Louise Wener of Sleeper: ‘I think the band is a very different animal now’

Originally intended to commemorate the record’s silver anniversary, the Covid pandemic has inevitably meant the celebrations have been delayed by a year, but Wener sounds upbeat.

Band rehearsals – begun early “because everyone’s really super busy through April” – have been going well, she says.

Recorded with Stephen Street, then hot off producing huge hit albums by Blur and The Cranberries, The It Girl found Wener and bandmates Jon Stewart, Andy MacLure and then bassist Diid Osman on an upward curve following the enthusiastic reception for their debut album, Smart. Released in May 1996, it would go on to sell more than 300,000 copies in the UK alone and yield four top 40 singles.

Small wonder, perhaps, that the singer remembers it being a “super enjoyable album to make”.

“Making Smart was really hard and we’d got into a terrible mess with it,” she recalls. “We’d record all night and then re-record what we’d just done the next morning, it was very shambolic. But recording The It Girl, everything just kind of fell into place. We knew what we were doing by then.”

Having Street at the helm certainly helped, she feels. “Stephen is a genius at what he does, he’s very organised and he’s such a calming, soothing, brilliant influence,” she says. “We just upped our game with him at the helm of it and it just felt like we were firing on all cylinders by that point.”

Wener remembers writing the first single from the album, What Do I Do Now?, on tour in the US, while the top ten hit Sale of the Century was co-written with her partner MacLure. “We stayed up all night writing it and went up to Hampstead Heath the next morning to see the sunrise because we thought ‘this song’s great’,” she says.

“They were all written especially for that album. I know they say the second album is harder to write somehow because the first album is all the things you’ve written over the years, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was almost like ‘we’ve found our way now, we kind of know what we’re doing’.”

The original demos for the songs were named after characters from the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs. “Nice Guy Eddie was the only one that stayed,” Wener says. “I wrote a song called Mr Pink that I think might have been (later retitled) Sale of the Century.

“When I write songs, I write exact melody, every single syllable of the melody is pretty much as it’s going to be, but I have nonsense lyrics, I just sing nonsense to the tune I’ve written. I just pick out little, tiny words that are stream of conscious and think lyrics will just come out of that. That’s why all these tracks didn’t have titles, they just had Reservoir Dogs names.”

Wener wrote the lyrics for Lie Detector on the top deck of a bus. “I actually think part of the tune was as well,” she recalls. “It was me and Andy playing about on the way to rehearsals, so we might have even had a guitar on the top of the bus which seems very 1990s. Interestingly the best songs that you write come together quite fast; things that you really labour over and work and work and work on often end up never being quite right. My feeling is that the good ones come quite easily.”

It will be the opening number at gigs on this tour. “It’s good because it’s really energetic and quite raw, you kind of come out making a bit of a statement,” Wener says. “I don’t like easing into things, I like going straight for it.”

Wener recently recalled how competitive things had been during the Britpop era. Today, she reflects: “We were young so we didn’t feel the stress then, but it felt a bit like the school playground had just carried on.

“When you’d see another Britpop band and they’d be standing in another part of the playground shuffling their feet and going ‘I’m not talking to that lot’ – it was a bit like that. It was pressured in the sense that you knew it could end suddenly at any point and you were only as good as your last record’s chart position. Though nobody really wanted to talk about stuff like that, that was the case.”

Although Wener does not miss the laddish sexism of the era, she says: “There was sort of a freedom about (the mid 90s), which I find interesting. You would go and do an interview and not think too much about what you were saying, you wouldn’t be watching every word and phrasing everything to appease everybody that might want to project what you said. That felt quite freeing, I suppose, although we weren’t aware of it at the time. I think that’s definitely changed. These days people go with their PRs to interviews. Then you’d go to a pub and get p***ed and do the interview and see what came out.”

After Sleeper broke up in 1998, Wener forged an alternative career as a novelist. She also wrote a memoir, Different for Girls, and co-wrote the BBC Radio 4 drama series Queens of Noise with Roy Boulter of The Farm. Writing was something she enjoyed, she says, because it afforded her “total control” over her work. “It’s the complete opposite (of being in a band),” she says. “You’d find yourself arguing about chorus progression in a studio then you’ve got producers and managers and PR people. It just became this ludicrous circus by the end of it and I didn’t feel connected to the creative process very much by that stage. I just wanted something where I could just sit in my joggers and have total independence.”

However she found it hard to write during the lockdowns. “Like everybody, our house was completely full, the kids were home, we were home-schooling, it was very hard to find a place where you could concentrate,” she says.

“What we did do (instead) was make our album This Time Tomorrow where we got all our old demos that we’d never released back from the late 90s and re-made those, and that was easier because it just felt like a very escapist thing to do. Even though we were locked in our houses, it felt like we could go somewhere through the power of music.”

The song We Are Cinderella, on This Time Tomorrow, had been written in the late 90s for a projected solo album, and features a fragment of backing vocals by the late George Michael, who had lent her and MacLure his studio in Highgate in which to work. “It’s lovely but it never got finished and things moved on, my heart wasn’t really in it,” Wener says. “I think you have to know when to move on to different things in your life – that’s what it felt like for me anyway.”

Sleeper’s reformation in 2017 came about as a means of distraction for Wener when her sister, the novelist Sue Margolis, was seriously ill. She says she found the experience “a bit like jumping off a cliff”.

“Andy had sold his drum kit a few months before we decided to reform,” she remembers. “I felt really scared, it had been so long, and I had stage fright for the first time in my life when we went and played at the Shepherds Bush Empire. Thankfully it went away about an hour before we went on but for the whole day leading up to it I was like, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t go on stage’, it had been so long and it felt so strange. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever experienced that. It went and I never got it again thankfully.”

Although Sleeper have made two albums since reforming, Wener says she is “not sure” how long they might continue as a creative outlet. “I think it is a very different animal now, it’s almost like a pop-up,” she says. “We have families, we have jobs, we do other stuff. It’s a way of us escaping our regular lives. I think that’s how it connects when we perform live, we’re engaged in the same process. For us to be onstage doing this tour is a bit magical as a band and I think that really connects with the audience who are doing the same thing when you come to see a gig, especially in the current climate with everything that’s going on. You want to be somewhere else, don’t you? Somewhere other. And I think there’s very much that connection between band and audience at the moment.

“So we will carry on doing stuff while it’s enjoyable. It’s much more about that than it was.”

Sleeper play at O2 Academy Leeds on Friday April 22. www.facebook.com/Sleeperofficially