Theatre Royal - The Medway Riviera

So, let's start with your musical background, both as listeners and as musicians. Where do Theatre Royal come from?

Robbie: I grew up listening to Elvis's greatest hits tape in my parents' car, along with the Beatles' greatest hits. We also picked up Paul Simon's “Graceland” when it came out. I remember being fascinated by the lyrics, I used to read them while we listened to the songs. I wanted to learn to play guitar years before I actually started, since my dad had an old acoustic (made in Italy by EKO, would you believe it?) hidden in his wardrobe, which I literally used just to strum around on. I didn't start learning seriously until I was eleven and had started secondary school.

Oliver: My earliest musical tastes came from my parents, we'd listen to the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon or the Waterboys in the car during summer holidays. As a teenager, I started developing my own tastes. We all grew up on Britpop and Nirvana, that era was hugely important in shaping our musical taste, it was an exciting time to be young and listening to guitar music, it was everywhere. From there I suppose we branched out into all sorts of different influences, going back decades, finding records and sharing them with each other.

Can you tell us about the band members, how you met and so on?

Oliver: Robbie, Jon and I met at school, we all like music, we went to the same places and we were in various bands together over the years.

Robbie: We met Brendan later on. Thank god that happened. He's by far the best musician I've ever had the good fortune to play with. We'd been in various bands years before, but I was never happy with the overall sound. When Brendan joined us and we formed Theatre Royal, everything clicked right away, and it's never stopped getting better...”

I agree with some of the reviews of “We Don't Know Where We Are” that say you've improved your sound, arrangements and songwriting with each record. Do you feel the same way?

Robbie: Yes, definitely, although every time we finish a record I think to myself: “Well, we'll never make a better record than this one”. I think that's what pushes us to keep working harder on our songs, the drive to constantly improve, even when you think there's nowhere left to go. I think that same drive runs through everything we do as a band. We try not to repeat ourselves and we're not satisfied until the arrangements are as dynamic, interesting and fresh as possible.

Oliver: I think we all feel this is our most complete record from start to finish. We're very proud of all three albums, but we're a better band now than when we started, we've all raised the level of our contribution to the sound, the songs are stronger and I think there's a quiet confidence to this record. I think introducing four-part harmonies was very important for us, it's something we've worked hard to develop.

“We Don't Know Where We Are” also has a slightly softer sound than your previous records, without losing your knack for dynamic songwriting. Do you recognize this evolution? Is it a personal thing, or are your musical tastes changing over time?

Oliver: I don't think there was a conscious attempt to go for a softer sound, but we definitely set ourselves the goal of focusing on the harmony lines and other instruments instead of the usual guitar, bass and drums. That might be why the record sounds more layered and delicate in places. That said, the opener “The Past Is Always Gone” is probably one of the most intense recordings across all three albums. I wouldn't say our musical tastes are changing, but we're constantly introducing each other to new records, adding them to our influences. For me personally, the Grateful Dead's “American Beauty” and the Walkmen's “Lisbon” were reference points at the back of my mind while writing and recording this record. I started writing one of the songs, “Ripple”, while watching a documentary about Ray Davies (Kinks), his songwriting has been a big influence on me personally over the last few years, and that song has references to him as a man as well as in its sound.

Robbie: Yes, I think it does. I'm not sure it was a conscious decision, but I definitely felt like I wanted us to free the songs from some of the clutter we'd added on the second record to make it sound bigger – let them breathe more and stand on their own a bit more. I'm not sure that reflects a change in my musical tastes though – I still like more or less the same music I liked as a kid.

I like the fact that you're able to sound deeply British and, at the same time, like nothing else around you. Do you feel the same way about your band?

Oliver: That's very kind of you to say, we do have some pretty obvious influences and we don't claim to be the most experimental band around, but we do have our own distinct sound. I don't think we could ever sound like anything other than British, just because of our accents. Even when we're doing something country or Americana, we always sing in our own voices and talk about our own lives. You'll never hear us going on about Route 66 or Sweet Louise the way some British bands do, drawing heavily on a certain kind of American music. That's fine for them, but it means nothing to us.

Robbie: I'm proud of the fact that we've always stayed true to ourselves. We've never gone out of our way to chase any particular trend, and we've never been ashamed to make the music we wanted to make, even though we've almost always been hopelessly out of step with whatever the "scene" is. That's led some people to write us off as derivative, but I don't see it that way at all. We've ended up making art that matters by doing what we love. Other bands, who are supposedly more original than us, lack our emotional depth. Even if we remain a small band, at least we can be happy that we're genuinely loved by our fans, and that we ourselves love the music we make.

Your songs share musical vibrations from different decades, blending the summer pop of the Sixties and Seventies with the alternative glow of the Eighties and Nineties. Which musical era do you really picture yourselves in?

Robbie: Good music is timeless. Making music now gives us the advantage of being able to draw inspiration from different artists and genres across huge stretches of time.

Oliver: We all love a huge range of music from every decade, from the primitive blues of Robert Johnson to newer records, like those by Daniel Avery. Along the way there are influences like the Beatles, Bowie or the Velvet Underground, but we don't like aligning ourselves with, or defining ourselves against, a particular era - we see ourselves as a band of our own time, hopefully with timeless qualities. I really love 80s bands like the Go-Betweens and the Chameleons, which Robbie, for instance, doesn't know too well, but he'll be raving about some old country or blues record at rehearsal and I'll have no idea what it is. Jon and Brendan bring their own different influences too, but we never try to copy or imitate - we work sounds in however we think is right for a given track. Influences all matter, but they certainly don't define us.

You've stayed true to your idea of music and sound across all three of your records. How do you feel about the ever-evolving music scene around you?

Robbie: Like I said before, I'm completely oblivious to whatever the current music scene is supposed to be. I just want to make music that reflects my life as honestly as possible. I realise that potentially makes us very uncommercial and less likely to "make it" in the music scene, but our music draws its strength from its emotional truth, and that should be protected for as long as possible, I think.

Oliver: We all listen to new music to varying degrees, but it doesn't influence our music any more or less than music from fifty years ago does - good songs are good songs, and that's all that matters to us. We're not interested in chasing trends. Success for us means writing and recording great songs.

What's the perfect pop song for you?

Robbie: Wow! Tough question. There are so many contenders. Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" would be the most evocative of my childhood, but I think the one I'm most obsessed with right now has to be the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" - but then I'd be forgetting the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie" and Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls Of Fire", and...

Oliver: I don't think you can go far wrong with the Beatles' "Help", the Clash's "Train In Vain" or Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". They're all perfect from start to finish and reward repeated listens. But then again, I was just listening to "Highway 61 Revisited" - and is there a better song to listen to on repeat than "Like A Rolling Stone"?

Brendan: Hmm, the Pixies' "Here Comes Your Man" and the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way". I thought about leaving the Beatles out, didn't want to be too obvious!

Jon: David Bowie's "Up Hill Backwards", for me. Bowie at his best. Great melody, great lyrics, with a streak of weirdness running through it.

You seem pretty passionate about radio and radio play - you recently released a "single edit" of one of the songs on "We Don't Know Where We Are". Is that a nostalgic fixation, or do you genuinely think it can still help, today?

Oliver: We're releasing a new version of “What Was That Sound?” because we had new ideas for the track that worked really well, and I guess these new ideas made the song sound more like a radio single – hence the release. Radio is important to us, we're a band that works together on a tight budget, and so, along with blogs and magazines, it's the best way for us to get our music out to people all over the world. We all grew up listening to the radio, discovering new music and hearing our favourite songs, so being on the radio and getting played by DJs we grew up with matters to us, it's a nice bit of satisfaction if nothing else. Maybe there's an element of nostalgia to it, but I still find the idea of being played on the radio genuinely exciting.

Robbie: I think singles can really help introduce people to our sound and keep current fans interested, but singles need to be special to count. For instance we've put out a couple of singles that don't appear on any album (one of them is a Christmas record!), just as we make sure our releases have at least one exclusive b-side or are part of a limited-edition EP. The current single is exciting because it's got a trumpet part played live by a regular collaborator of ours, John Whittaker, but that came after we'd already finished the album. In fact it sounded so good that we booked the studio as soon as we could so other people could hear it…”

You come across as a pretty DIY band, yet the sound of your records has grown to the point of near-perfection. How do you do it?

Robbie: Magic! A secret recipe, but with a couple of key ingredients… 1) We're lucky enough to have worked for years with the brilliant Jim Riley at Ranscombe Studios, who constantly reminds us how important it is to capture the spirit of a live performance to bring our records to life – he's got an analogue studio in Rochester so there's no “cut and paste” going on. If the take isn't good, you just do it again. 2) Constantly working countless hours over many years to sharpen our sound, our singing and our songwriting. I can honestly say it took me fifteen years of being in rubbish bands before I even started to get any good. I just hope we haven't peaked yet and that we can keep improving for many more years (and records!) to come…

Oliver: We're a DIY band, we fund our records with money from gigs and record sales. There's no big-label money for studio time. That means we record a lot faster than other bands. Our records take five to ten days to record, whereas some bands will spend six months in the studio making a record. But we like the time constraint, for us spending six months recording a record just doesn't make sense. We go into the studio with well-defined ideas and fully arranged tracks, we like to get a good take, full of energy and feeling, which matters more to us than perfection. We get some help along the way, our friend Shaun put this record out on his label Vacilando 68 Recordings, it's a very friendly arrangement, Shaun does a lot for us and gets very little in return!

Do you spend a lot of time in the studio, or are you more of a live band?

Robbie: We don't have much money, so we only go into the studio when we're confident we can be efficient and productive. Getting to that point takes a lot of rehearsing and hard work, which might suggest we're more of a live band. I think it's more complex than that, though. I think if you come and see us play live you'll feel the energy and passion we put into performing our songs, even though they might not necessarily sound the way they do on record. In fact I think we succeed where other bands fail, in the sense that we can make a record that sounds independent from our live sound. We don't just try to play live onto tape and call it an “album”. We want to make a record that lives and breathes on its own.

Oliver: We spend more time writing and rehearsing than recording. Like I said, we only spend short stretches of time in the studio. But we really love playing live and we're perhaps a different band live compared to on record. Live we're more intense, there's an element of aggression, even though we keep our pop sensibility.

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