Everything Everything On Ten Years Of ‘Get To Heaven’

British art-rock innovators Everything Everything are returning to Australia this month to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of their critically acclaimed third album, Get to Heaven. The upcoming Australian tour marks the band’s fifth visit to Australia, and will see them play Get To Heaven in full. No-one quite operates in the realm of the visionary Everything Everything. Setting dystopian ‘Black Mirror’-style concepts to songs which thrillingly find the sweet spot between esoteric experimentation and art-pop accessibility, the band have earned critical acclaim and a devoted following in equal measure. Their accolades include five Ivor Novello Awards, two Mercury Prize nominations, and a remarkable run of six consecutive Top 10 albums. Front man Johnathan Higgs spoke to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Great to be talking to you. You must be looking forward to getting back to Australia again so soon after the last tour.
Absolutely. Yeah, I love it down there. It’s pretty different to back home. It’s huge and it’s hot.

Ten years of the third album Get to Heaven. How does that milestone sit with you when you look back at it now?
I’m really proud of that record and it doesn’t really feel like ten years because it feels like the world is sort of stuck in the same spot that it was then. I mean, everything has become a lot more insane, but it felt like that was the beginning of the insanity and we’re deep in it now basically. So it feels like maybe the last chance was around 2015 to stop the world descending into this.

Did things really start to change for the band with this album? Did you feel like you turned a corner?
Yeah, it did. It certainly opened us up to some new parts of the world and there were things happening. Opportunities came our way, but we’d already had a lot of good stuff happen. This record seemed to resonate particularly, and it captured a certain time that has become very important in hindsight. That moment — 2015, 2016 — Brexit and Trump and all those things seemed to come together at once. And we also released a very successful record that has those good tunes on it. So it felt right to come back and play it again ten years later because it’s so potently connected to life. It’s about this time we’re living in more than any record we’ve made probably.

And of course, there’s something about the artwork that really captures everything coming together.
The artwork, the songs, the lyrics, the stage outfits, everything just came together and it felt like this is what we came here to do, was that record. So we’re doing it again.

With these milestones rolling around, do you get nostalgic at all, or is it more about celebrating a moment in time while the band keeps moving forward?
I’m not really one for nostalgia. I don’t really enjoy it. It makes me feel sad more than anything. But I certainly appreciate that people still want to hear these songs and there’s something special about a decade. It does put things in perspective a bit. But I’m not really thinking about the time the songs are from because it wasn’t really a very good time. There’s a lot of pain and suffering in the songs for me, and I don’t particularly want to inhabit myself in 2015 again or 2014. But I can appreciate that I wrote some good tunes then.

How was the process with putting together the reissue? There looks to be an incredible list of B‑sides and tracks that didn’t make it the first time.
I’ve got to hand it to Mike and Jeremy from the band because they went through it. They picked through the whole lot and Mike keeps an awful lot of stuff on his old drives. I really try to avoid it because it goes deeper than the stuff we’re already saying — it’s all the castoffs and the demos and you get very close to who we were and what was happening if you go through it and listen to it all. So I stayed out of it and then when the shortlist was there at the end, they were like, “Well, you need to actually listen to this and tell us what some of these lyrics are,” because they’d never been written down. That was a little bit painful maybe, but I’m really glad we did it. I’m sure the fans really like it, but for me it’s quite tricky to listen to, frankly.

Were there any particular songs that surprised you, maybe ones you’d forgotten about?
Oh yeah, I definitely forgot about a couple of them and now I’m feverishly trying to remember what’s even on there that I’d forgotten. Let’s see… deluxe, expanded ten‑year, that’s what we’re looking at. Yeah, Magnetophone — I still don’t know how to play that song. We thought about playing it live for one of these tours and we literally listened to it together and were like, “Well, I don’t know what I can’t tell what we’re playing.” And Indigo, yeah, I completely forgot about that. I always remembered Giving Your Blood because I always liked it and was a bit miffed it didn’t make the record, but Indigo I completely forgot about. So that was kind of a cool one.

Were there any moments from the time the album came out that really stand out as significant for you, or do you choose not to look backwards?
The biggest thing that happened when that came out was Brexit in Britain. That was huge. It completely upended the country and it affected us, it affects our career, it affected everyone in lots of ways. We don’t need reminders that it happened because we’re reminded every day. Personal life stuff… it was a weird time. There was a lot of terrorism on the TV and I got very sucked into rolling news. I guess I got a bit terrorised by the terrorism because I was watching it day in and day out. They captured this guy who was fairly local and they cut his head off and I was watching all this stuff. It affected me quite a lot. So yeah, it’s not exactly a highlight, but those are some of the things that happened around that time that I remember strongly.

Having such an impactful album, did you feel pressure to continue delivering at that level, or does that not phase you?
No, we’ve always done what we wanted. There were quite a few risks we took on this record and we just thought we’ll keep doing what we do. We’re not going to try to replicate this and we’re not going to listen to anyone else. We’re just going to do the next thing we think is good and we have been, and it’s worked for us. I don’t think it feels like we’ve stayed in one place or been repeating ourselves. That’s really the only goal you can have as an artist. You can’t expect people to like you, but you can see if you’re repeating yourself and strive to always do something else, which is what I think we’ve done.

With the tour in mind, are you looking to play the album start to end, or will you mix it up?
When we did this in the UK, we went into it thinking we’d do it in order and keep it strict, but as soon as we did… I mean, our biggest song is track two. And it was insane. We quickly realised we have to shake it up a bit, otherwise people are going go home.

The songs that made the reissue, do they make their way into the setlist as well?
I don’t know. I think maybe not. I think we kept it strict because in our mind this is the thiteen‑track album, but when it came out in a lot of places it had five or six added to it in what’s called a deluxe. So we are playing the deluxe tracks, which is something we haven’t done ever. So there’s like nineteen songs there and then there’s all the extra crap we’re talking about. So we’re just keeping it to the nineteen. Otherwise it’s too much to play in one show.

Beyond this tour, what’s next? Is there a new album on the horizon?
We’ve been demoing quite a lot recently and we’re getting to the point where we think we’ve probably got a record to make, so that’ll be the next thing. I think we’ll see how the sessions go, we’ll see how we feel. We don’t want to put a date on it and just focus on making a good record.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Everything Everything on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…