We Were Promised Jetpacks in conversation

With Luxembourg's Rock-A-Field festival just a few weeks away, Sam’s Scene will be featuring a number of interviews with some of the bands featured on the bill.

Scottish indie rock group We Were Promised Jetpacks are set to play on the Saturday, July 4, and Darren Lackie, the band's drummer, took some time to talk to Sam all about their current tour plans, their most recent album 'Unravelling' and the pitfalls of releasing a live record. 

By Sam Steen

We Were Promised Jetpacks have been around for a few years now and were even in Luxembourg as recently as 2012 when they played at the Rockhal.

The band has a loyal and steadily growing fan base but even so they are still happy to do support slots for other bands. Indeed their current tour starts with a few support gigs for Death Cab For Cutie in London.

Darren says there are plenty of advantages to getting on stage early. “(They are) Generally pretty easy, there’s not that much pressure on you, you just turn up play a nice 30 minute/40 minute set and then that’s you off”, he said, “They’re pretty good yeah (laughing) we quite like the support tours, they're relaxing you don’t have all the stress and hassle of a headline tour you just turn up an hour before the doors, have a little sound check, play a little gig, brilliant!” 

While happy to play further down the bill, the Edinburgh five-piece have seen a decent level of success in the United States and will be playing almost as many concerts state-side as in Europe this summer.

Explaining their popularity there Darren says: “It kind of started at the very start of our career. Our record label, Fat Cat, are based both in the UK and the US so we got quite lucky with that because they wanted to push us in America and when we first went over there we went with two other Scottish bands on the label, 'Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad' and we did a sort of three-band bill all across America and that went really well.

"We just kind of followed along on the coat tails of Frightened Rabbit and Twilight Sad who had been doing really well over there and I think our music just got across to their fans as well and since then it’s been on the up.”

So much so that We Were Promised Jetpacks released a live album based around a concert they did in Philadelphia last year. But, Darren says that putting together a live album isn’t as easy as you might think.

“We did it pretty badly the first time", he said. “We booked a small venue in Glasgow and tried to do a sort of ticket give-away type thing. It was a small venue so some sort of 'apply for tickets' thing or something like that. It was a bit silly and it all went a bit wrong. It was just a random gig in the middle of nothing. We hadn’t been touring or playing shows it was just plopped in the middle of us doing nothing so it didn’t sound very good or go very well so we decided it would be better if we did it on a big headline show and America always makes sense for stuff like that.”

Darren admitted it probably sounded a bit more impressive to do it in America too. “Yeah 'Live in Philadelphia' or 'Live in a basement in Glasgow'”, he laughed, adding that they were much better prepared when they recorded this time.

"We’d had a whole month-long tour and a whole month of playing the set. We were fairly confident and it came out a lot better than the first one.”

As for studio albums, WWPJ brought out their third in October 2014. Entitled 'Unravelling', it received positive reviews all round with drownedinsound.com describing it as “a menacing post-rock effort and an accessible collection of hook-laden songs”.

Talking about the recording of the album Darren said: “We did it so we were doing a kind of Monday to Friday kind of thing. We had the weekends off which I think helped us. It was nice to have the relaxing time at the weekend and look over what we’d done during the week or even just have some time away from it because it can get a bit much when you’re in there 12/13 hours a day every day. Your head starts to turn a bit in to mush.”

Darren went on to say that there were some other differences in the recording process of 'Unravelling' to their previous work.

“We did demos a couple of times which is not something we’ve really done before,” he said.

“We did some preproduction days with a couple of different producers. A couple of songs weren’t ready when we went in to the studio. We decided deliberately to leave some of them as just skeletons of songs and we’d work on them when we got there.”

But what are the differences between working on the songs at home and in studio?

“I guess you know you’re paying for this nice studio so you’ve got to do something in it! But it’s also good to have an outside perspective as well if you have a producer. We were working with Paul Savage, who’s done a lot of great albums and we’ve worked with him once before so we knew he was someone we could rely on to help us out and someone who would push us” he said.

We Were Promised Jetpacks are sure to go through a set looking back through their previous work as well as material from their latest album. But, they have already started work on their next LP even if they don’t have a release date in mind just yet.

“I wouldn’t say we’re working on the album or have deadlines or anything like that but we decided to just get started early and start writing because quite often these things can sneak up on you” explained Darren.

We Were Promised Jetpacks will play on Saturday, July 4, at this years’ Rock-A-Field festival in Luxembourg and are definitely a band you shouldn’t miss.

Get your tickets at www.rockafield.lu

Unravelling is out now.

Click here to read more articles from Sam's Scene

Do not miss the news - sign up to receive thewort.lu newsletter in Englishdelivered to your inbox six days a week.