TV on the Radio

Wed 9th Nov, 2011 in Features

TV on the Radio are impossible to pigeonhole or define, these critical darlings are known for their bombastic live shows as much as their engrossing albums.

The band suffered a heavy loss six months ago, losing bassist Gerard Smith to lung cancer, but are back on the rise, visiting Australia to tour fifth album Nine Types of Light with the upcoming Harvest Festival. Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe spoke to FL about the album, recording new material and the political uprisings taking over the world

Tell me about the album, Nine Types of Light, it’s a very personal one. Has it taken on a new meaning for you six months on and playing the songs in a live context?
I don’t know as far as meaning goes what’s happened, but the great thing about touring is that we always can shift the songs in a live setting, and you get to figure out certain things about them that maybe didn’t reveal themselves before. The presence of certain songs is a lot greater live, it’s an active thing playing them so I guess it keeps them fresh, the things you may have written a year ago. As far as meaning goes, I think just the constant push to keep things interesting shifts the songs around a lot and makes them worthwhile for us.

What was the meaning of the album at the time, I mean did you have a lot of relationship stuff going on?
With this record not so much, it’s funny thinking about it, it’s not that my life was boring really, but everything was just okay. Usually when things are okay you have an entire backlog of feelings that you can draw from for creative work.

Does that make for more interesting or vital music if your life’s fucked up a little bit?
I think maybe the thing that gets you to a place where you’re making that music the things that you go through that you want to write about, when your life is more fucked up things are a lot more obvious and colourful and writing can be an exercise in putting them in a place where they’re manageable. But I think that actually getting around to sitting and recording a record, I’ve been in situations where I was not emotionally stable enough to be productive, and I would not go back to that for anything in the world. It might happen again, but I definitely am not looking for it.

And can you tell me about the film you made the accompanies the album, can you explain it a bit?
Basically there’s a feature length film that accompanies the record, and every single song on the record has a video that goes with it. We asked certain friends to come in and to see what they thought of the songs, and make something that goes along with them. I directed one of the videos, and also there are pieces that work as the glue between the videos, and I directed those pieces. Increasingly, making a record is not all there is to it. I mean I love making music, I actually wish we were making a record now because we’re in a good place to start doing that.

But increasingly, with the act of putting music out into the world, you always get barked at by a label to do a million remixes or something that’s ‘added value’, I guess anything that’s more valuable than ‘songs’. I hate thinking about that shit and I love making films and I love making art, so I tried to jump the gun a little bit and make something that we were proud of that would also shut them up for enough time so they can’t say ‘we gotta dress it up, we gotta put wings on it.’ I think it did that, I don’t know, I don’t care if it did that actually. I’m really proud of it, and the album.

Is there anything stopping you from jumping into the studio and recording now?
It’s sort of tough. People are writing demos and things like that now, but I would prefer to not be on the road while we’re recording, because it’d be nice to get it done in one fell swoop and not interrupt the momentum by playing shows. Especially so late in the tour, it gets a little tricky if you start writing new songs and that’s all you wanna do, and suddenly everything you’ve ever written sounds really dumb when all the new stuff is really interesting and great. I don’t know what the future holds, but it’d be really nice to start working on something after the tour, early next year.

Going back to the film, can you explain the bit at the end how the band breaks up. It’s quite poignant.
The conversation that we had in that scene was a conversation we’d all had as a band while we were on tour, or while we were playing. You get down and you’re playing for nine people in a basement, and you’re like “maybe this is not going to go on for as long as I thought it would go on”, so you have the conversation about what you would be doing after the band breaks up. I love a lot of that dialogue.

It’s a great thing to have been able to make this work, to make music with your friends and have it find an audience anywhere is such a plus, and I think this whole thing has exceeded all of our expectations, which then and now were just to make stuff that was really really genuine interesting to us and a good document of where we were in our heads collectively.

The fact that people can understand what might be a very esoterical language, something we don’t even understand ourselves, the fact people respond to it is such a great thing and such a gift. We want to keep it special, and there are lots of things about being in the music industry that make you go “this part of what i love is making me not so interested in continuing it,” and you get to certain points where you think “I don’t want to make this any less special than what it has been,” so you think maybe it’s time to take a break. And that’s just on a band working level, and then as friends, the reason you’re friends is because you don’t see them all the time.