Interview With The Clientele By Pitchfork.

Interview With The Clientele

By Pitchfork media

The Clientele are almost the definition of a cult band: They possess a singular, homemade sound, their songs reward close examination, and they've earned a small but devoted audience. The band is criticized for bordering on the monolithic-- its tracks have both a repetition of lyrical themes and often draw from a common sonic well-- but the revisiting of familiar scenes and locales seems to function as an organizing principle, a window into the everyday through which the mundane can be transformed into either dreamy escapism or a source of dread. In 2005, the band enjoyed its best year yet, releasing a well-received second studio album, Strange Geometry, as well as a collection of early demos, It's Art Dad, and going on two lengthy jaunts across the U.S., one opening for fellow Merge artists Spoon and one as headliners.

Pitchfork met the Clientele in Chicago near the end of a lengthy, eight-week world tour, the band's longest to date. We initially sat down with singer/guitarist Alasdair MacLean and were eventually also joined by bassist James Hornsey and drummer Mark Keen while discussing Harry Potter and magical realism, the post-Britpop conservatism of UK indie, and the possibility that every Clientele record could be their last.

Pitchfork: You've been out on the road for about seven weeks now-- this must be the longest tour of your career.

Alasdair MacLean: This is the eighth week. We don't have day jobs anymore, so we're free to tour, but this was the longest we've ever done.

Pitchfork: Did you quit your day jobs before this album came out?

Alasdair: Just before we toured with Spoon, we got a publishing deal with Chrysalis. Publishing and the advance from that meant we could not do our work for a year, and just try and promote this record.

Pitchfork: Where had you been working?

Alasdair: I had a desk job in an advertising agency. I was writing copy for them. Mark worked for a computer company, writing programs. And James worked for the largest merchant bank in England, where the Queen banks. So we all had-- well, my job was crap, but the other two had pretty good jobs.

Pitchfork: Was there any doubt in their mind about stepping away?

Alasdair: Absolutely not.

Pitchfork: How long had you been doing the ad copy writing? That's quite different from lyric writing.

Alasdair: For about four years. I used to do books before that. I worked for a book publisher, and actually attempted to turn down Harry Potter. The first Harry Potter title came in, and we had an editorial meeting about it, and I said, "This is just absolute rubbish. There are so many better children's books that aren't being published." And I was overruled. So, they published the book, and all my bridges are burned. I was a bit harsh on it at first. I wanted them to do a biography on Arthur Lee, and everyone said, "Who's Arthur Lee?" So I was never happy in that job.

Pitchfork: Have you read the 33 1/3 Series' book on Forever Changes?

Alasdair: It's pretty interesting actually, but it's kind of a grad student view. They talk about the American tradition of prophecy, and how it leads into Arthur Lee's heroes, and kind of the disjointedness of the music, and they link it together with quotes from Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and people like that, Walt Whitman. So it's pretty interesting.

Pitchfork: What was your primary criticism of the Harry Potter series?

Alasdair: There were other books, like The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, that this book ripped off, in a really cast-iron, populist way. And it lost all the beauty of that Through the Looking Glass type book. But I suppose I get protective about it because I grew up reading those books, these really beautiful evocations of ancient British myth. Those books totally shaped my imagination, as a writer. And I just thought this book had a thin and silly way of stealing those ideas.

They didn't care at the publishing house, they just wanted to know will it sell, and I said "Oh yeah, it probably will." And it did actually. By the millions.

Pitchfork: That sort of evocative language and magical realism is obviously a big part of your writing today.

Alasdair: Totally. I mean I still read those books. They're books of literature, they're not just children's books. I suppose they are magical realist-- the best that British magical realism got at the time when the Latin American authors were writing magic realism. So it wasn't an academic thing that happened a generation later. I don't know if they were reading people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but they're just as good in my opinion, those books. And I can recognize the roles that I lived in as a child in them as well.

They're full of dread, as well, you know, they're not cozy books to read, they're really scary fairy stories, and they're set in a realistic way in the English suburbs in the 1970s, which is exactly where I grew up, so the sense that in these new little housing estates, there are bulldozers that aren't doing anything, waiting around for new houses to be built, but through this there's a kind of fault line in the continuum, where this magical sense of another world opens up. And I couldn't have read it at a better time, or in a better place, because it described my reality.

Pitchfork: Same kind of heightened sensory feeling-- especially from the Latin authors-- which is translated into your music.

Alasdair: I came across the Latin magic realists much later, but I could see that it was the same kind of imaginative roads being taken.

Pitchfork: How has the response been on the U.S. tour?

Alasdair: Really good, better than any of the other times we've come here. There are a lot of people coming to see us who don't know our old albums, which is always a good sign. If we play an old song, we get somebody who'll really cheer, because Suburban Light is such a favorite with a certain circle of indie people here, but there are a lot of people who seem confused by the old songs, and if we don't play enough of the new songs, they'll come up and say, "You played loads of stuff we didn't know." We've sold more records in the past four or five weeks than we did in the past four or five years in this country.

Pitchfork: How did you end up with Spoon? You obviously are both on Merge here, but some people considered it an odd match.

Alasdair: As I understand it, this was their big tour, where the album was in the top 50, and Britt Daniel wanted to get a band he liked, so he imported us from England.

It was kind of a weird mismatch of bands, because they're such a crowd-pleasing band, and we really need people to listen-- we ask a little bit more from the listener than they do. Some nights we won the audience over, some nights we didn't. We'd never done a support tour before, we didn't know what to expect, and they treated us so well, we thought all support bands were treated that well until we talked to some people and they said, "Oh you guys were treated like royalty," like using their equipment and being paid a reasonable amount for playing a show, so it was very nice for us.

Pitchfork: In Europe, why don't you think the connection is as strong?

Alasdair: Strange enough, in France and Germany, it is these days. And we played in Paris, and these Parisian girls are screaming when we played the first notes of this song, and we were astonished. It's really taken off in France. I think the main place we have trouble in is England, and I don't even mean Scotland, I just mean England. We can play to a lot of people in Glasgow, or in London, but outside of London, it's very slow for us. Some people have asked me why that is, and I really don't know. It just doesn't seem to catch people's imagination there in the same way it does in other countries.

The kind of music we make has been really unfashionable in Britain since the late 1980s, early 90s. [Then] a lot of bands broke through playing really similar music, bands like Felt and the Razorcuts. And that eventually became Britpop, and Britpop spoiled everything in a way, cretinized the whole guitar underground. People who write about or play guitar music don't want to go back to the trouble of playing upstairs at the top of pubs and writing fanzines, they want the next Oasis. There's a lot less room for subtlety and off-kilter poetry. It's not fashionable to do those things.

Pitchfork: Is it mostly press driven? It seemed as if once NME were able to lift bands into the mainstream that became its goal: Instead of pushing quality, they pushed bands that could hit the top 10.

Alasdair: I think it's even more crass than that. It's just bands that have money. It sounds like I'm being bitter about it, and I'm not. I just feel lucky we have an audience. But I think a lot of it has to do with major labels and publicists. The whole British music scene has always been driven by press anyway, so when the nature of the press changed, the nature of the music changed as well.

I remember reading NME when I was like 16 and 17, and they would give stunt reviews and silly reviews to bands and they would color these bands excessively, and that's what drove people's popularity a lot of the time, but their manner of choosing has become much more conservative, they only go for the bands that they think are going to break through. We get really respectful and good reviews in the English press all the time. Any time we're going to release a record, we get good reviews. But never a feature, you know, never anything more than that.

Britpop polarized people to such an extent. A lot of people say guitar music is just old fashioned now. People have just given up on it really. I mean I would too if I wasn't in the band. I wouldn't listen to any new guitar music, I don't think. Through the band, I hear lots of really great guitar music, but I wouldn't know it was there, if I wasn't in a band.

Pitchfork: Most people assume that you guys are old-fashioned, even calling you revivalists.

Alasdair: It's always disappointing when people say the Clientele are trying to recreate the 60s, because what 60s band do we actually sound like? The musical education I have from the 60s is more the really square end of the decade, like Paul McCartney ballads, About Moons and Junes, Neil Diamond, the Mamas and the Papas, that kind of thing. Maybe we take the formal beauty of those ballads and maybe excise some of the silliness from them, some of the dated syrupiness, but that's really it.

Pitchfork: Listeners can be trained to think of bands in relation only to other bands. Particularly at a time dominated by revivalists.

Alasdair: That just misses the point. So many good bands already have their own unique sound. So to compare bands to other bands seems to miss the point of what is good about music.

Pitchfork: You also seem, more than most contemporary bands, to be influenced by other forms of art other than music.

Alasdair: Yeah, it's about getting the way that those types of art make you feel and transport you, and translating that to music. So as a result it can be quite subtle. Some people miss lyrics, some people just don't care about lyrics. You could be quoting a big passage of a Robert Browning poem, in a way that, to me as a writer, juxtaposes this pop song with a Victorian poem about depression in an interesting way, but people aren't necessarily going to realize that's what's being done. Some people will understand it, some people won't.

Pitchfork: Do you think you consciously take a Situationist approach to mixing life and art?

Alasdair: I don't have any control over my life in the way I have control over art, so that approach never really made a lot of sense to me.

Pitchfork: Do you use art to make sense of your life?

Alasdair: I think so, yes, using it as a sort of prism to see a life through.

Pitchfork: In that sense you often seem to use it as an organizing principle, returning to familiar scenes and places over and over. Was it then difficult working with an outside producer, in this case Brian O'Shaughnessy? Was it difficult to let someone else do the organizing?

Alasdair: Yeah, it was. But I couldn't make another record like the first two. We could do it, but we couldn't justify doing it. I was just like, "Fuck it, he's going to produce the record, and if it's crap it's crap, and I'll just go and get a day job and stop making music," because it got to the point where we couldn't carry on any further down the road we're going.

It was a different approach to recording, everything one or two takes, had to be done in two weeks, but we had rehearsed so much and we'd done so much working out the arrangements and the words and everything, there was no improvisation at all. Normally when we record, it's a long process of improvising and seeing what fits. This was just like, bang, straight down really fast. That was really interesting. We didn't have to worry about any of the stuff an engineer or producer worries about. It's very easy to make a record that's unlistenable if you're not on your toes. But we didn't have to be on our toes, all we had to do was just play and sing. Which was for me like a massive liberation. I loved it.

Pitchfork: Will you work with him in the future? Was it Brian specifically who made you feel liberated or just the set-up itself?

Alasdair: It would be nice to work with other people. The problems came with him when we mixed, because that was the point when we're going to control how the record sounds. And he wanted a very slick production like the other records he's produced, and we wanted things a little bit more simple, just the sound of the instruments coming from the amps through the microphone with the drums. I got my hand slapped a few times when it was on the reverb dial.

But I think we came out with something that everybody really loved. He's a hard man to impress. I didn't know whether he even liked our music until we were mixing "(I Can't Seem to) Make You Mine" and he said, "I could just listen to this forever." I said, "Oh, so you actually like the Clientele then?" and he says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

And Brian's got a really interesting imagination and knows lots of arcane facts and things, about London, so just going for a drink with him is a real pleasure, and that's really the point, because I think we thought if we can have a drink with a guy and he's interesting, then we can probably make a record with him that's interesting. He's also a really good friend of Lawrence [from Felt and Denim], which also made Brian seem like the kind of person who we would be able to work with.

Pitchfork: Did you meet Lawrence?

Alasdair: Lawrence is a very reclusive man, we've heard so many stories of him, but we've never met him.

Pitchfork: It might be better to keep the mystery intact.

Alasdair: From the stories I hear, it would be, yeah.

Pitchfork: You're records sound very homemade, were you worried that working in a professional studio would make you sound like a different band?

Alasdair: We've recorded in studios before, but always with completely disastrous results, and always junked the recordings because they were awful. It just comes out sounding really bland and washed out. No highs and lows, just everything clicked, everything dead on and boring. I didn't know if my voice would be good enough, if I could even sing in key, without a big mask of reverb.

Pitchfork: Your spoken-word track, "Losing Haringey", was something you weren't planning on, right?

Alasdair: I wrote a song that had that music, and I wanted just to do an instrumental, and it was pretty and everything, but everyone was like "No, you should sing on it." And I wrote some lyrics that were just awful, and it was the most awful tune, and I hated it so much. As soon as I recorded it, Brian came to me and said, "It sounds like Leonard Cohen, it's amazing," and I said, "No, it sounds awful." I knew I'd have a fight on my hands to not have the vocals on there, so one day I just came in and I was like, "Right, what can I do?" And there was a story I had written years before, and I thought, "Fuck it, I'll just read the story over it," and that would divert everyone away from the vocals, so I read it and Brian was like "The boy can write." So that was how that ended up, it was just a spur of the moment thing, a moment of desperation.

Pitchfork: Had you wanted to do a spoken-word piece for a while or was it purely a stopgap?

Alasdair: For ages, but I never really had the guts to do it because it lays you open to so much criticism. If it hadn't been 20 instruments on that track, and strings, and if I hadn't had an immediately good response from everyone in the studio right after I read it, I think it would have just disappeared. So it took quite a lot of coaxing. I just didn't want to make the sort of track that someone would hear the first few words and burst out laughing. And I thought we need a Bouzouki and a string quartet and Fender Rhodes to stop that from happening

Pitchfork: The spoken-word track and references to proper names seems to mark this as more of a personal record, or at least strip a few layers from between you as author and performer.

Alasdair: Suburban Light is a very personal album, but it's of a person I don't even recognize anymore, almost a choirboy innocent-type person, which maybe is what some people like about it. On this one I didn't want to hide under layers of allusion or atmosphere or anything. I wanted to write something that was a bit braver and more honest.

I thought we've just got to try, and if it's stupid, and we look stupid, like melodramatic, then so be it. We've got to risk falling flat on our faces. Because that was the kind of music I wanted to write. That was what I was feeling like, sitting in cafes, on my lunch hour at work, there wasn't really anything else I could write at this point.

But these songs have been written with very constant themes of dread and worthlessness, along with a kind of heightened sensory thing, that's more transcendental, that bittersweet pull between the two of them. And I think there were hints of that in the stuff we did before, but it really flowers in Strange Geometry.

Pitchfork: This record was also put together much quicker than your others. Did you stall before because you had the freedom to keep going over things?

Alasdair: I think so. We knew exactly what we were doing before we went into the studio, and Brian really hated improvisation or any kind of dissonance or anything like that. So we had to have the arrangements already worked out before we did it. Otherwise, he would get very upset with us.

Pitchfork: He was worried it would get overcooked? Was it the process or the results he didn't like?

Mark Keen: He was just being practical in the studio; he knew we only had a certain number of hours to work with. And I think, being a producer, you don't want people humming around on instruments. You gotta have quite the tight drill. Obviously it was frustrating, because you could feel it if you were improvising.

Alasdair: Yeah the worst nightmare from [Brian's] point of view is someone who is sitting at a guitar or a piano, just going, "Oh, let me just record that again. I think I've got it now."

Pitchfork: I imagine that was even more true with Louis Phillipe, who arranged your strings.

Alasdair: With string players, they're hired for 2-3 hour sessions, and a lot of classical musicians will play for three hours and they're halfway through a song, and they'll start packing up, and the guy recording the quartet will be like, "What're you doing?" "It's three o'clock, we're out now. If you want us to play the second half of the song, you're going to have to pay us for another three hours." They weren't like that for us. We couldn't get the BBC Orchestra or anything, we just had to get custom musicians or friends to play.

But Louis and I didn't go into the studio together. He's a very tightly drawn individual, and he expects absolute perfection from the recording process. The relationship we have with Lou is he's like a kindly uncle whom we look after, and if he gets upset, it's like, "Would you like some wine, do you want us to go and get you some cigarettes, do you want us to get you some food?" And I just didn't want to be in that position, because I knew he would be getting upset. The studio was very cozy, and he's used to working with the Prague Philharmonic at places like Abbey Road. I knew it would be a culture shock for him. And it was.

I took him for a pint afterward, and he completely ignored me and talked to Brian all night about how to record handclaps.

Pitchfork: When you were recording your own work, were you writing in the studio?

Alasdair: When we did The Violet Hour, that was very much arranged like, "Oh the drums sound good with this instrument, so let's put this instrument in." Just trial and error. That took a year to make, you know, just on weekends. So, yeah, we've always worked in a very improvisational way before. I mean, the song structures are generally there before the songs get recorded, but the arrangements are completely up for grabs. We were like, "We've got this keyboard; what can we do? Oh, we can get this string sound on it. Okay, well I think my father-in-law has a lap steel, so let's get that. How do you tune a lap steel?" There was just no time for that this time around. And if you try it in that studio, you look through the glass and you see the producer, and the look on his face would say "You stop that now," and you just say "Okay, I'm gonna stop it now." It was very different.

Pitchfork: The It's Art Dad CD that you're selling on tour, were those demos you had sent out some years ago?

Alasdair: Yeah, that was me and James, Innes [Phillips] from the Relict, and a guy called Daniel who played drums. We were all sort of childhood friends from Hampshire. We made these recordings and sent them off to various labels: Sub Pop UK-- back then they had a UK office, when they had the money from Nirvana-- and Fire Records, as well. And there was no real response. By the time we got a record deal in London, the other two were really pissed off at the whole thing, playing shows with crappy goth bands, going on at 7 p.m. to 20 people. So that band dissolved. [To Mark] And it was like 2000 when you joined wasn't it?

Mark: Yeah.

Alasdair: So there was a little interim period where we had another drummer; he was like a jazz drummer who didn't really fit in very well at all. So nothing happened during that period at all.

Pitchfork: Did he end up on any records?

Alasdair: He plays on "Joseph Cornell", "As Night Is Falling", and "(I Want You) More Than Ever". He was very into post-rock. He was in a band called Billy Mahonie. He's currently playing with Joy Zipper. He's a really good friend and a really great drummer, but his sensibilities-- he thought we were kind of old fashioned and obscure.

Mark: He could easily make a song 10 minutes long that should have been two.

Alasdair: So he didn't really work out.

Pitchfork: Are you and Innes still pretty close?

Alasdair: Well, not geographically because he's in Australia, but as friends, totally, yeah.

Pitchfork: Is he still doing Relict things?

Alasdair: Well everybody is trying to convince him to do another record, but he doesn't really want to, I don't think.

Mark: He's happily married now, just got a job, so I don't think he could instantly pick up a guitar. But he'll be miserable once the job slows down.

Alasdair: The Cannanes asked him to play with them, and he said no, because he was just like, "I don't think I'm good enough." And we were just like, "You just moved to Australia, you don't know anybody, and the Cannanes just asked you to play on their records. And you're saying no? What are you doing?" That's the whole thing with him, he just doesn't really have much confidence about him. His record's been re-released by Pehr Records in L.A. If there's some interest from that, it might spur him on, I don't know.

Pitchfork: Did you have a conversation with him before putting out this compilation?

Alasdair: Oh yeah, he listened to it, and he was involved in choosing the tracks. He said, some he didn't want to put out. Some mixes he wasn't happy withֹyeah he was totally involved.

Pitchfork: Why did you decide to do that now?

James Hornsey: We just found the tapes.

Alasdair: We had forgotten about the tapes for 10 years, and I was around Innes' house just before he moved to Australia, and he said, "Listen to this," and then played an old C-90 tape. We were all really drunk, and we thought "This is all right," and we were getting really nostalgic about the old days, so we found all the master tapes and remixed them, and we were like, "Some of this is actually better than what we're doing now." It was our little project while we weren't working, in between the Spoon tour and the album being released, we were just sitting in our studio, going through the tapes. We mixed about three or four hours of music and picked the best 16 tracks.

Pitchfork: So it was the first time you'd heard that stuff in the years, but it's obviously recognizable as your work. Were you conscious of having solidified your sound so long ago?

Alasdair: That took me by surprise. I was like, there's just no other way we can play instruments and sing.

James: We took some time to try other things, amongst these tapes, and it just turned out really bad.

Pitchfork: What sort of diversions did you take?

Alasdair: There was more of a kind of folky feel-- not folky in a pop way, folky in a folk way. It was pretty grim, to be honest. A few indie rock moments, a few totally Spacemen 3 songs, ambient, weird noises. There's one drum and bass tracks, and I overdubbed a lot of spooky sounds, and its totally laughable. It's hilarious. Just a lot of stuff that was too obviously influenced by the bands we were listening to-- too Byrdsy or Beatleish or too garage punk, listening to the Pretty Things and doing a Pretty Things-like song. Just laughably bad.

We always recorded vocals through guitar. We rehearsed that way because we didn't have a PA. And we really got to like the sound, and so when we recorded we'd use the same sound. And that sound, that's become the Clientele sound. And playing the guitar Spanish-style as well, with the fingers, rather than a pick, and doubletracking the vocals. All those things have been there from the start. We do it any other way and it tends to be awful.

Pitchfork: After a few months, you've only got a couple of more days out on tour: What are you going to do next?

Alasdair: A lot depends on certain business machinations back home, whether we get more money. We'll have to wait and see. It's really uncertain at the moment. The publishing money comes in options, and they can take up the option of another album, if they think this one's done well enough. We have no idea whether they're going to or not.

Pitchfork: Did they give you guys any idea at the time what their expectations were? Purely a sales thing?

Alasdair: They really like the music, so hopefully they'll carry on that belief. If it's purely a sales thing, then we're probably in trouble.

Pitchfork: How did you go about setting up a publishing deal?

Alasdair: People have just come to us. We've never really promoted ourselves in any way. Every opportunity we've had has just been people finding us and asking us to do stuff. We had offers from Merge and Sub Pop at the same time, and I think we just preferred Merge. We saw Lambchop and the Magnetic Fields, and we thought, "Oh, this label's great."

Pitchfork: Sub Pop had Eric Matthews.

Alasdair: We really wanted him to play trumpet on the album, and he offered, but we had just finished recording. It would have been a case of putting everything in a parcel, sending it to him, him recording over it, and sending it back.

Pitchfork: Which track did you anticipate him working with? Alasdair: All of them. We're still in touch with him, so hopefully one day, you know. He's a wonderful trumpet player.

Pitchfork: Have a lot of things you've written for the future?

Alasdair: About five songs, so the holiday seaside homes are going to come in handy.

Pitchfork: Are you changing your writing approach, thinking about potentially larger arrangements and albums rather than self-recorded singles?

Alasdair: The Violet Hour has three or four song cycles, and it's very much arranged that way. I think that's something that interests me about making records. Now that we're not making singles anymore, because singles are just great little pop art things, that you put out on vinyl, and EPs as well, to an extent. But albums, I think you can go deeper, and you can just bring together more contrast, more light and dark, I suppose.

Pitchfork: There seems to be a logic that says your music works better in singles. Do you still hear that?

Alasdair: We haven't so much with this record, but we did at the time of The Violet Hour. People really didn't like the fact that we weren't releasing 500 7" singles on yellow vinyl every now and then, so they could show it to their friends. But we've done that, so it's time to move on.

Pitchfork: With indie pop people still seem to gravitate to smaller, more personal packages. So what is the timetable for a next record?

Alasdair: Well, we don't even know if there is a next step. We'll have to wait till we get home. It might be that this is our final record, but there are new songs, so hopefully we'll get a chance to record them, but at the moment things are just totally up in the air.

Pitchfork: It hinges solely on the advance?

Alasdair: It partly hinges on that, and partly we've got to sit down and think whether it's still fun. I mean, I'm having fun, but we need to think that if it stops being fun, then it's not worth doing.

Pitchfork: So before Chrysalis came to you, which was a happy accident, was there a feeling that you had already reached the end?

Alasdair: No, we wanted to make another record for Merge, because no matter what happens at home, we've always got that label here. They're very nurturing, and the best possible label you could have. We don't even say to them when we see them in Chapel Hill, "Do you want to do the next record?" because we know the offer is implicitly there. There was always that, but the Chrysalis thing helped us try and take things up a level in terms of recording.

Pitchfork: What has changed from then to now that makes you question whether it's worth it to go on?

Alasdair: You have to go through a constant reappraisal of yourself, because otherwise, you end up putting out boring records. If you make records for the sake of making records, what's the point? You should only make records if you've got something to say. And so you have to go home and think to yourself, "Have I actually got something to say?"

Pitchfork: Is this the first time you've felt like that?

Alasdair: No, I felt like that after every single record we've made, even the 7", because each, for all we knew, was our last record. I guess that attitude has carried through. You can make a 7" single in a studio for £100. The budget for Suburban Light was £200, and The Violet Hour was something like £5,000. Strange Geometry must have cost something like £15,000. So going back to having £200 to make a record, it's too depressing to think about.

It fills me with dread, to be honest. The thought of going back into the studio for an intensely stressful two weeks when we get back, and then touring for another eight weeks without proper sleep, and as soon as the sun goes down we're in the van and I can't read my book anymore. I'm trying to get through Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust at the moment, and every time the sun goes down, it shuts him up, I can't read it anymore.

Pitchfork: What else would you do? Go back to the ad job?

Alasdair: No, I don't think so. I'd like to do something like be a night watchman, but I think there's a lot of aspiring authors making it a very competitive job. That's the thing. I'm not qualified to do anything, really. I've no idea what I'm going to do when I get back, so it's just total uncertainty.

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