It Takes Two Baby - Everything Everything

“Nothing feeds art like genuine civil unrest,” says Jeremy Pritchard, bassist with new Northern four-piece Everything Everything who have just released their debut single, Suffragette Suffragette. He's sat having a coffee with the band’s singer, Jonathan Higgs, in Manchester’s Night and Day, which is unusually quiet today without any of the live action it’s renowned for. Jeremy is commenting on how the present economical climate may affect the UK music scene, he expands on the idea: “I think it will mean that people will start making better records again…the 1980s was a hotbed for political records. The 90s was kind of contented and so was the first half of this decade. It was all kind of soft and boring wasn’t it, Britpop?”

The Britpop era must have held some magic for the members of Everything Everything as it’s where they found common ground in their music tastes along with the Beatles and Radiohead. Indeed it’s clear it bears personal significance for Jeremy as he recalls when his musical aspirations first took hold: “I can remember for years, I just listened to Michael Jackson, the Beach Boys and The Beatles, that was pretty much it until I was 12 and I started to listen to contemporary pop and stuff. Then this guy that was a year older than me, I thought was cool was into Blur. So I bought a Blur tape because I had a voucher to use up. Then I really loved this record The Great Escape, that made me want to pick up a guitar and that changed my outlook.”
“It was fairly similar for me,” interjects Jonathan, “but I had an older brother which helped and my parents had loads of 60s records.”

Jeremy and Jonathan were both in bands during their teen years. Did you face any objections from your parents when playing your instruments? “No, not at all, I was right out in the countryside so I could just set up my drums and guitar, and play” replies Jonathan. “I got talked out of playing the drums!” laughs Jeremy.

So, what about choosing music, as oppose to a ‘9 to 5’ career, were your parents supportive of this? “It is a career!” Jonathan says assertively. “It took a while to convince them that it was actually a legitimate thing to be doing and that I could do singing if I wanted to, and I could do it for a living. Not that doing it at university actually guarantees you a job in the business at all!”
Jeremy: “My parents are musical people anyway. I don’t know if they ever thought I’d be into this, but they’re definitely into it.”

The bassist, who is originally from Kent, met Jonathan while studying on a music course at the University of Salford. The pair shared a vision on what they could learn and take away from their musical degrees. Jonathan then enlisted his friends, Alex Niven (guitars) and Mike Spearman (drums) from his home near Newcastle to complete the line up of the band. Everything Everything are now based in Manchester, a middle ground to their North/South amalgam. The quartet have been together for just over a year, but did not play London until six months into their existence, which Jeremy believes was positive for the band because, “It raised the expectations more, so we had to be good to go there and had people to play to. We didn’t just burn out too quick.”

Despite this comment, the band view playing empty rooms important too. Jonathan explains: “You’ve got to do it… if you played all your gigs all your life to a room full of people who loved it, you’re probably going to be really crap eventually because you’ll never know what to really think.”

When asked about the highlights and low moments in their brief history together, lower times immediately stand out to them, as they both say, “Barrow” in unison before they pause to ponder the early shows, and Jeremy puts them into perspective: “The poorly attended badly organised shows that you have to play when you first get together, you have to go through that. That was our ‘Hamburg period’ as Alex calls it.”

He continues, revealing a show that was particularly memorable for them all, “We played a pub in Liverpool with 20 minutes notice, we weren’t doing anything so we said, ‘Okay’, but they’d never had a band play before. There was no PA, one mic and they kept turning our amps down!”
Hopefully, Everything Everything will not have to repeat this experience on their forthcoming UK tour.