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Interview: Liam Frost - Master Of His Own Dishwasher

Since parting from backing band The Slowdown Family and former label Columbia Records, Liam Frost has taken some (metaphorical) happy pills and released a new album featuring Martha Wainwright and Ed Harcourt. He chats to Q from his flat in central Manchester about his influences - everything from Charles Bukowski to Ricki Lake.

Q: Hi Liam, how are you? Have we caught you at a good time?
Liam Frost: Yeah, yeah, I'm just filling up my dishwasher. I'm not very good at washing up. I did an interview with the Manchester Evening News recently and they picked up on the fact that I'm spending more time at home now, the line was "Liam Frost: Master of his own dishwasher." You can use that if you want.

Q: Congratulations on the new single, Good Things Are Coming Our Way, are you hearing good things about it?
LF: Yeah, a few people have said they like it and think the video is really cool. It seems like a positive time to be making music at the moment.

Q: The video shows you dancing with the microphone amongst confetti and balloons - what happened to the sombre Liam Frost?
LF: Do you know what? The budget was tiny and we only had one camera, so it felt like a real achievement. I love the fact that we threw all the bells and whistles at it.

Q: What does the line in the single, "throw as much as you can at the ceiling and keep the ones that stick," mean?
LF: I'm not really sure. I think there was an element of filth in it at one point. It's about relationships.

Q: And it's kind of hard to ignore how happy you sound on the new album, have you fallen in love?
LF: Yeah, well definitely there is that tinge to it and it's also due to good health and happiness. I was quite keen to do a pop record in the classic sense, with what I consider to be darker lyrics still in the songs.

Q: And the title, We Ain't Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain, comes from a Charles Bukowski poem, are you a fan of his?
LF: Yeah I'm a really big fan. I spotted the rain reference and really liked it. I've referenced him in a couple of things. No one's ever picked up on it but there's a poem called Bluebird, and the first line says, "There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out." I took that concept and turned it into the chorus on The Mourners of St. Paul's (from 2006 debut album Show Me How The Spectres Dance).

Q: You're looking a little trimmer these days too - was that a conscious image change?
LF: I just wanted to be a bit healthier. It wasn't an aesthetic thing. I'm not that sort of musician, you know like these indie bands where you have to wear pink leather jackets and skinny jeans to fit in with a certain mould.

Q: And you recorded the album in New York with US-based producer Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave, PJ Harvey) just before your split from Columbia Records, how was that?
LF: His wife was having a child, which meant recording the album there. I wasn't going to turn down two months in New York for anything. We'd recorded and got all the mixing done by September 2008 and that's when everything happened with the label.

Q: What was it that caused the split? They let you keep the master tapes in the end so you could release it on your own label, Emperor Records?
LF: Yeah they did. One of the things I found was that there was a lot of waiting around for people to make decisions, but I knew how I wanted to do it. I think it's a results based industry where they want to see record sales instantly, which is kind of understandable. But my music is never going to go straight in the top 10 - it grows on people.

Q: You wrote some of the material for the album during Cape Farewell (a project which takes artists and scientists on expeditions to learn about climate change), is it true you replaced Jarvis Cocker?
LF: I was on a boat in Greenland. It was a really bizarre, life-changing experience. It took a fair bit of time to get over. Jarvis Cocker was lined up to do the original voyage but he'd been on tour for about 18 months and his wife said he couldn't go - so he had to duck out and they asked me with only a few days to spare.

Q: And you worked with Ed Harcourt on your album, how did that come about?
LF: The record label at the time wanted to put me with some co-writers, so I thought I'd have a dabble. I didn't really gel with anyone so I put in a request to work with Ed because he's a really good songwriter and a great pianist. I got on with him immediately and we wrote three songs in pretty quick succession.

Q: And he originally recorded the vocals on former single, Your Hand In Mine, but you later replaced him with Martha Wainwright?
LF: Yes, well it's a love song in a sense. Ed sang some of the lines and played piano and it sounded really cool. It would have been interesting to do but it was a sort of guy-on-guy thing, which isn't in anyway wrong, but it may have mislead people as to what I was trying to get across.

Q: The start of track Skylark Avenue, from the new album, sounds uncannily like Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing, while the lyric "late night radio" resembles a David Gray track, are you a follower of either?
LF: Everyone keeps saying that about Jimi Hendrix! And the thing is I'm not really into the big guitar players, so that was like the biggest compliment. And the David Gray thing, I mean bless him, but that was never my intention to incorporate him into my work.

Q: And what's this about Ricki Lake influencing a line in the song Shipwrecked?
LF: I was flicking around one day and it was one of those cheating husband episodes. This woman said something like "When you sleep with dogs you wake up with fleas" - I thought it was just too funny not to include in some way.

Q: Being from Manchester, you're often bunched together with acts like Elbow and Badly Drawn Boy. Is the album track Leading Lights and Luminaries a reference to that?
LF: Yeah, I was sussing myself out, but I think it's a really positive song. If you come from Manchester there is a tendency to talk about what's come before and it's quite natural, but I don't really feel pressured.

Q: Is it true Elbow's Guy Garvey once said you were the UK's answer to Bright Eyes?
LF: It's totally true. It was due to an early demo. I guess my song Try Try Try sounds Bright Eyes-ish, and a few other tracks I did. It was fine to some extent after the first album, but I don't sound that similar to him on the new record.

Q: And you've started working on the third album already?
LF: Yeah I feel a lot more confident in my abilities and I know what I don't want to be now. If it all goes right I'm hoping to have it recorded in the summer. Being my own boss I can do that now. I can empty my dishwasher when I want.

Liam Frost will be playing festival dates throughout the summer, visit his MySpace page here to find out more. Album, We Ain't Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain, and single, Good Things Are Coming Our Way (with a B-side cover of Echo And The Bunnymen's The Killing Moon) are out now.

Words: Kaitlin Sullivan

Kaitlin keeps her own personal music blog here.

8:24 AM | 03/06/2010