Ed Masley

The Republic | azcentral.com

“And then, obviously, we met Lauren and everything changed from there.”

Iain Cook is explaining how CHVRCHES evolved from two friends having fun in the studio into something much more serious with the addition of lead singer Lauren Mayberry.

Cook and fellow synthesizer player Martin Doherty were just “literally screwing around,” he says, when he invited Mayberry to listen to the tracks they’d been recording and, if she fancied, maybe add some backing vocals.

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“So we put some tracks down on one of the songs we were playing,” Cook recalls, “and immediately thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the lead vocal. This needs to be a thing.’ We were still just a studio project, friends messing around at that point, even with Lauren. It wasn’t really until we put it on a blog, I think it was March or April 2012, and the reaction was amazing. We’d never experienced anything like that before. So we thought, ‘Oh God, now we’re gonna have to try and get her to play with us live. People are obviously interested in it so let’s give it a shot.’ And it snowballed pretty fast from there.”

Having cracked the Alternative Songs chart in 2012 with “The Mother We Share,” the synth-pop revivalists hit the U.S. charts at No. 8 last year with “Every Open Eye,” their second album.

As the tour in support of that album makes its way to Tempe’s Marquee Theatre, Cook checked in by phone to talk about their latest, ancient history and more after rocking Coachella for the biggest crowd they’ve faced since before they were even a thing.

Question: So how was Coachella?

Answer: We played just after Run the Jewels so they got the audience hyped up and we had a really great time. It was kind of a bizarre experience walking out to 30,000 people and playing a gig.

Q: Was that the biggest crowd you’ve ever played to?

A: No, actually, I think it was the second-biggest crowd we’ve ever played to. I think the biggest one was a few years ago when we toured with Depeche Mode in Europe and did a few stadiums for 60,000 people (laughs). We probably didn’t play to that many people, actually. They were probably still coming into the stadium at the time.

Q: I would think Depeche Mode would be a good fit for you guys.

A: Yeah, it was really early on for us, before even our first album came out. And it really gave us a sort of a foothold in Europe because their fans … well, they’re legion, for a start. And they’re also very passionate. So even now, when we play Belgium or Germany, we always have Depeche Mode fans coming out. But it was a good learning experience as well, getting to watch these guys perform because they’re absolute masters of playing these big rooms. They’re also one of my favorite bands. It was fantastic.

Q: The sounds of Chvrches is a fairly big departure from your previous projects. What inspired you to move in this direction?

A: I’ve been playing in post-rock bands for probably 10-13 years. And I have to say that I was done with being in bands because I’d done that whole thing a couple of times around. I thought, “OK, I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. I don’t need to do it anymore.” And yeah, I was starting to get more into making electronic music and buying up synthesizers. I think it was the summer of 2011 and Martin and I just happened to have some time off and started playing around with some ideas and quickly realized that we had a real chemistry as co-writers. We’d played in bands before but he was kind of there as a live keyboard player and I was a member of the band. So we hadn’t actually sat down and written songs together. That was our first kind of taste of the chemistry and we just got really excited by the sounds — you know, taking guitars and drums out of the equation and focusing more on electronic instruments. We found that that was really a sort of fruitful area for us as songwriters. And then obviously we met Lauren and everything changed from there.

Q: When you first started writing together, were you envisioning it more as a studio project? Were you just screwing around? Or were you starting a band?

A: Literally screwing around. We were just doing it for fun and realized very quickly that it had a lot more potential than that.

Q: Did it take much time to find your footing as a live band?

A: I think we played our first gig in July of 2012, so we managed to pull together enough songs to do a 40-minute set in a few months. But really, it’s been a gradual learning process all the way through. And it feels right. We’ve finally settled on a formula that works, a dynamic that works.

Q: Given the attention you got for your first album, did you feel much pressure going into this one?

A: I’d be lying if I said we didn’t feel any pressure but we were certainly telling everyone that at the time because we wanted to kind of keep that at arm’s length as much as possible. Obviously, there’s a great deal of expectation, particularly on album two, where, as you say, you’ve established yourself with the first album. You’ve made an impact and everyone’s watching to see what you do next. So we were very aware of that. But we didn’t talk about it much. We wanted to get back to the same studio where we did the first album and with as little pressure as possible just mess around and see what happened. We said to our management, “Don’t get in touch with any commitments or any kind of external pressure. Just let us do our thing.” And I feel like that was the right way to go because things happened purely naturally just like they did on the first album. So yeah, it worked out pretty well.

Q: Was there a goal going in as to what you were after?

A: Not really, because what tends to happen with this band is that things happen really naturally and organically in the studio without too much talking — just more, like, playing and bouncing ideas off each other. The only thing we really talked about before going in is that we wanted it to be a lot more stripped-back than the first album. Even though on album one, we only made the album with three synthesizers and coming back for album two, we had like 20 synthesizers that we’d kind of picked up along the way while we were touring, rather than layering and layering, the way we did on album one, we thought we’d just, like, have one sound to do one thing so that it had more character. If you layer up five bass synths, for example, you can’t tell what it is. It ceases to become a unique voice. It just becomes a massive wall of sound. And so we wanted to strip it back to as few elements as possible at any given time. We were pretty heavily influenced by Quincy Jones’ production style. You know, the stuff he did with Michael Jackson. It sounds big. It sounds full. But at the same time, there’s hardly anything actually going on at any given time. It’s being smart about it rather than just sort of throwing everything at it. It’s being really smart about economy in terms of sound. So that was kind of our only M.O. in making album two. Other than that, we just went with the flow.

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495.Twitter.com/EdMasley.

Chvrches

When: 8 p.m. Sunday, April 24.

Where: Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe.

Admission: $25.

Details: 480-829-0607, luckymanonline.com.

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