Interview by matt ayres
ST UNDERRATED ROCK BAND... to do that now. That's boring.' We lost track of what it would be like for someone else to hear it for the first time." Luckily, the band's perfectionist approach paid off. The result was a momentous album that put Tellison back on the map, and The Wages of Fear became one of the most talked about independent releases in the UK. Keen to capitalise on this momentum, they've been touring ever since, whilst simultaneously writing a third album to make up for lost time. 'We want to do it a lot faster, that's the key notion", Davidson explains. "We've taken so long with our past two records, and spending so long on something makes you go a bit mad; you lose sight of any kind of quality control which makes everything take ten times as long because you second guess everything. You end up being like "Is this snare drum ok? Is that snare hit at 58 seconds the snare hit that we want to have associated with us for the rest of our lives?" That shit doesn't matter, so we've been talking about recording in different ways. But we want to do it swifter, we want to make it fun." With rivaled chemistry, it's easy to believe that a band like Tellison could pull off another belter of an album simply by tracking it live, one option that Davidson considers "a definite possibility." Rest assured, the new material will impress: at Truck Festival this year, the band showcased a new song that was bold in its simplicity and shone as a set highlight, even among a host of archive favourites. The lead singer's musical
influences reveal more of what the new stuff's about: "I've been listening to the Weakerthans, Greg MacPherson, Pedro the Lion, David Bazan... I think with this record we want a style of songwriting that's not too highly wrought. We want to state our ideas honestly, straight up. That's exciting for me. "With this record, I'm just interested in writing great pop songs. That's difficult, it's hard. People often stick their noses up at it and decide to write songs in 8/15, write weird time signatures and weird shit just because that's supposedly clever. I'm much more interested in writing songs that are in 4/4. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. But making it great. So many people have done that, and if you can do it well then it's gonna be instinctive; people who are listening to it are gonna feel like they know it already. That's what I want to do." With the demoing process underway, we're expecting big things from Tellison in 2013. For now, you can pay what you like for their cracking Christmas song, 'Good Luck It's Christmas.' It's available from tellison.bandcamp.com (where you can also check out the rest of the band's back catalogue). All proceeds go to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), a charity dedicated to lowering suicide rates among young males in the UK. Have a heart and pay generously - good music + good ethics = good on you.
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