L O NE W O L F FR O M S TA G E T O PA GE Nabbing a rather sweaty Paul Marshall post gig, Spencer Bayles managed to bombard Leeds’s favourite cut-off canine with some performance related questions. The results are curiously coherent... Photo by Sarah Burton
You’ve just played your first big headline show in your home town how was it? I can’t really remember anything! It went so quickly. I don’t really know how to put it into words. I’m not speechless because I thought we played amazingly; I’m just happy that so many people came, and they didn’t just pay for a ticket then stand and chat. They were genuinely there for the show, and I’m dumbfounded as that’s a first for me Did you have any idea it’d be so popular? I hear it was close to being, if not an actual, sell-out. I wanted to see about a hundred people here, and so to know there was that many people out there who were waiting for this sort of thing to happen… it’s totally made my life! How come you haven’t been gigging much in Leeds recently? You don’t want to play your home town too often, as otherwise this [kind of successful event] won’t happen. Also I wanted to choose my time. We played the Play Patterns festival at Joseph’s Well and we all really dug it, so I thought maybe we should book a gig now. We were going to do this at the beginning of December, but it turned out I’d accidentally booked on the same night as Villagers, so we moved it back - I think we made the right choice. Was the Brudenell Social Club always the first choice of venue for this gig? Always is and always will be. The couple of new tunes in the set went down really well – is it a good taster of what the next album
will sound like, and will you use members of tonight’s live band on the record? The new album’s going to be a bit different; it’ll have a beginning and an end, with parts that recur throughout. I’ve been very much inspired by Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit Of Eden’, and The Antlers. James Kenosha will be recording it, and I reckon he’ll probably play the drums on it, because he’s the dude. Jon [Foulger] is going to be co-producing it with me, because I love his vision. I’m a massive Duels fan anyway, and that’s why I’m honoured to have them on
stage with me. I’d like to have Jon there because I feel he can steer my record in the right direction – he can remind me what I originally wanted to do. Those two new songs are two of the more upbeat ones.
“ T HERE’S ST ILL SO ME DA RK ST UFF, BUT IT ’S A BIT MO RE UPLIFT ING.” The album is about the end of something but you don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s not a concept record, but it has a recurring theme. And what’s next on the Lone Wolf calendar? We’re playing in Paris on Saturday, and then there are a couple of gigs at the beginning of February in Liverpool and Wakefield. After that I’m going back into the studio to start the next record. I’m itching to get going on with it, ‘cos I don’t want to sit on it like I did with ‘The Devil And I’. A song like ‘We Could Use Your Blood’ was written three years ago, and I don’t want to do that this time – I want to have songs that are all new. Spencer Bayles Keep up with Lone Wolf at iamlonewolf.com... and nab a copy of ‘The Devil and I’ while you’re at it, yeah? 21