Turin Brakes: 'Every record is like a portrait of where we are at as four thinking human beings'

For a few weeks last summer the band, led by long-time friends Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian, created their own mini Eden in Knights’s garden studio in Tooting, south London, while they worked on songs for the record.

"It was pretty idyllic, there was something very peaceful about it,” says Knights, remembering how he, Paridjanian and band mates Rob Allum and Eddie Myer managed to temporarily inhabit their own little bubble.

“It was just in my rather humble south London garden studio but there was a feeling on homeliness about it. As a band, it’s kind of our headquarters these days, so everyone was happy to be together in a cosy place where we could just concentrate on making a record. It was a nice time…in a low overhead fashion. In the really early days we might have had much more expensive studios that we could spend a lot of time in, but in our own way it was kind of a safe space to dream up a better future musically.”

The songs themselves stemmed from a batch of demos that Knights has recorded a year earlier. “Good demos are like a map where the next record can come from,” Knights says. “They seem to have their own in-built agenda and rules, and if you’re sensitive to it you can almost follow them. Because I’d done that it had already set up the kind of record we could make. It was those demos that made us think OK, instead of going to somewhere like Rockfield, where we done the three records with our co-producer Ali (Staton) beforehand, these felt much more home-made and we felt we could make these with just the four of us as a band. They had a bit more of a closer-to-the-bone feeling about them.

"I think it was about time to do that. The three records that had come before were getting bigger and bigger sonically speaking, each seemed to try and outdo the last one in some respect. Sometimes, especially with experience, you realise that in order to go somewhere new, you don’t always have to keep going up the ladder. You can go sideways or you can pull things back down so that you create more head-room for yourself and it feels like there’s more space, so we actually purposefully made things smaller again so we could get to the core of the songs. So it’s less about lavish production, this record, it’s a little more homegrown. It still sounds pretty juicy at times, it can’t really help itself, but I’d say it’s a little more lo-fi in its core.”

The band avoided discussing too much of what was going on in lockdown – “There was so much in the news and it was so scary, there was a palpable feeling of fear in the air,” Knights remembers – but the songs inevitably reflect a sense of unease. “The songs were mostly written pre-Covid, but it’s strange,” he says. “There’s a song called Isolation in there and others that seem to be talking about huge, worldwide danger and this feeling of fire catching, the flames being just outside your door. Even before Covid there was a sense that things were in extreme flux societally and with the environment...so it is in the record, it certainly doesn’t shy away, it’s not really an escapist record musically.

"I guess it’s probably dealing with some of those things lyrically, but Turin Brakes records always do. Every record is like a portrait of where we are at as four thinking human beings, it’s sort of where the philosophy of those four people is at every couple of years or whenever we make a record, for better or for worse.”

The songs hint at a quest for inner peace. “It’s always been an interest of mine,” Knights admits. “There always seems to be this thread of trying to seek some balance within your own mind. I’ve always enjoy that as a subject, or the kind of images that can be brought out from that type of concept, but every few years your take on it is different. You have a different angle on it because you’ve lived. The songs have been striving for that inner peace type of scenario since the first record. I was 22 when I wrote (The Optimist) and now I’m in my mid-40s, so I have a different angle on it now than I did all those years ago, but the themes and the interests have remained very much the same. The human condition is really what interests me as a writer – what is it and how can I pin it down musically every few years and somehow make those connections with other humans that’s beyond words.”

Wide-Eyed Nowhere is out on September 16. Turin Brakes play at Hull Tower Ballroom on September 17, Leeds City Varieties on September 18 and Sheffield Octagon on October 8. turinbrakes.com