ONE ON ONE: AN INTERVIEW WITH BOSTON MANOR!

We sat down with Henry Cox of Boston Manor to talk about their upcoming album 'Datura', growing as a band, their upcoming live shows and much more!

Published On: 12/10/2022

YOUR NEW ALBUM ‘DATURA’ RELEASES NEXT FRIDAY THE 14TH AND I’VE BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH TO HEAR IT ON A PRESS COPY, IT’S AN INCREDIBLE ALBUM, SO CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU GUYS! WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM THE NEW ALBUM?

I suppose if you’re already familiar with the band it occupies familiar territory. It's the first part of a larger concept that we have been working on for a few years now and that's why it's such a short track list, because it's one half of a larger whole. It's a concept record and it's a pretty dark sounding record, it’s kind of set at night so to speak. Datura is a flower that blooms only at night which is why we called it that and it is a piece that we wrote with the intention of people being up to digest it in one sitting, another reason why we sort of split it into two parts. So yeah! I hope that people come at it from that angle and they get a chance to listen to it, I think it’s only 27 minutes.

JUST UNDER 30 MINUTES. WAS IT ALWAYS THE PLAN TO MAKE IT A TWO PART ALBUM OR WAS THAT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN THE PROCESS OF MAKING IT? DECIDING - YOU KNOW WHAT, WE’LL SPLIT IT DOWN AND MAKE IT INTO TWO SHORTER PIECES.

It was always the plan actually, we talked about it for a while. We did ‘Desperate Times, Desperate Pleasures’ before that which was our first full into EP's in quite a long time and we really enjoyed the format of creating something that was a little bit more concentrated and shorter.

We thought we missed having the focus in a way, when making a record. If you make 14 tracks (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, we probably will go back to making 14 track albums after this.) but I do think sometimes there is an element of spending a lot of time making 14 songs and then you just look at the analytics on every streaming service after track six or track seven, the plays drops of massively. That’s just the case with everybody because it’s the format and the way that streaming has engineered people to listen to music.

I also just think it allows you to be a little more editorial when making records because we recorded more than seven songs, we recorded quite a few songs but we were pretty cut-throat and were like ‘Nah, that’s just not up to par and it's not as good as the rest’ or it was just doing the same job that the better song was doing. We kind of looked at it like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, What’s working? What’s serving the greater concept and what is just filler?

IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN REVEAL TO US ABOUT PART TWO? WHEN CAN WE EXPECT STUFF FROM THAT TO START DROPPINGOR WHEN CAN WE EXPECT THE FULL ABLUM TO BE OUT?

I have a plan, I don’t want to reveal anything in case it doesn't match that timeline because things just shift all the time. We are working on it now, we’ll hopefully get a bit of studio time early next year and start chipping away at it. We’ve started to now do things in little chunks as opposed to one big block of recording, so we do two weeks here, two weeks there and go back and forth. The plan is after Christmas to start actually tracking some stuff and we’re writing all the time, we never really stop writing. That’s the plan, we’ll see if it turns out that way.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THIS NEW ALBUM IS THAT IT’S QUITE DIFFERENT FROM ‘DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE PLEASURES’ AND ‘GLUE’. THERE’S A LOT MORE ELECTRONIC SOUNDS ON IT. I WAS WONDERING WHERE THAT SORT OF DIRECTION CAME FROM?

Yeah, I love all that shit and I make a lot of that kind of music on my own, this desk in front of me is just covered in synths everywhere. It’s kind of my little weird hobby. All of us grew up listening to bands that really used a lot of that like Nine Inch Nails and Deftones. That was the time I started buying CD’s, it was not uncommon for bands to have a DJ in the band.

THE TRACK BEFORE ‘INERTIA’ ON THE ALBUM, WHICH IS JUST A FULL THREE MINUTE ELECTRONIC ATMOSPHERIC CUT, I’D LIKE TO DIVE INTO THAT TOO. IS THAT SOMETHING THAT WE’RE GOING TO SEE MORE OF? APART FROM THE ‘FY1’ INTERLUDE ON ‘WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD’ IT’S KIND OF THE FIRST TIME YOU’VE DONE SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

Yeah, there will definitely be interludes on the next record. That first synth I showed you is actually what that whole interlude was made with. It’s really weird, organismic synth is what it’s called so it just has a life of its own which is really interesting. You can plug away at it, turn knobs and press buttons and it just creates really strange evolving sounds. I do love interludes and I think that this whole record’s purpose is to put you into a world that we’ve built and let it be really 3D. You can get in it, walk around, touch it, smell it and hear it. I think an interlude does a really good job at doing that, it can serve as palette cleansers to ease you into different sections of the record and it can also just give you a little bit of time to breathe. I do think that a lot of the albums I first listened to when I was old enough to buy CD’s, there used to be loads of interludes. I particularly like hip-hop records, I used to listen to a lot of hip-hop when I was a little kid.

DO YOU STILL LISTEN TO THAT MUSIC NOW OR ARE YOU MORE SET ON ROCK?

I listen to everything man! It’s a bit of a cliche but I genuinely get something out of almost every genre of music. I think we all go through little cycles, like you’ll have a month listening to loads of metal and then a month where you listen to drum bass. I still listen to all sorts of stuff, it was probably the first genre that I really connected with when I was a little kid. Maybe because it was what was really popular in the charts at the time, like 50 Cent and Eminem. Eminem is a good example because he used to have skits and he’d also have interludes. He’d have 32 track albums and half of them would be 15 second weird moments but it definitely made it feel like a bigger concept.

I’M ALSO FROM BLACKPOOL SO I KIND OF KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE, BUT I’M INTERESTED TO KNOW HOW BLACKPOOL HAS INFLUENCED BOSTON MANOR OVER THE YEARS. OF COURSE ‘WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD’ WAS SET IN BLACKPOOL, BUT ‘GLUE’, ‘DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE PLEASURES’ AND THE NEW ALBUM, IS IT STILL IN THAT WORLD? OR HAS IT MOVED OUT OF IT.

This record is 100%. This record goes back to that ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’ sort of noir-esque version of Blackpool that we’ve been creating. I love it, it might sound a little pretentious but I've recently been describing Blackpool as my muse. I really do think it is in a large sense, at least for Boston Manor. It has such an influence on the aesthetic, the sound and us as people because we still practise, write and even record in the very centre of the town.

ROCK HARD STUDIOS?

Yeah! I was there like two days ago. I used to practice there with my old bands too, it’s really served musicians well over the years. It’s the centre of our universe really, everybody but me still lives in Blackpool and I love it there, I'll probably move back there at some point. There’s nowhere else like it, it’s a very unique place. I’ll come back for band practice or whatever and I'll just go for a walk down the prom (promenade) and stuff. I just love it, I love everything about it. I love the people there and I think it’s great.

JUST WHILST WE’RE STILL TALKING ABOUT BLACKING, I WANT TO ASK - CAN WE EXPECT A HOMETOWN SHOW AT ANY POINT IN THE NEAR FUTURE? IS THAT IN THE WORKS?

Yes.

THAT’S WHAT I LIKE TO HEAR. I’M ASSUMING THAT’LL BE SOME POINT NEXT YEAR.

Ah maybe, maybe not. Maybe in the next couple of weeks you’ll see some info on that.

YOU’VE GOT YOUR TOUR WITH ALEXISONFIRE COMING UP STARTING ON THE DATE THAT ‘DATURA’ DROPS. WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM THE LIVE SHOW? WILL THERE BE MORE OF A FOCUS ON THE NEW ALBUM OR WILL THERE BE MORE SONGS FROM THE OLDER ALBUMS ON THE SETLIST?

Yeah, it’s pretty imbalanced really. There is quite a lot of new stuff off the new album and the last EP. The reason for that is because we’ve been a band for quite a long time now, next year will be 10 years which is mental. We’ve obviously changed our sounds quite dramatically over the years from our early EP’s and our first album. We’ll never totally stop playing songs from the first record, I'm sure every now and again we’ll come back to it but this tour is a chance for us to play to a lot of new faces and I think we want to lean with our best foot forward and play the music which really represents us at this point. We’re not going to be playing anything off ‘Be Nothing’ and I'm pretty happy about that because I think we have been working really hard over the past three years and we’ve really been hitting our stride with the music we’ve been making. I think if you’re a new fan just discovering a band then you’d want to hear the stuff that they’re releasing now. We’ll always throw in old favourites and ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’ is still a very definitive album which we still play tracks from. We mix it up, some shows and some tours we’ll just throw a song in. We started playing ‘Funeral Party’ the other day at a couple of festivals we had done. We hadn't played that for a few years. We swap stuff in and out all the time, we’re not a band that has a super rigid live set which means we can be quite flexible and chop and change when we want. Sometimes mid tour we’ll change the setlist if it’s not working. It’s one of the benefits to being a little more punk in terms of our actual equipment and set up for a band of this level.

YOU MENTIONED THAT YOUR SOUND HAS CHANGED FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF ‘BE NOTHING’, THE CHANGE FEELS QUITE NATURAL ‘WTTN’ STILL KEPT SOME OF THAT OLD SOUND. AS TIME HAS GONE ON IT SEEMS LESS ABOUT THE STRAIGHT PUNK SOUNDS AND IS NOW MORE ATMOSPHERIC AND ROCK, DID THAT HAPPEN NATURALLY OR DID YOU ALWAYS HAVE THE INTENTION OF MAKING NEW ALBUMS TO MAKE THEM SOUND NEW?

Yeah, it’s a bit of both really. The two aren't mutually exclusive I don’t think either. We’ve naturally gravitated towards the music that we want to make and that’s what we always do. Honestly, you could chart the shift from album one to album two and there’s been a very dramatic shift, but the difference between album two and the stuff after much less so because we found the tools that we had to use in the shed so to speak. It’s just more about what we’re actually making, we’ve definitely discovered our core base of the sonic palette. From there, it’s just about pushing the boundaries a little bit more every time. Sometimes you push one way and it’s not quite right and sometimes you try something else out and it works out really well. That’s where the interesting stuff comes from. So we’ll always try different shit and we’re influenced by a large variety of things, if this doesn't sound too arrogant I think we’ve started to recently become quite influenced by ourselves in a weird way. I’m very proud of our discography, I wouldn't say that every track we’ve written is a great song, I'd say there's a lot of stuff that I listen back to and think I would not do that now and I wouldn't listen to that now, but i’m very proud of it all. Sometimes the best thing to do when we come to write is to just switch off from everything, you need to be listening to things all the time and enjoy music because if you're not a fan of music then what's the point? But I think being able to shut yourself away when it comes to create from the wider musical zeitgeist is really important because it means you hone on your own music and you don’t start comparing yourself to others or copying other bands. I’ve definitely been guilty of that. Subconsciencly myself, you go and record a track and then your mums like ‘Oh that sounds a bit like that song on the radio.’ It’s part of being a music fan, you have all of these echoes of music history just bouncing around your brain all the time. I think just being into your own shit is crucial really and not getting too in your own head, not seeing every musical decision as the be all and end all of both the song and career.

HAS THERE BEEN STUFF THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN OR RECORDED WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN RELEASED THAT MAYBE ONE DAY YOU’D LIKE TO BE RELEASED? IS EVERYTHING THAT YOU’VE RELEASED WHAT YOU WANTED TO PUT OUT? AND WERE YOU HAPPY ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MAYBE DID GET THROWN AWAY?

So we kind of recorded two albums of ‘Glue’ and one of them got thrown away or we wrote a demo to albums and one of them got chucked in the bin. For every album, we write fucking millions of songs, or demo them at least, sometimes we’ll even take two bits of two songs and merge them together. ‘Desperate Pleasures’ is one of those songs. Sometimes we’ll also come back and think ‘That bridge in that demo which we didn't do anything with on the last record was pretty cool’ and then we’ll nick that. There’s nothing that I haven't released that I wouldn't want to put out now. The only thing that we talked about recently which I'm actually getting quite into is I went back and listened to the demos over the pandemic on a twitch stream of all the ‘Glue’ and ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’ demos which was pretty fun if somewhat a bit narcissistic. I listened to the ‘Terrible Love’ demo which is a song from ‘Glue’ and I think the demo of that song is better than what the original song became. I think we deviated from the demo quite a lot and I think the demo was onto a better idea. We’ve talked about that and joked about it quite a bit but we’ve talked a little bit about re-recording that song in the style of the original demo and re-releasing it as a B-side, I think that’d be interesting.

YOU’VE DONE THE ACOUSTIC VERSIONS OF SONGS BEFORE SO I THINK RE-RELEASING A BRAND NEW B-SIDE OF A SONG WOULD BE QUITE INTERESTING TO DO.

Yeah - there's no rules as well, it’s just music, you can do whatever you want.

IF PEOPLE DON’T LIKE IT THEY CAN ALWAYS GO BACK AND LISTEN TO THE ORIGINAL VERSION

Exactly yeah! I was having this conversation with Mike the other day. A lot of people are like ‘Oh seven songs, I wish it was more’ I was like, ‘It’s free! You don't have to spend a penny to listen to it. If there’s not enough songs for you, It’s free.’

THIS MIGHT BE A REALLY WEIRD COMPARISON, BUT IN 2018 WHEN KANYE MADE A BUNCH OF ALBUMS WITH OTHER PEOLE WHICH WERE ALL SEVEN TRACKS AND IT ALL PRETTY MUCH SEEMED LIKE THEIR BEST WORK. TRIMMING STUFF DOWN CAN BE FOR THE BETTER.

Yeah, and again there are no rules. We’ll go back to making longer albums and maybe again we’ll do a shorter album, it’s still music. We have a higher turnaround rate than most rock bands, in like three years we probably will have released three albums and an EP which is mental.

IT SEEMS LIKE YOU GUYS ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING IN THE WORKS, WHETHER IT’S A SINGLE, AN EP OR AN ALBUM.

For sure. We just always like making tunes and recording. It’s our full time job so we’re really just doing the band.

DID THE PANDEMIC INFLUENCE ANY OF THIS AT ALL? OF COURSE SINCE THE PANDEMIC STOPPHED IT HAS BEEN CONSISTENT TOURING, NEW SONGS, AN EP AND NOW ‘DATURA’ IS OUT. SO WITHOUT THAT TIME TO TOUR, WAS THERE STUFF THAT CAME OUT OF THAT?

Yeah, the whole last EP was kind of a pandemic project so to speak. Even on ‘Datura’, the first song is a poem I wrote in 2020. It was just floating around and I didn't really have anything to use it for but I wanted to use it for something. We actually printed it on some merch which came out years ago, I don’t know if anyone has even clocked that yet but I think it’s on a pair of joggers. There’s still stuff that’s come from the pandemic and a lot of this record is a bit of a hangover from the pandemic, it’s a lot about realising things aren't totally back to normal and how we have changed as a culture. We’ve shifted onto a trajectory that we wouldn't have done had there been no pandemic and I think a lot of people are just now realising how badly a lot of those things affected us.

OUTSIDE OF ‘DATURA’, WHO WOULD YOU LIKE TO WORK WITH ON FUTURE ALBUMS? YOU’RE WORKING WITH THE SAME PRODUCER, LARRY HIBBITT, WHO YOU WORKED WITH ON ‘DESPERATE TIMES, DESPERATE PLEASURES’ FOR AT LEAST THE FIRST SECTION OF ‘DATURA’, ARE YOU WORKING WITH THEM ON THE SECOND PART TOO?

Yeah, he’ll definitely do the next record.

AND AFTERWARDS WOULD THERE BE ANYONE YOU’D LIKE TO WORK WITH YOU WHO HAVEN’T YET?

I don't know, it’s a weird one because you can look at all these producers and think ‘Oh wow imagine what it’d be like to work with Steve Albini or Garth because they’ve made this record.’ It’s such a unique thing, the relationship between the producer and the artist and it’s just like a pair of shoes - they fit everybody differently. I could say it’d be incredible to do a record with this person but it might not work. We’ve had lots of zoom calls and things with people who could maybe produce an album for us and have worked with all these artists that we love and they’re really cool but it’s just about finding the right fit. We’ve been lucky to work with two amazing producers, Mike Sapone who made ‘Glue’ and ‘Welcome to the Neighbourhood’ is an incredibly talented person who changed the course of our band's history and changed us as songwriters and musicians for the better. He is still one of our very dear friends and I imagine at some point we will make another record with him. Same with Larry Hibbitt, he has brought a whole new energy to the band and broadened our horizons in some ways, we’re really lucky to have him. At the moment it’s kind of a don’t fix what isn't broken situation.

YEAH! I’VE GOT A FEW QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS FOR US AND THAT SHOULD BE IT FOR US TODAY - WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SONG THAT YOU HAVE RELEASED?

Ever? Oh I have no idea! I couldn't pick just one, it always changes every week.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE ON THE NEW RECORD THEN?

I think ‘Crocus’ is my favourite from ‘Datura’. I think. ‘Crocus’ or ‘Inertia’.

I DON’T KNOW WHY I SAID A FEW QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS THAT WAS ACTUALLY THE ONLY ONE I HAD.. SO I’D JUST LIKE TO SAY THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME, IT’S BEEN AN ABSOLUTE PLEASURE BEING ABLE TO TALK TO YOU TODAY - WELL DONE ON THE NEW RECORD, IT’S GENUINELY INCREDIBLE.

Thank you so much Sam I really appreciate your time and thank you for the great questions, but yeah, I’ll see you - have a great rest of your week!

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