New Model Army: 'We started with a bad attitude​​​​​​​ and we’ve still got​​​​​​​ a bad attitude'

Dividing the early part of lockdown between his adopted home city Bradford and Paris, where his partner lives, Sullivan made a solo album, Surrounded, before commencing writing Unbroken with the band. “We were just messing around in our own studio, and it took shape over a couple of years,” he says. “There was a much-delayed (40th) anniversary tour that we had to do, the Sinfonia project (with the Leipzig Orchestra), so we kept being interrupted but we worked on it in a fairly leisurely way.”

Deciding early on in the process that they wanted it to be mixed by Tchad Blake, the American producer and engineer who has worked with the likes of Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Arctic Monkeys and U2, they sent him some demo recordings and asked which studio they might work in.

“He said ‘I like the demos’ because there is something about demos when you first come up with ideas that’s very immediate. So basically over a year and a half bit by bit we’d put together songs. We’d do rough monitor mixes and we sent them to Tchad, who did things to them and it came out as Unbroken. We always wanted to make something simple and straightforward, that was the principle of the album. We weren’t going to get overcomplicated, keep the songs simple and shortish.

“One of the things about rock music is there is a bass and drummer then all of the other things are the interesting bit; with New Model Army it’s always been about the bass and drums are the interesting bits and there’s some other instrumentation. This album is very bass and drums heavy, which is kind of what we wanted it to be.

“I think maybe because of the orchestral project we wanted to do something simple and basic.”

Unbroken is nevertheless a diverse album in terms of songwriting. “Someone said it reflects every era of New Model Army, maybe because it was put together over a period of time,” Sullivan acknowledges. “There were different things coming in, the lyrical subjects were all really different, but it holds together suprisingly well and I think that’s partly Tchad. There are thousands of people that can mix records but there does seem to be this top league, and now we’ve worked with four of these people: Andy Wallace, Bob Clearmountain, Joe Barresi and now Tchad Blake. They can do extraordinary things with sound, the amount of clarity and power they create in mixing.

“When it comes to production, in some ways we’re not bad at producing ourselves because we’re quite rigorous with each other. We argue about the music a lot but it’s not personal, it means that we can keep pushing each other in quite a good way, but mixing we know we don’t know how to do, so go to the very top of the league. Well, Tchad Blake’s one of those people.”

For the most part over the past 40 years, New Model Army have stayed outside of musical trends. Sullivan believes there are several factors involved. “We started with a bad attitude and we’ve still got​​​​​​​ a bad attitude,” he says. “In order to become popular you should give people what they want and there was a period in the early ’90s when we were on the edge of becoming quite a big band and it never really quite happened, and I think it’s because we didn’t play what people wanted us to play. We didn’t play the hits.

“We had that sort of attitude that whatever people want from you f*** them, we will do what we want, and in the long run that has been great for us. We’ve ended up in a situation where there’s no song we have to play​​​​​​​, we just play what we want to play​​​​​​​, and the audience which we have got, which is perhaps smaller than we might have had, accepts that that’s what we’re doing. Most bands when they get to their 16th album play two songs from it​​​​​​​ and the hits, we play most of the new album and we’ve got an audience that accepts that about us, so that’s worked very well for us.

“I think also the slow turnover of members over the years. Every five or 10 years something new arrives, and that helps as well because we don’t have to go through that thing of trying to reinvent ourselves​​​​​​​, it just happens naturally​​​​​​​ because one new person changes all the dynamics in the band. So that creative thing goes on, we’re not ever scratching our heads​​​​​​​ going, ‘Ooh, I don’t know what to do now’, there’s always ideas kicking around.”

Sullivan believes Bradford, where he moved from Buckinghamshire when he was 21, is an important part of the band’s identity. “There’s loads and loads of songs that are about Bradford,” he says. “Bradford’s a very peculiar place, I think it has three particular features – one is that it’s surrounded by beautiful countryside, 15 minutes and you’re out in this big, wide open space, Wuthering Heights basically; two, it’s cheap, if you live in New York or London you’re always going to be worrying about money; and three, we are from different places but there’s one thing about Bradford because it’s a 19th century boomtown there wasn’t much there before and it hasn’t got this sense of deep, self-conscious history, so if you go back more than five generations nobody’s from Bradford, everybody’s an incomer.

“I was once talking to a bunch of Iraqi refugees back in 2003 or ’04 and they’d escaped Iraq and been stationed at very different parts around the UK and they said, ‘We like Bradford’, I said ‘why?’ and they said ‘Because nobody cares where you’re from’ and I can see that. I’m a Southerner, people are from anywhere in Bradford, and if you go back five or six generations, nobody’s from Bradford. It’s a strange, fluid city. I don’t know many other places to compare it to, it is special.”

Unbroken is out now. New Model Army play at ​​​​​​​O2 Academy Leeds on April 27. https://www.newmodelarmy.org/