Things weren’t going my way on April 3rd. Having arrived outside the Bristol Thekla at the appointed time of 6pm to meet Noah and the Whale, I encountered two heavy-duty techies who informed me that the band’s flight from Dublin was delayed and no-one knew quite when they would turn up. When I returned an hour later, I bumped into the band heading determinedly away from the spot where I’d been asked to meet them for the re-scheduled interview. Conceding that their pre-show dinner was probably deserved, I agreed to meet them after the gig. Finally inside the converted ship, I was in a decidedly bad mood. However, an amazing show followed by a chat with two very lovely musicians, Charlie Fink and Tom Hobden, was the perfect antidote to my misery.
Noah and the Whale are well known for two main things: the chirpy hit ‘Five Years Time’ from their first folk-rock record Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, and lead singer Fink’s well-documented break-up with singer Laura Marling, the devastation of which spawned the emotional outpouring of second album First Days of Spring. The tones of the two albums could hardly be more different, and recent third album Last Night on Earth marks another new direction for the band as they strive to put the past behind them. First Days Of Spring promised ‘you know in a year I’m gonna be happy’, and upbeat, poppy singles ‘L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N’ and ‘Tonight’s the Kind of Night’ suggest that Fink is ready to put tragedy behind him. ‘[The new album] is very different. I think we wanted to test ourselves on this album and not rely on what we’ve done before. It’s more outward looking, more character based, more narrative.’ It’s also much happier in tone. Fink calls the stories ‘uplifting’, and many are about making new starts in life, a natural progression from the last album, which displayed definite seeds of future happiness among the anguish.
Lyrical influences are diverse, including Tom Waits’ Bone Machine, Lou Reed’s Berlin and the poetry of Bukowski. After the overtly personal First Days Of Spring, it is interesting that Fink has chosen to move into narrative lyrics – the album follows, amongst other characters, a boy who leaves his house at midnight in search of a new life, Lisa, the ‘rock and roll survivor with pendulum hips’, and Joey, the artist whose ‘best work was his letters home’. ‘This is the first time, probably more than anything else I’ve done before, that there are elements of fiction in the writing. Even writing fiction is still as revealing in its own way, and it’s as personal, it’s just a different way of expressing it. There’s a great Tom Waits quote about writing in characters – he says that the key is not to obscure yourself from the song, and in fact on the contrary you find a whole family inside you – the key is that you’re still expressing something about yourself, it’s just a different method. Sometimes you take someone you know or something that’s happened to you and make it a bit more exciting and romantic – and sometimes you just make it up.’
Many of the stories take place at night. ‘The imagery and idea of the romance of the night-time is commonly placed in America, because the drives are so much longer and the darkness is so much darker – but I like the idea that people can picture these stories in their own lives. You can get a bus out of town from anywhere.’
With three such different albums, making a coherent live show must be a hard job. Fink clearly enjoys the challenge: ‘You revisit old songs, and they’ve matured, like a fine wine. You get new life from them every time you see people enjoying it – it makes you rediscover the song’. They agree that their fanbase has changed along the way, losing some and picking up others. The audience was made up of a strange mixture of young trendy indie kids, wild for the poppy hits, and middle aged people, who seemed more at home with the 70s rock influences of the latest album and the mellow First Days Of Spring. Yet unregretful they stay focused on the present and are delighted at how the new songs have been ‘really connecting’
I wonder what their relationship is with the song ‘Five Years’ Time’, now that they are in such a different place musically. ‘We’re grateful for the platform it gave us. And obviously we’ve played it a lot live, but when you play a song and see it connect like it does, and see people smiling like they do, you’d have to be a pretty big Scrooge not to get pleasure out of that.’ The band finished their set with the song, much to the crowd’s delight – bands can be snooty about playing old hits, but Fink disagrees with this attitude: ‘We’re trying to give people the best show we can and let them leave feeling like they’ve got what they wanted.’
So where next for Noah and the Whale? Literally, a mammoth tour of Europe and America lasting until August. Musically, it’s anyone’s guess. Hobden muses, ‘Because of this album, it feels like we could go either way – we could do an electronic record or a completely guitar record, and it wouldn’t be unthinkable. It’s a nice place to be.’ Meanwhile they are going to give their audiences a real treat. ‘We try to give people the best night of their lives’. They’re not doing too badly.
