Einige Bands sehen die Antwort auf diesen Branchenwandel darin, autonom über ihre Karrieren zu walten - nicht die einfachste Option für eine Band, die den großen Durchbruch schaffen will. Dennoch ist dies genau das, was FICTION PLANE getan haben. Und in einer Zeit, in der die Zukunft der Musikbranche von Schwarzmalerei geprägt ist, zeigt sich die Band mit ihrem dritten Studioalbum „Sparks" erfrischend selbstsicher und optimistisch gegenüber dem, was da kommen wird. Warum? - Seht selbst:
Die Geschichte nahm ihren Anfang im Frühjahr 2009; nach einer umfassenden Auszeit von einem zweieinhalbjährigen Tourmarathon, der die Band einmal um die Welt führte - vom Auftritt vor 85.000 Musikbegeisterten auf dem Stade de France in Paris, bis zur Headliner Position in Amsterdams legendärem Paradiso Club - haben sich Pete Wilhoit (Drums), Seton Daunt (Guitar) und Joe Sumner (Vocals/Bass), der ja bekanntermaßen der Sohn von Weltstar Sting ist, in einem ranzigen New Yorker Kellerraum eingefunden, um mit ihrer Arbeit fortzufahren.
"We had no clear idea of what we wanted to do going in, which was kind of unique for us," sagt Pete. "We had a couple of songs we'd been playing live, but we all felt this new album should be a true collective effort". Seton erklärt weiter: "About 90% of this album was collaborative, whereas before most of the musical ideas would have come from Joe." Drei Wochen am Stück jamte die Band und eröffnete somit den kreativen Schreibprozess, während die einzelnen Ideen und Fragmente auf einem Laptop aufgenommen wurden. "We ended up with hours of material, and then we sifted through it all to find those little bits of magic.", sagt Joe. Proben des Materials wurden im Februar 2009 bei einer Show in kleinem Ramen veröffentlicht "It was important for us to play the songs in front of an audience as quickly as possible," erinnert sich Pete. "Playing live is our strong suit, so we needed to know the songs would work in that environment."
Zufrieden, dass sie sich in die richtige Richtung bewegten, machte sich die Band kurz darauf gemeinsam mit Produzent Paul Corkett auf den Weg in die RAK Studios in London, bevor sie „Sparks" im darauffolgenden September im Moles Studio (über dem gleichnamigen legendären Venue) vervollständigten. "Before we started recording, we asked ourselves; what would we want to hear if we were listening to a band we liked?" sagt Seton. "We used that as an opportunity to be more imaginative, and try out things we mightn't have tried otherwise" Joe sieht es so: "This time we didn't have anybody getting in our ear and telling us we needed a single, or that we'd be cleaning toilets if we didn't sell 50 million records. It was a nice feeling." Dank dieser Repressionsfreiheit ist ein Album entstanden, das stylistisch vielfältig sowie abenteuerlich ist, und dennoch die bittersüße melodische Schärfe mit der kraftvollen Rock Dynamik paart, wie es bereits für die bisherigen Fiction Plane Werke typisch war. "All our different influences have come through much more on this record," erklärt Seton. "We're all fans of Radiohead and Queens Of The Stone Age, but I'm a big Dylan fan, Joe likes Pavement, and Pete's into Coltrane and things like that. We're not really like any of those artists, but we tried to take a similar approach to them. It's difficult to sell records nowadays, and you're not going to automatically sell more records because you don't take chances, like putting five minutes of free-form stuff in a song. You may as well just do what you want to do and have fun with it."
Diese musikalische Ausgelassenheit wurde auch bei den Sessions im Moles Club ausgelebt, da die Band dort die Möglichkeit hatte, ihre frisch produzierten Stücke kurzerhand vor einem Livepublikum zu testen. "An amazing, tiny little rock 'n' roll place above a pub and a nightclub. Often we'd do a quick mix of something, then we'd take it downstairs, play it in the pub and watch people's reactions. If people don't know a song, but respond to it, they've got to be responding to something real about it, and being able to see that right away helps to take you out of the studio mindset and gives you a simpler perspective on what works and what doesn't".
Vielleicht ist das auch der Grund, dass das gesamte Album, von einer spürbaren Live Energie durchzogen ist.
Der Opener des Albums, "You Know You're Good (The La La Song)", entstand nach dieser Methode. "We'd been playing it live for the past two years, and it was about eight minutes long with a different title," sagt Seton. "It had gone through all sorts of changes and weird digressions," fügt Joe hinzu, "We'd already tried recording it, but in the end we just took the parts that people reacted best to, and stripped it back to three chords and four lyrics", was dem Song einen scharfkantigen, punklastigen Drive gab, kombiniert mit einer Hookline, die sich direkt in Mark und Bein bohrt.
"One of the things I learnt from all the touring", sagt Joe "is that you can be a lot more expressive lyrically and audiences won't find it weird. When you're writing, there's a tendency to think small differences are very important, but because we're much more confident in our playing now, I know that the music is going to support whatever I'm writing about, and it gives me the strength to experiment with the lyrics." Beweis hierfür liefert z.B. „Russian LSD" - inspiriert von Mikhail Bulgakov's Satire „The Master And Margarita" über das post-revolutionäre Russland.
Joe erläutert, "I'd read "The Master and Margarita" a couple of years earlier, and while we were playing the song, it struck me that it would work as a kind of soundtrack to all that debauched bacchanalia near the end of the story." Der Song erhebt sich zu einer widerspenstigen Passage, in der nichts bleibt, bis auf das packende Kick-Drum Spiel und ein schreiendes Echo von Setons Stimme, was Pete als einen seiner Lieblings Momente auf Sparks beschreibt. "It felt to me like we'd grown into the kind of band with the confidence to do something like that whereas before, we might have worried about losing people's attention", sagt Pete. "Now we'll let it breathe and take its course."
Den Song Humanoid beschreibt Pete wie folgt: „One of those moments in the writing sessions where you just fall into a groove. It starts off with this kind of Radiohead drum pattern that sounds like a loop, and we added things like the music box to give it a more unusual feel. There's a lot of different passages and shifting textures in it, almost as if you're going on a journey, and it's really satisfying musically to have something like that on the record." Achtet man auf die Lyrics legt sich Joe nicht fest, ob „Humanoid" von einer allgemeinen Gruppe Menschen, oder einem bestimmten Individuum handelt. "I don't want to name names," lacht er, "But he's definitely out there, roaming the earth. He might be in the music business, he might not - he is, if you believe him..."
Die Platte enthüllt jedoch noch weitere bizarre sowie bezauberne Charaktere, wie in „Tommy", einem Stück über einen zermürbenden Groove-Rocker, um genauer zu sein "A drunken Brit who wanders into a lapdance club and gets more than he bargained for." Joe erzählt weiter: "We spent quite a bit of time in Paris, and there were always a lot of young Englishmen like him roaming around the Pigalle. Later on you'd see them being taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of seedy little nightclubs". Sparks erreicht seinen Höhepunkt mit der epischen Rock Ballade „Denied". "The most un-jaded love song Joe's ever written", sagt Seton, und bestückt mit allem, was ein Musikstück zu einem potentiellen Klassiker macht. Natürlich stimmt Joe zu, dass dies einer der persönlichsten Songs auf dem Album ist. "I didn't actually sing the lyrics to anyone until we got into the recording studio," erklärt er. "I wasn't sure I wanted to go that far because, as a writer, I think I feel more at ease with darker subject matter, but it's one of the moments on the album where I can definitely hear myself talking."
Spricht man mit allen drei Fiction Plane Mitgliedern, ist es schwer, nicht von ihrem eigenen Stolz und ihrer Freude über ihr Werk beeindruckt zu sein. Wie Seton sagt, "Even if it all fell apart tomorrow, we've made exactly the record we wanted to make artistically. This is a true representation of us as a band, and we think that comes across in the music". Joe hingegen sieht die Dinge folgendermaßen: "It definitely captures a moment, and I don't want it to end. A lot of music nowadays is marketing first. No judgement on that - often it's a necessity. But we're going the opposite way, and I think people will find the record and understand it. I mean, I like to be surprised by music. Sometimes you'll go on a website and see one of those "if you liked 'X', you might like 'Y'" things, and almost always it's not the case. I love getting blind-sided by something; it's my favourite way to discover music, and if people end up discovering this record in the same way, that'll be wonderful."
