The Fratellis Turn It Up

12/02/08 3:23pm

by Jen White (CHARTattack)

You might not be instantly familiar with their name, but you've definitely heard The Fratellis' music. The Glasgow, Scotland trio caught their big break on this side of the pond in 2007 when "Flathead" from their Costello Music debut was used in an iPod commercial. "Chelsea Dagger" later popped up in countless television ads and movie trailers, including Run Fat Boy Run, Shrek The Third and Knocked Up.

NME called The Fratellis the "best new band in Britain" in 2006, Costello Music peaked at #2 on the U.K. sales chart and they won best British breakthrough act at the 2007 Brit Awards.

The Fratellis' success has landed them some pretty big opportunities. ChartAttack caught up with vocalist/guitarist Jon Fratelli backstage at Toronto's Virgin Festival to talk about how they made their label buy them a studio and what it was like opening for The Police.

ChartAttack: The Fratellis have had a massive amount of success in the relatively short period of time since the band formed in 2005. Did you feel any pressure while recording your sophomore album, Here We Stand?
Jon Fratelli: We're either too lazy, too dumb or too stupid to sort of know where that pressure might come from. We were just desperate to make another album. We're kind of desperate to make music and not necessarily be a traveling salesman. When we finally got the chance to make another album, we were so desperate to do it that we pretty much went straight from finishing the last album's worth of touring and went in and did the new album. And we'll probably always do that. But pressure…

No sophomore slump?
In my opinion, it's a better album, in all ways. I'm way more happy with this record than I was with the first record.

Why are you happier with this one?
Well, you know, it just sounds like us. The thing about this record was to make sure that, at the end of it, it sounded like us on a stage, nice and loud. For that reason, it's so much more fun to play on stage. It's nice being able to turn the volume up, which we're very good at actually.

How has your sound changed or evolved from the last album?
It really has changed because when we made the first album, I don't think we could have played more than about 15 gigs together before we got signed and recorded an album. It wasn't that much because our drummer had broken his back as well, so we were out for a while, and just as he sort of came back, that's when we got signed.

We just recorded the first songs for the album that we had. Whereas this one, we spent like a year-and-a-half on the road and became the band that we are now, but we didn't really have the album to show for it. The whole point with [Here We Stand] was to have an album not to show off, but show this is actually how we are, rather than, the first one's like, "This is how we were, but we'll keep playing it for you because we don't have anything else to play."

Whereas now, there's definitely more "This is us, this is what we want to do." It's not perfect, and it's not flawless, but we've got plenty of time to become perfect and flawless. We don't have to do it straight away.

So for this album, you did something pretty cool: instead of getting a producer, you asked your label to actually fund a studio for the band.
Yeah, there wasn't a lot of asking involved. There's that Glaswegian way of, you ask a question in such a way that you're not really asking permission, but you're still doing it politely, but you're really saying how it's going to be.

But really, you've got to give them a little bit of credit for that because they didn't really argue. For starters, we said, "We're not going to use the same producer," and they were like, "Yeah, OK." "In fact, we're not going to use any producer," and they were like, "Oh... OK." "And the other thing is, we'd like you to buy us a studio. Instead of paying all the money for an expensive producer, just give it to us and we'll buy a studio in Glasgow." And they went for it. That's actually quite cool. Not many labels would.

It means now we have this studio that we can pretty much do whatever we please with. It means we can get going on this goal of making a lot of music rather than an album every three years because you've toured two years with it. We can pretty much always make music, unless the bank takes it back off of us, which may be any day now.

What was it like opening for The Police?
We did about four dates. We couldn't have done a full tour, 'cause you're talking about half-full baseball stadiums here — full of middle-aged people eating nachos and drinking really terrible beer, wearing earplugs. You can actually almost hear them talking over you because they don't let you turn it up so loud.

It was interesting to see what that sort of life is like, because they do that every night, or U2 do that every night. It's a funny existence to live your life in a stadium.

So would you rather be playing in a small club or a massive stadium?
You want to play a tour in smaller clubs because you want to feel like you're getting somewhere… But then again, if you're playing to a field full of people that are liking what you're doing, then it makes you feel like a rock star. You can get on your Robert Plant, which is kind of cool.

To hear Jon Fratellis' awesome Glaswegian accent, check out the interview in video form here.