The Guillemots

Tour for new album arrives in Brighton

Formed in 2004, the BRIT and Mercury Music Prize nominated indie rock band fronted by Fyfe Dangerfield, and still featuring the same core four members, have steadily developed a loyal and somewhat fanatical fanbase.

Three albums in they have cemented their status as one of the UK’s more interesting and thoughtful bands, capable of putting on a rousing show – you come away with the feeling you’ve been part of a celebration.

“Yes, Dangerfield is actually my middle name, and my mum’s maiden name – I’m Fyfe Anthony Dangerfield Hutchins, my full name that my parents gave me in a moment of madness! But I always vowed to use Dangerfield if I was ever in a band…”

It was the glorious, chugging, classic sound of Trains To Brazil, that caught the imagination at the tail-end of ’05, and a successful tour supporting Rufus Wainwright followed, before releasing their Mercury nominated debut album Through the Windowpane.

“We’re interested in creating a timeless sound – not retro, but there was this sense of doing something, although I don’t like using this word, classic – we’re rooted in traditional songwriting, but (with recent album Walk The River) against the background of the night sky and being lost in space…

“I had this feeling, sitting out at night, once we started making the record, of creating something spacious… I was at a friend’s wedding in Spain and we were in the hills, staying up at night, and I had this sense of imagining hearing someone playing music far away in the valley… I wanted it to sound as if there was some distance to it – a feeling of being lost, searching and being found… I didn’t want anything to be too precise and crystal clear…”

Walk The River certainly achieves this ambition – being a typically epic Guillemots production, and much like the moniker the band employs, floats freely, and then swoons and dives with aplomb.

“There wasn’t a great deal of insight in calling ourselves The Guillemots which apparently refers to the plural of the Common Guillemot ‘Uria aalgee’, but which is often used as the plural of the name for a group of seabirds, – it was the first thing that came in to my head. The others are often irritated that we’re referred to as a band of bird lovers,” says Fyfe, who is an occasional bird-watcher himself. “When I get the chance…”