You Me At Six: the story of Sinners Never Sleep | Kerrang! August 20, 2011
AT THE start of 2010, you’d have been hard pushed to find a band who looked like they were enjoying life more than You Me At Six.
Their debut album, Take Off Your Colours had taken them from their Surrey homes to the brink of success. Still teenagers, it earned them a major label record deal. And from every magazine article they adorned, they grinned the grins of those who couldn’t believe their luck.
In the can was their second album, Hold Me Down, a Technicolor pop-punk riot of big tunes, summery melodies and boy-girl dilemmas. Its release was accompanied by a great fanfare from fans, media and industry alike. From the outside looking in, life was pretty sweet.
From the inside, though, it was a little different. They hated each other.
On the eve of Hold Me Down’s release, You Me At Six were a band who could quite easily have broken up. Their singer, Josh Franceschi, would reach the end of tours and not want to see his band again. In return, drummer Dan Flint admits, “I wanted to tell Josh to fuck off”. Later on, despite having earned mainstage slots at Reading and a headline show at Brixton, guitarist Max Helyer, had such a significant panic that he wanted to leave the band, claiming he was lost.
Rumours and Chinese whispers swirled. The most serious was that Josh wanted a greater share of the band’s money. The other four members of the band – completed by guitarist Chris Miller and bassist Matt Barnes – were understandably upset.
For a British pop-punk band who seemed so primed for the sort of success their American counterparts enjoyed, suddenly it seemed the wheels might come off. Their stratospheric rise curtailed by arguments, suspicion and tenseness. Pretty mundane.
BUT, A year-and-a-half later, here they all are. All five of them. And they’re brandishing a new album.
Sinners Never Sleep is, in part, a chronicle of what they have been through. They hope it will be seen as a rock record, rather than a pop-punk one. From Josh’s savage attack on his bandmates (Bite My Tongue), to the gratitude he offers their fans on Little Bit Of Truth, it is certainly more world-weary than Hold Me Down. Josh sums up his mood on the record as “troubled”.
“That Hold Me Down cycle was probably one of the best years of our career professionally, but one of the worst personally,” says the singer.
“Some people think being in a band is all fun as you’re travelling the world,” adds Max. “But with the good comes the bad. This CD reflects that; it’s honest. This is not all fun and games. It hasn’t been an easy ride.”
Today, though, those troubles are behind them. We’re at Max’s parents’ house and, as his dad tends to a barbecue while his mum makes salads in the kitchen, You Me At Six mill about the patio, sharing jokes, taking the piss and laughing. Birds chirp, as the sun shines on a peaceful English summer garden.
One listen Sinners Never Sleep’s third song, the heavy (for You Me At Six) Bite My Tongue, proves things were not always this idyllic. Featuring a guest vocal from Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes – he ends his onslaught by repeatedly bellowing ‘<<Fuck you!>> over an aggressively spiky riff – the song finds Josh launching a scathing critique of the rest of his bandmates. It must make uneasy listening for them.
“Max asked me what the song was about when we were recording,” says Josh. “Usually I’d brush that off or sugar-coat it. This time, though, I said, ‘Basically, it’s about how much I fucking hate being in this band with all of you guys sometimes’.”
What had got him to that point was the long hard slog of touring and a feeling that some members of You Me At Six were not pulling their weight. “Everyone brings something to the band but there may be times I feel I do more,” he says. And the petty arguments that had become a regularity in You Me At Six life didn’t help.
Some of those problems started the first time the band played the Warped Tour in 2009. There, a singer in another band had told Josh that, as the lyricist and melody writer, he was entitled to a greater share of You Me At Six’s royalties. From that moment on, the rest of his band eyed him doubtfully.
“If Josh had taken a bigger share because he writes the lyrics then it would have damaged us,” says Max who also writes much of the band’s music. “As a writer too, I would have been devastated. We’re all in this together and it could have changed how much commitment other people were prepared to put in.”
“We were barely making money then, and every other member of the band thought I was going to do it,” says Josh. “I don’t care about money though; I give most of mine to my parents to pay off their mortgage. But no-one asked me outright if I was going to do it. If they had, they’d have got the answer straight away: no.”
But no-one did ask him and, for 18 months, they worried he was going to take 60% of the pot which, until then, they had divided equally. It was symptomatic of the lack of communication. Clearly, this was not the basis for a harmonious band.
“Guys don’t really like to talk about their feelings,” says Josh. “They tend to just pick out the negatives. Chris is the shyest dude on the planet, Max and I are outspoken and Dan can be very aggressive, so these personalities can be explosive if no-one’s sitting down and having a mature conversation. And we weren’t.”
“We were so road-beaten and we’d been away from home for so long that there was a disconnection between us,” says Chris. “When you’re with the same five people for months, little things nag away until they become something big.”
It meant You Me At Six became increasingly dysfunctional.
“I would come off tour and be quite happy not to see any of the band at all,” says Josh. “At the start of the next tour, I’d get to the bus or airport not wanting to go on tour with these guys. By the end of 2009, Dan and I were barely talking.”
It is much of this that Josh is writing about on Bite My Tongue.
“But even though that song is so aggressive and angry, I am saying ‘I can’t hate the ones who made me’ about them,” he adds. “Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are. As much as there have been times I would have loved to drown them all, it is a love hate relationship. And I know they’ve thought the same about me – ‘the egotistical prick with classic lead singer syndrome’. That’s fine because any band that pretends that doesn’t happen is in a fucking dream world.”
How, then, do the rest of You Me At Six feel about playing on a song that is so critical of them?
“Erm... let me think about that,” says Max, pausing for a minute and worrying. “I suppose I’m glad he got things off his chest. It’s about time he was allowed to be open. I’m glad he doesn’t have to be worried about what he says.”
Which sounds like a tactful answer.
“Max knows it’s not really about him,” replies Josh.
“I think,” adds Dan later, “what’s frustrating for the rest of the band is that there are plenty of times I’ve wanted to tell Josh to fuck off. But because I’m not the singer or lyricist, I can’t say it in a song. I think we’re mature enough, though, that it’s not really a big deal.”
THERE IS a horrible irony that the incident that saved You Me At Six was a tragedy. The day that Hold Me Down went into the charts at Number 5, Dan’s dad died. Each of the band, though, credit that moment as the point where they refocused on what was important.
“I went from celebrating a top five record to not caring about it at all,” says Dan. “Perhaps it took something terrible to bring us five together. We needed that at the time.”
“It made us realise that we were arguing about nothing,” says Josh. “Dan, one of my best friends, was in agony. I never cried so much in my life. He said, ‘Why are we arguing here? What are the fundamental problems?’ That gave us perspective. We had got wrapped up in stuff that wasn’t important.”
Chris’s father, too, has passed away recently. Little Death, the sixth track on Sinners Never Sleep, is about both his and Dan’s dads and how young they were when they died. Its blazingly catchy chorus details Josh’s problems with a god who could allow that to happen. “My dad,” says Dan, “would have been stoked about it.”
It is further proof that You Me At Six have grown up on Sinners Never Sleep. While Bite My Tongue is evidence of increasingly complex relationships in the band, so Little Death shows they are writing about more serious topics than the parties and boy-girl relationships that fuelled their first two records.
Partly, they’ve matured because they’ve had to. Still only 21 and 22, You Me At Six’s success has come to them young – few bands their age are onto their third albums, having played both Brixton Academy and Reading Festival’s main stage. While many of their friends are finishing university, they have been sat in meetings with record label MDs, product managers and agents (the yin to the yang of touring, partying and playing their way around the world). It’s been a learning curve and one that, occasionally, has caught them unawares.
“I was on the back foot for a little while,” says Max, normally so cheerful and ebullient. “We’d played Brixton and gone to Australia and then, suddenly we hit Japan, and I didn’t feel like I was in the world at all. I felt lost. I didn’t know what I was doing with myself. I had to phone someone who convinced me to stay in the band. I bottle things up.”
“A lot’s happened in two years that has made us grow up fast,” says Josh. “It’s weird, I feel as though I’ve had to mature quickly in order to understand how to be in this band. Two of our members’ dads have passed away, we’ve had conflicts created by major labels talking about big sums of money – that’s a lot to take on when you’re 18, 19 or 20. It’s very easy to get caught up in it. I guess it was enough for us to internally break down.”
“It’s been unreal,” says Matt. “And it’s been so intense because we haven’t stopped – we’ve either been on the road or recording. It’s been a blur.”
But over the course of the last year, those strained relationships did begin to mend.
“We learned how to respect each other,” says Josh. “That takes time. We learned that there’s no point bottling things up and having an attitude.”
“It means that, now, things in the band are the best they’ve ever been,” says Max.
SINNERS NEVER Sleep was recorded – after fairly forceful petitioning on the band’s part – in Los Angeles. The five of them moved into three apartments in Hollywood, despite their record company’s initial reluctance to let them loose in the city. There, they recorded with Garth Richardson, the influential producer who has worked with Rage Against The Machine, Biffy Clyro and Gallows. The reason for the location was to provide them with an adventure. The reason for the producer was to help them make a more grown-up record.
Talk to You Me At Six for any length of time and the bands they now reference are not the New Found Glories and Blink 182s of old. Instead, they talk about the Foo Fighters and Biffy Clyro, mainstream rock bands.
“Timeless bands are not the ones who just blow up on a couple of pop songs,” says Chris. “Bands like Foo Fighters are straight up rock and that makes them timeless.”
“We namecheck the Foos a lot,” says Matt. “Pop-punk has come in and out, metal has too, but rock music will always be in. I’m not sure what we’re labelled anymore – are we a pop-punk band, a pop-rock band, emo-pop-rockers? We want to be a rock band.”
In the studio, they were determined to prove it.
“We wanted to reinvent ourselves,” says Josh. “But we were wary of that too. There’s a reason why we have done well so far and that’s because people like our sound. So we had to keep elements of that. But, for the sake of ourselves, we needed to develop. There are songs on Sinners Never Sleep that are slower or heavier than we’ve ever done before. They’re an indication of where we’d like to go in the future.”
One song, the album’s closer, is an experimental, six minute track; another – featuring Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall – matches Bite My Tongue as one of the heaviest they have attempted.
“I don’t want to hear a band release the same album three times, I want to hear them push some boundaries,” says Max. “We’ve taken it to the next step because we have grown up a lot and gone through some things together. I’m going to look forward to seeing what other people have to say about it – because I don’t think it’s what people are expecting.”
Initially, though, the sessions were fractious, with band and producer not gelling.
“Eventually, we had to have a confrontation with Garth. He can really push your buttons,” says Josh. “I said, ‘We respect you, but we don’t think you respect us – which is a problem’.”
Things eventually settled down, with Garth forcing the band to reach for their best.
“To be fair to him, at the beginning we were too relaxed. We were like, ‘LA! Let’s chill’,” says Josh. “He said, ‘No you don’t – if I’m doing my best, you’re going to do your best.’ As much as he drove me insane, he got the best out of me. I think I hate him as much as I love him. But I’m not sure I could work with him again.”
The sessions were marked by further Chinese whispers too: somehow a rumour spread that Josh wanted the band to return home so he could record alone. It was precisely the sort of thing that, previously, would have rumbled along in the background before exploding in a row further down the line.
This time You Me At Six tackled it head on. After a clear-the-air chat, Josh told them the rumour wasn’t true. Argument averted. “That shows that we’ve changed,” he says.
And in the end, there was even time for some fun. A few weeks in, after Matt finished tracking his bass, he went straight back to the band apartments and told them to pack their bags, they were going to Vegas.
“Twenty-five minutes later, we were on our way, ready to burn it across the desert,” he says. “We got there at 1am and none of our credit cards worked so we couldn’t check into our rooms. Instead, we stayed up until 6am going mental.”
“We had $200 and decided to have a little gamble,” says Josh. “We were gambling on roulette and we just kept on winning. We won every time! We put $200 on black and – bang! – it would come in. Then we put $400 on black and it came in again. It was insane. I won $1200!”
“And then,” adds Chris, “Everyone was in the pool the next day at 10am drinking margaritas.”
“Moments like that showed that, in the end, it was a lot of fun making this album,” says Matt. “It took a while and it was a lot of stress, but we’ve ended up with something great.”
A YEAR or so ago, You Me At Six were nearly over, riddled with issues. To survive, they’ve had to grow up. Death, money, stress and tiredness will do that to you. In maturing, they’ve learned to be straightforward with each other too. It’s why the rest of the band could allow Bite My Tongue onto the album.
“Something like that shows what friends we are,” says Dan. “It also shows that we’re being honest. Because, no matter how good your friendship, there’s always a point where you’ll think someone is a dick. That’s life. That’s why that song’s on the album.”
It also that gives them a future. Bands who write solely about life as a teenager having fun don’t tend to last long. You Me At Six are leaving that behind to write about other things. And they’re trying to do it as frankly as possible.
“This is what You Me At Six is all about now: no bullshit,” says Max, trying to sum up the last few years of the band. “We’ve had some ups and downs but we’re not going to put a fake face on things anymore. If we’re fucking hating this shit, we’ll tell you. If it’s the best point in our career, we’ll tell you that too. Right now? Things are the best they’ve ever been.”
© Tom Bryant 2012
Their debut album, Take Off Your Colours had taken them from their Surrey homes to the brink of success. Still teenagers, it earned them a major label record deal. And from every magazine article they adorned, they grinned the grins of those who couldn’t believe their luck.
In the can was their second album, Hold Me Down, a Technicolor pop-punk riot of big tunes, summery melodies and boy-girl dilemmas. Its release was accompanied by a great fanfare from fans, media and industry alike. From the outside looking in, life was pretty sweet.
From the inside, though, it was a little different. They hated each other.
On the eve of Hold Me Down’s release, You Me At Six were a band who could quite easily have broken up. Their singer, Josh Franceschi, would reach the end of tours and not want to see his band again. In return, drummer Dan Flint admits, “I wanted to tell Josh to fuck off”. Later on, despite having earned mainstage slots at Reading and a headline show at Brixton, guitarist Max Helyer, had such a significant panic that he wanted to leave the band, claiming he was lost.
Rumours and Chinese whispers swirled. The most serious was that Josh wanted a greater share of the band’s money. The other four members of the band – completed by guitarist Chris Miller and bassist Matt Barnes – were understandably upset.
For a British pop-punk band who seemed so primed for the sort of success their American counterparts enjoyed, suddenly it seemed the wheels might come off. Their stratospheric rise curtailed by arguments, suspicion and tenseness. Pretty mundane.
BUT, A year-and-a-half later, here they all are. All five of them. And they’re brandishing a new album.
Sinners Never Sleep is, in part, a chronicle of what they have been through. They hope it will be seen as a rock record, rather than a pop-punk one. From Josh’s savage attack on his bandmates (Bite My Tongue), to the gratitude he offers their fans on Little Bit Of Truth, it is certainly more world-weary than Hold Me Down. Josh sums up his mood on the record as “troubled”.
“That Hold Me Down cycle was probably one of the best years of our career professionally, but one of the worst personally,” says the singer.
“Some people think being in a band is all fun as you’re travelling the world,” adds Max. “But with the good comes the bad. This CD reflects that; it’s honest. This is not all fun and games. It hasn’t been an easy ride.”
Today, though, those troubles are behind them. We’re at Max’s parents’ house and, as his dad tends to a barbecue while his mum makes salads in the kitchen, You Me At Six mill about the patio, sharing jokes, taking the piss and laughing. Birds chirp, as the sun shines on a peaceful English summer garden.
One listen Sinners Never Sleep’s third song, the heavy (for You Me At Six) Bite My Tongue, proves things were not always this idyllic. Featuring a guest vocal from Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes – he ends his onslaught by repeatedly bellowing ‘<<Fuck you!>> over an aggressively spiky riff – the song finds Josh launching a scathing critique of the rest of his bandmates. It must make uneasy listening for them.
“Max asked me what the song was about when we were recording,” says Josh. “Usually I’d brush that off or sugar-coat it. This time, though, I said, ‘Basically, it’s about how much I fucking hate being in this band with all of you guys sometimes’.”
What had got him to that point was the long hard slog of touring and a feeling that some members of You Me At Six were not pulling their weight. “Everyone brings something to the band but there may be times I feel I do more,” he says. And the petty arguments that had become a regularity in You Me At Six life didn’t help.
Some of those problems started the first time the band played the Warped Tour in 2009. There, a singer in another band had told Josh that, as the lyricist and melody writer, he was entitled to a greater share of You Me At Six’s royalties. From that moment on, the rest of his band eyed him doubtfully.
“If Josh had taken a bigger share because he writes the lyrics then it would have damaged us,” says Max who also writes much of the band’s music. “As a writer too, I would have been devastated. We’re all in this together and it could have changed how much commitment other people were prepared to put in.”
“We were barely making money then, and every other member of the band thought I was going to do it,” says Josh. “I don’t care about money though; I give most of mine to my parents to pay off their mortgage. But no-one asked me outright if I was going to do it. If they had, they’d have got the answer straight away: no.”
But no-one did ask him and, for 18 months, they worried he was going to take 60% of the pot which, until then, they had divided equally. It was symptomatic of the lack of communication. Clearly, this was not the basis for a harmonious band.
“Guys don’t really like to talk about their feelings,” says Josh. “They tend to just pick out the negatives. Chris is the shyest dude on the planet, Max and I are outspoken and Dan can be very aggressive, so these personalities can be explosive if no-one’s sitting down and having a mature conversation. And we weren’t.”
“We were so road-beaten and we’d been away from home for so long that there was a disconnection between us,” says Chris. “When you’re with the same five people for months, little things nag away until they become something big.”
It meant You Me At Six became increasingly dysfunctional.
“I would come off tour and be quite happy not to see any of the band at all,” says Josh. “At the start of the next tour, I’d get to the bus or airport not wanting to go on tour with these guys. By the end of 2009, Dan and I were barely talking.”
It is much of this that Josh is writing about on Bite My Tongue.
“But even though that song is so aggressive and angry, I am saying ‘I can’t hate the ones who made me’ about them,” he adds. “Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are. As much as there have been times I would have loved to drown them all, it is a love hate relationship. And I know they’ve thought the same about me – ‘the egotistical prick with classic lead singer syndrome’. That’s fine because any band that pretends that doesn’t happen is in a fucking dream world.”
How, then, do the rest of You Me At Six feel about playing on a song that is so critical of them?
“Erm... let me think about that,” says Max, pausing for a minute and worrying. “I suppose I’m glad he got things off his chest. It’s about time he was allowed to be open. I’m glad he doesn’t have to be worried about what he says.”
Which sounds like a tactful answer.
“Max knows it’s not really about him,” replies Josh.
“I think,” adds Dan later, “what’s frustrating for the rest of the band is that there are plenty of times I’ve wanted to tell Josh to fuck off. But because I’m not the singer or lyricist, I can’t say it in a song. I think we’re mature enough, though, that it’s not really a big deal.”
THERE IS a horrible irony that the incident that saved You Me At Six was a tragedy. The day that Hold Me Down went into the charts at Number 5, Dan’s dad died. Each of the band, though, credit that moment as the point where they refocused on what was important.
“I went from celebrating a top five record to not caring about it at all,” says Dan. “Perhaps it took something terrible to bring us five together. We needed that at the time.”
“It made us realise that we were arguing about nothing,” says Josh. “Dan, one of my best friends, was in agony. I never cried so much in my life. He said, ‘Why are we arguing here? What are the fundamental problems?’ That gave us perspective. We had got wrapped up in stuff that wasn’t important.”
Chris’s father, too, has passed away recently. Little Death, the sixth track on Sinners Never Sleep, is about both his and Dan’s dads and how young they were when they died. Its blazingly catchy chorus details Josh’s problems with a god who could allow that to happen. “My dad,” says Dan, “would have been stoked about it.”
It is further proof that You Me At Six have grown up on Sinners Never Sleep. While Bite My Tongue is evidence of increasingly complex relationships in the band, so Little Death shows they are writing about more serious topics than the parties and boy-girl relationships that fuelled their first two records.
Partly, they’ve matured because they’ve had to. Still only 21 and 22, You Me At Six’s success has come to them young – few bands their age are onto their third albums, having played both Brixton Academy and Reading Festival’s main stage. While many of their friends are finishing university, they have been sat in meetings with record label MDs, product managers and agents (the yin to the yang of touring, partying and playing their way around the world). It’s been a learning curve and one that, occasionally, has caught them unawares.
“I was on the back foot for a little while,” says Max, normally so cheerful and ebullient. “We’d played Brixton and gone to Australia and then, suddenly we hit Japan, and I didn’t feel like I was in the world at all. I felt lost. I didn’t know what I was doing with myself. I had to phone someone who convinced me to stay in the band. I bottle things up.”
“A lot’s happened in two years that has made us grow up fast,” says Josh. “It’s weird, I feel as though I’ve had to mature quickly in order to understand how to be in this band. Two of our members’ dads have passed away, we’ve had conflicts created by major labels talking about big sums of money – that’s a lot to take on when you’re 18, 19 or 20. It’s very easy to get caught up in it. I guess it was enough for us to internally break down.”
“It’s been unreal,” says Matt. “And it’s been so intense because we haven’t stopped – we’ve either been on the road or recording. It’s been a blur.”
But over the course of the last year, those strained relationships did begin to mend.
“We learned how to respect each other,” says Josh. “That takes time. We learned that there’s no point bottling things up and having an attitude.”
“It means that, now, things in the band are the best they’ve ever been,” says Max.
SINNERS NEVER Sleep was recorded – after fairly forceful petitioning on the band’s part – in Los Angeles. The five of them moved into three apartments in Hollywood, despite their record company’s initial reluctance to let them loose in the city. There, they recorded with Garth Richardson, the influential producer who has worked with Rage Against The Machine, Biffy Clyro and Gallows. The reason for the location was to provide them with an adventure. The reason for the producer was to help them make a more grown-up record.
Talk to You Me At Six for any length of time and the bands they now reference are not the New Found Glories and Blink 182s of old. Instead, they talk about the Foo Fighters and Biffy Clyro, mainstream rock bands.
“Timeless bands are not the ones who just blow up on a couple of pop songs,” says Chris. “Bands like Foo Fighters are straight up rock and that makes them timeless.”
“We namecheck the Foos a lot,” says Matt. “Pop-punk has come in and out, metal has too, but rock music will always be in. I’m not sure what we’re labelled anymore – are we a pop-punk band, a pop-rock band, emo-pop-rockers? We want to be a rock band.”
In the studio, they were determined to prove it.
“We wanted to reinvent ourselves,” says Josh. “But we were wary of that too. There’s a reason why we have done well so far and that’s because people like our sound. So we had to keep elements of that. But, for the sake of ourselves, we needed to develop. There are songs on Sinners Never Sleep that are slower or heavier than we’ve ever done before. They’re an indication of where we’d like to go in the future.”
One song, the album’s closer, is an experimental, six minute track; another – featuring Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall – matches Bite My Tongue as one of the heaviest they have attempted.
“I don’t want to hear a band release the same album three times, I want to hear them push some boundaries,” says Max. “We’ve taken it to the next step because we have grown up a lot and gone through some things together. I’m going to look forward to seeing what other people have to say about it – because I don’t think it’s what people are expecting.”
Initially, though, the sessions were fractious, with band and producer not gelling.
“Eventually, we had to have a confrontation with Garth. He can really push your buttons,” says Josh. “I said, ‘We respect you, but we don’t think you respect us – which is a problem’.”
Things eventually settled down, with Garth forcing the band to reach for their best.
“To be fair to him, at the beginning we were too relaxed. We were like, ‘LA! Let’s chill’,” says Josh. “He said, ‘No you don’t – if I’m doing my best, you’re going to do your best.’ As much as he drove me insane, he got the best out of me. I think I hate him as much as I love him. But I’m not sure I could work with him again.”
The sessions were marked by further Chinese whispers too: somehow a rumour spread that Josh wanted the band to return home so he could record alone. It was precisely the sort of thing that, previously, would have rumbled along in the background before exploding in a row further down the line.
This time You Me At Six tackled it head on. After a clear-the-air chat, Josh told them the rumour wasn’t true. Argument averted. “That shows that we’ve changed,” he says.
And in the end, there was even time for some fun. A few weeks in, after Matt finished tracking his bass, he went straight back to the band apartments and told them to pack their bags, they were going to Vegas.
“Twenty-five minutes later, we were on our way, ready to burn it across the desert,” he says. “We got there at 1am and none of our credit cards worked so we couldn’t check into our rooms. Instead, we stayed up until 6am going mental.”
“We had $200 and decided to have a little gamble,” says Josh. “We were gambling on roulette and we just kept on winning. We won every time! We put $200 on black and – bang! – it would come in. Then we put $400 on black and it came in again. It was insane. I won $1200!”
“And then,” adds Chris, “Everyone was in the pool the next day at 10am drinking margaritas.”
“Moments like that showed that, in the end, it was a lot of fun making this album,” says Matt. “It took a while and it was a lot of stress, but we’ve ended up with something great.”
A YEAR or so ago, You Me At Six were nearly over, riddled with issues. To survive, they’ve had to grow up. Death, money, stress and tiredness will do that to you. In maturing, they’ve learned to be straightforward with each other too. It’s why the rest of the band could allow Bite My Tongue onto the album.
“Something like that shows what friends we are,” says Dan. “It also shows that we’re being honest. Because, no matter how good your friendship, there’s always a point where you’ll think someone is a dick. That’s life. That’s why that song’s on the album.”
It also that gives them a future. Bands who write solely about life as a teenager having fun don’t tend to last long. You Me At Six are leaving that behind to write about other things. And they’re trying to do it as frankly as possible.
“This is what You Me At Six is all about now: no bullshit,” says Max, trying to sum up the last few years of the band. “We’ve had some ups and downs but we’re not going to put a fake face on things anymore. If we’re fucking hating this shit, we’ll tell you. If it’s the best point in our career, we’ll tell you that too. Right now? Things are the best they’ve ever been.”
© Tom Bryant 2012
