Kaleidoscope and Fink Interview

This weekend [30^th Sept -2^nd Oct] sees St. Andrews play host to Scotland’s newest festival Kaleidoscope, an eco-friendly event that not only includes fantastic music but also fire performances, trapeze, aerial, circus, cabaret, burlesque, trash fashion parade, a people powered cinema, live graffiti and street art, dress ups, stilt walkers and a light/art installations. In preparation for the weekend’s festivities, Studentpunch.com was lucky enough to have a conversation with headlining artist Fin Greenall aka Fink.

Signed on the back of a cassette-tape demo Fin Greenall was an internationally renowned DJ and producer, even working on the initial demos by Amy Winehouse, before becoming the first singer/songwriter signed to the Ninja Tune record label.  Fink is currently touring the country in support of his latest record, the great Perfect Darkness and was speaking to Studentpunch.com just prior to going on stage in Belfast and I started out by asking simply how he was doing.

Fink:  Yeah, not too bad mate just getting ready for the show tonight it’s hopefully going to be a good one.

Studentpunch.com: You just played my hometown, and your old University town, Leeds the other day, how did that go?

Fink: Oh, Leeds was great man; Hi-Fi club was wicked and we had a fun time there. We just about squeezed our stuff in and had a nice intimate show, it was cool to play Leeds again, it’s been a while.

SP: That’s good to hear, you usually get a good crowd down there

Fink: Dude they were lovely, and it was fresher’s week so it was chaos out there, though I think our crowd was having a rest bite from the madness of fresher’s.

SP: On this tour you have teamed up with 59 Productions [designers of the visuals to Broadway smash War Horse] to put on somewhat of a visual extravaganza to go along side your music, did you bring the full show there then?

Fink: Nah, we couldn’t squeeze it on to the small stage. All these different venues in the UK where the venues are smaller we are playing more intimate shows. We have to be quite organic then when we get to Europe, where the shows are a little bigger and the audiences are a little bigger, we can bring out the projection Its all good man, its all organic.

SP: I guess it the case that here in the UK you can just focus completely on the music.

Fink: Well out in Europe and the States people have seen us a few times, so we have to keep upgrading and changing our show. But yeah, we’ve never played in Leeds before and it’s our first show in Bristol in a couple of weeks and our first gig in Belfast so in a way we just need to play the music and the light show is an extra bonus. I mean for now it’s just about the music and next time we come up people will be like “what else you got” and we can go ah ha, and have these light and the projections and all this extra shit going on. But we absolutely love touring [Perfect Darkness], either way though.

SP: So three or four albums down the road can we expect to see you touring with the full U2 stadium experience then?

Fink: [Laughs] Exactly, a live feed to Africa in the middle of the show would be good actually.

For some bands it’s just about rocking out but we tour and we put a lot of albums out and it all feeds into one an other, we put a lot of albums out so we can tour and we tour so we can record. It mean we can play new stuff and have a new show and it means we are not trapped in our hit and we have to play our hit every time, it means we can go out and play a new set every night for people.

SP: Well, speaking from experience the best live shows are the ones where a band’s set list is a bit unpredictable every time they play ‘your’ town.

Fink: True, yeah it’s come to the point with us that if you want to hear our album you’ve got to come out and see us on that tour, we’ve got key tracks that we do then when we come round again we won’t do them. It’s almost an extra bit of incentive to come out and see us on the Perfect Darkness tour.

SP: You recorded Perfect Darkness extremely fast, how does this album then transfer to a live setting?

Fink: The good thing is, because we recorded the album essentially live in the studio in LA, it means when we take to the stage all we have to do is play it. Its kind of cool actually, the last album was quite produced and we had to try and work out how to take it all and get it into a live setting. Now it’s just playing it live and capturing that energy is easy, as it’s the same process just in a different environment.

For example here in Belfast we’re going to play Perfect Darkness, we are likely going to play ‘Yesterday…’ and ‘Honestly’ exactly how they are on the record as best we can. And they all have their own energy. Once you start a song that is that deep it’s just a question of putting yourself in the zone where you can do the song justice, you can’t do any of my material on autopilot.

It’s all about the vibes between us on stage and these stages in the UK are very small, very intimate so we’re very close [laughs] so we can communicate and go off on adventures during the set. This is the first album where we don’t have to worry about playing it live we just play it. And it’s down to my voice. It has changed now it’s gone into a spot where I’m really confortable with it after all these years and all the practice we’ve had. I love it.

SP: You can really tell the difference between your voice, say now and even on your last record and you seem to be taking this ‘confidence’ and using it to create more personal and unique material…

Fink: I think it’s taken a lot of people in the UK by surprise. I think a lot of people boxed us into a particular genre and we make an effort to buck out of them. The good thing is that now we are our own genre but the bad thing is we don’t fit into the press’s confinements, were not indie, not blues, not folk were not anything, not straight down the line anything. On this Perfect Darkness album, yeah, I think the song writing’s good and the productions good and a lot of people are slowly getting into it.

We released it in July and the point was we wanted to get it out it early and let it bed in over the summer so people can discover it. We realised we wouldn’t get features in Q or even reviews in the NME or in the UK so we just wanted to get people listening to it and get really into it before we tour. Seems to be working though, all the gigs are packed and it’s really good. Packed with people who are surprised, because the record does have a different vibe to it.

We really made an effort on this one to write for a good couple of months and record it as quick as we could and it’s because we’re on an indie label our budget is slightly more… practical than if we were on Island or something. We would love to spend 6 months on a record but we’d have to sell a million records to pay it back, so we wanted to do a professional grown up Hollywood record but within the budget of a British indie label. I think we just about pulled it off.

The producer of the record Billy Bush is a legend and he said this is the fastest record he’s ever made. The last record he made before us was something like 18 months and we took 16 days. He was sceptical that we would get it done; he thought we only get the instrumentation done and the vocals would be done some other time but we were on it. We practiced our faces off to get ready for the recording session and we were good to go. It was one or two takes on every track, because we’d done all the work at home. It costs nothing to do it in your living room at home. I think we’re settling into people’s brains now though and that’s pretty great, it’s a really lovely feeling.

SP: I’m glad you mentioned Billy Bush as I wanted to ask you about his contribution to the record. Did he influence the album at all or did you have Perfect Darkness set out in your mind before you hit the studio?

Fink: What we wanted from a producer was not necessarily creative input but someone who was renowned for recording bands as they are and getting the best sounds out of them. For example Ethan Johns is a specialist in this, he recorded Laura Marling and Mumford, and likes just chucking bands into a room and capturing that sound. He’s way out of our league price wise [laughs] but that was the kind of thing we were looking for and with Billy Bush we found it. We wanted to use someone who had a background as a really solid engineer and a technical guy and knows how to record stuff, and he was perfect. We knew from his work with Butch Vig that there might be a big name producer on the record but the real work, the nuts and bolts comes from the engineer and that’s Billy. He worked with Butch Vig [SP:  Vig worked on Nirvana’s Nevermind] and he worked with big bands.

He was amazing, he just said, “tell me what you want and we’ll get it.” We didn’t want complicated stuff, we wanted the drums to sound awesome, the guitar to sound natural and the bass to fat and the usual shit, and he was just perfect for it, really calm, really fast. When you’ve got sixteen days you’ve got to be fast.

He had the down time; we needed just two weeks so he gave us an amazing price, because he doesn’t need the money and I think he liked the music to be honest, and he liked the idea of us lot flying into LA and banging it out. We learnt a lot about how fast you can do stuff, we had an idea and before you could think about it the stage was set just to record it and try stuff.

There’s a track called ‘Wheels’ on the album, and it’s a totally live moment. I said, “I might have a new one bubbling up at the moment and need to get into the room”, I got my head together and got in there. With Billy you just do stuff while you have the feeling. He’s a great guy. Love to work with him again. I think it ruined me as a producer though. I won’t produce any more because he the sound he got out of us is infinitely better that what I’ve ever done and it made me realise, moving forward… producers are a good thing.

SP: Do you think you’ll ever record this fast again?

Fink: Lets see, a lot depends on where we record. Getting out of our home environment and going where we can focus our time and energy, is good. Home life feels far away and I loved that. I like to record in Amsterdam, as I love that city. Maybe not quite that quick again though [laughs], depends on what we sell, you never know if we sell enough it might be 6 months with Ethan Johns and, well, happy days.

SP: So what can people expect from your Kaleidoscope set?

Fink: Until we see the stage I don’t know, though it’s very courageous to do a festival at that time of year in Scotland but we’re hoping it’s dry. If the stage is big enough we’ll bring the full Monty. Or, if not, it’ll be sweet intimate show. The great thing about touring every night is different; we’ve no idea what’s going to happen, there are so many variables.

SP: What else does the future hold for Fink?

Fink: Well, we are on tour till December, which is a 50-date monster with something like 14 countries. Then we get Christmas off. But after that I’ve got some projects to complete and the drummer has a book to write, then in 2012 back on the road just in time for Festival season.

SP: So we can expect you at the big festivals next year then?

Fink: Hope so. Mainly in Europe we think though we’d love to do Bestival, which is just Fresher’s week madness with tents or Big Chill but I love Green Man. Bloody brilliant festival, love it [SP: So do we!]. We played there in 2007, it’s great because it’s about the music.

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Fink is currently touring the country and tour dates can be at finkworld.co.uk

 

More information about Kaleidoscope can be found at http://www.kaleidoscopefestival.co.uk/

 

 

Daniel W. Raper

Twitter: @danielwraper