English Riviera’, though, there wasn’t a single twisted instrumental to be seen, and there’s just the one (‘Boy Racer’) on ‘Love Letters’. “The one thing I really wanted to do [on this record] was write lyrics where attention had been paid to them,” says Mount. For a while he says he considered collaborating with a Van Dyke Parks figure (the 1960s composer and singer-songwriters who’s worked with Brian Wilson, Rufus Wainwright and Grizzly Bear), “to try to get someone who had this confidence with writing, so I could feel comfortable singing someone else’s words.” But I find it hard to believe that Joe would be able to relinquish such a large part of a Metronomy album to someone else.
“After ‘The English Riviera’ there were some songs that I thought had good lyrics and some that I thought had bad lyrics,” he says, “and the ones that were bad, it was only because I hadn’t tried hard enough. A song like ‘The Bay’ could have had more going on. When I was writing that song, I was thinking of things that were more interesting than how it ended up being. I realised that I’d been dumbing myself down a bit.”
