“Last time we were there it blew my mind and we can’t wait to get back – that and the sun is amazing! You have one, that’s a start,” jokes Butler. “We rarely see ours, I think we saw it March 25 of last year and then nothing since.” Butler and co.’s latest album, Start The Party, sounds like The Blackout on a summer holiday, with up-beat party anthems it’s a departure for the group, a far cry from the dark soundscape of previous albums.
“The last record we wrote – at the time of writing we didn’t have a label, we didn’t have management, we had no money in the bank. So we literally wrote it ourselves and our heads were down a bit and it came across in the music,” recalls Butler. Penniless, the band turned to donations from fans to fund the recording of their third studio album – the aptly titled Hope. The change in sound was not a conscious decision but rather a side effect of their turn of fortunes.
“With Start The Party everything just totally flipped ends. We had a label and we had management and we were in a really good head space,” says Butler. “We came back from this amazing tour playing venues we’d only dreamed about selling out two years before. We came home and instead of just sitting around we thought, ‘Nah, let’s just use this positive place we’re in right now and just start writing again’ and as soon as we did that everything we wrote came with this big pop up-beat kind of party-rock vibe which we just kind of rolled with really.”
The Blackout are now with UK label Cooking Vinyl, and it seems to be a happy coupling for the outfit. “It’s great now. They’re an independent label here in the UK and they’ve paid for us to go to Ibiza for a laugh for a video so I can’t really complain at all!”
Forming in 2003, where rumour has it the guys started the band out of sheer boredom, Butler and company could never have anticipated their success, having previously cited boredom as the precursor to their decision to start a band. “When we first started the band we honestly didn’t even think about releasing a record or anything like that. It was strange recording a demo in a really small studio was the height of anything we could have ever imagined we’d become. It just kind of snowballed, every six months you’d do something and go, ‘Whoa, we just kicked it up a notch, that’s mental’. You know, ‘We just toured with Lost Prophets [in 2006], that’s mad!’ (At the time of the interview the controversy surrounding fellow countryman of the Lost Prophets fame had not yet surfaced.) And then a couple of years later we’re on our own playing pretty big venues that we couldn’t have dreamed of doing and next thing you know we’re in Australia.”
BY MICHELLE GILLINGWATER
