Interviu cu Harry McVeigh – vocalist WHITE LIES
1. How would you describe, in 30 words or less, White Lies on a flyer promoting your gig?
White lies music is a contrast between light and dark, expect and intensely emotional show with extreme highs and lows in both the music and the performance.
2. The hype surrounding White Lies is quite impressive (“At the beginning of 2009, White Lies featured in multiple “ones to watch” polls for the coming year, including the BBC’s Sound of 2009 poll and the 2009 BRITs Critics’ Choice Award.” – Wikipedia); how do you keep it real?
We all have a lot of friends and family at home and we all have pretty normal lives really, the only difference is when we are working we are traveling all over the world which can be pretty intense. The fact that we all have long term girlfriends as well certainly stops us from becoming very arrogant because they would never let us!!!
3. Your music (and lyrics) shuffle between light and dark (sleep/death etc), and I can’t help get the feeling of a very personal experience; is this why you gave up on Fear of Flying (whose music feels less personal) – to reinvent the band, and get a fresh start?
The music we make as white lies is much more reflective of our personalities and who we are than what we were doing before as fear of flying. When we were in the band fear of flying we were still very young and growing up, when anyone looks back on that period of their lives they will realise how much they learnt in every way and we are exactly the same, when we started white lies we had learnt how to write music that truly meant something to us and also to other people, it changed everything.
4. Harry said about White Lies’ music being compared to the likes of Joy Division, Interpol etc: “I think we’re a lot more euphoric and
uplifting”. “Euphoric and uplifting”?
Joy Division are a band that demand a lot of repect and have certainly influenced a lot of people, but we have trouble listening to their music because it is so cold and morbid, there is no hope or happiness anywhere in there songs. I think our music, although lyrically it deals with some quite dark things, is quite the opposite I think there is a lot of hope and happiness and I think people are starting to realise that with our band and our music certainly when they see the live performance.
5. How does the life of a contemporary rock band look like? Is the glam still there?
Being in a rock band is a lot of hard work, it’s something that i don’t think people really realise when they see a show or listen to an album. To build a career for yourself you have to do the same thing as any job and work very hard, we are very lucky that our job is something that we all love and enjoy more than anything and we get to do it with our best friends.
6. You started venturing into music when you were all still kids; when did you realize this was very serious and you could actually have a career in the field?
It wasn’t until we started white lies and the music that we were making started to generate a lot of interest in the music industry, when everyone paid attention we realised we could do this as a job.
7. I absolutely love your website; what’s the idea behind it?
The idea behind the website is to highlight the imagery in the music usuing the music video’s, which we love, as a background. The idea’s for most things related to the band come from the idea’s in the music its very easy to make everything look and feel right that way.
8. You tour a lot, and will play in Bucharest at Bestfest right before The Killers; anything special we should know about your live
performance?
As I said before it is an intense show and it will be very exciting, it is going to be great for us to share a stage with the killers and we
will certainly try to give the people of Romania something that they don’t expect, I hope you enjoy it!!!
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Interviu realizat pentru Feeder.ro de Alex Rosu.
Pe WHITE LIES ii puteti vedea in concert la BestFest 2009 in data de 01 iulie.