Although the release of The Bluetone’s sixth album, A New Athens will undoubtedly reaffirm their commercial twilight period, Mark Morriss and co. are currently embarking on a 22-date promotional tour. Fresh from their show at Academy 2, we caught up with Mark and had spoke to him about what this year has in store for one of the few living remnants of the Britpop era.
“It feels great to be back out touring properly again. We’ve done a few smaller tours over the last couple of years but now we’ve got some new songs to play. Being back in Newcastle is fantastic because the crowd are always so passionate and always have been. There’s a lot of good memories of shows here.”
Despite the band’s constant presence on the live circuit, A New Athens is the first LP of new material for over four years, marking the start of a busy year for The Bluetones.
“We’re doing this huge tour now which culminates in the album release. Hopefully that should get our name back out there some more, then we’re going to go a bit further afield, maybe Europe and Japan. After that we’ll be back on tour in the UK over the winter.”
“We’ve been playing four or five new songs at every gig so far but by then the fan base will be more familiar with the new songs, so they will want to come out and see us again. On this tour we’ve been typically playing about a 60/40 split on old and new songs.”
“The hits like Bluetonic and Slight Return though always have to be the first ones on the set list.”
A New Athens has been a long term project, with the band entering the studio over twelve months ago.
“Right at the beginning of recording, we demoed about eight or nine songs. From this number, we typically will use about four or five tracks on the final product. The title track, The Day That Never Was and a couple more are instances of that. We then used these songs as markers and the structure of the album was written around these songs, rather than them simply being another part of it.”
“To be honest when you enter a project, you have a better idea of what you don’t want the record to sound like, as opposed to what you want it to. Since the last record, some of us have become fathers and we didn’t want to force that into our songs. That’s not what we’re about.”
“I guess if you described the record, there’s an underlying theme about movement. It’s far from being a concept album though, you’d have to really read deep to pick something up there.”
Like many more seasoned bands, The Bluetones have chosen to release their next album in a traditional manner – there are no free downloads and Myspace streams, but simply eleven songs available to buy in the traditional way.
“Piracy is a bit of an issue at the moment, I can see the advantages of it for smaller artists but it’s a bit like a builder building a house and then somebody squatting in it. We’ve worked on producing these songs just like every other artist, for a long time. To have somebody take them away is just plain theft.”
The Bluetones release their sixth record, A New Athens, on May 3rd.
“Spotify and similar services may be legal too but at the end of the day it’s still not right. I’d agree that it devalues music.”
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