This is a very original idea!  What gave you the idea for the Gooseberries project?

At the beginning of last year,  the Happy Hollows and I had scheduled a photo shoot, and I had all of these crazy images in my head which I hadn’t any idea how to materialize without a massive budget that none of us had.   So, the day before our session, I pulled out a seamless backdrop and some paint and dug through my closet and came up with the closest thing I could to what I’d imagined. Reiko and I had been talking about doing a project together, and we both agreed that we wanted to do something a little more unusual than a coffee table book.  So, it all fell together pretty easily.

Why the title “Gooseberries”?

The project was meant to draw attention to the process of creation as a driving force in all artists – which we so often forget when we’re tweaking and twisting and obsessing over the final product.  There’s a short story by Chekhov in which a man discusses his uncle, who – after years of miserly living and dreaming of having a farm with gooseberry bushes -  finally harvests a plateful of these bitter, yet somewhat bland berries.  The story is a gorgeous way of illustrating that sometimes it isn’t the thing itself – rather, the idea of the thing – that truly drives us.

How did you choose the bands involved and how did you go about getting them to sign on to the project?

Of course, I wanted my friends to be a part of it – and I’d already worked with Silversun and Great Northern and Rogue Wave, but there was still this tricky matter of pitching such a weird idea.  I mean, how do you explain this to someone?  Paper and paint? It sounds absurd.  So I made a time-lapse video, and showed it to Rademacher – who suggested doing a music video.  Brad Basmajian (who was in Rademacher at the time) used the time-lapse footage from their shoot to make the video for “What I Want,” which I then used to pitch to the rest of the bands.

Tell us a little bit about the process you took during the photo shoots: the painting, the makeup, getting the bands into position, etc.

I started with a color palette for each shoot.  I knew I wanted Great Northern’s to be red and black.  I knew I wanted Earlimart’s to be shades of blue.  I knew that Afternoons ‘needed’ green with flecks of red.  I don’t know why, but those colors just made sense – and in my mind there weren’t any other options.  If Rogue Wave had told me that they wanted to be shot with purple and orange (I used yellow and black) I would have drawn a blank.   And because of these color palettes, I was very specific about what the bands were allowed to wear; I dressed most of the women in clothes from my own wardrobe collection – which largely consists of dresses that were made for my grandmother in the fifties and sixties.   I really wanted the final products to have the same feeling as those stiff, posed oil portraits which were commonly commissioned in Europe by elite families in the 18th and 19th centuries, so I kept my subjects moving in ways that felt very unnatural.  Of course, that makes for a miserable shoot, so we’d shoot for about twenty minutes, then take a break and have a drink and relax for a half hour, then go back to shooting.

Did you choose the ideas for each band based on your impressions of them, or were there other motivations behind each theme?

Not really.  The concepts had little to do with the bands themselves; I had these images and these colors in mind, and I wanted to use fun, creative people as my subjects – people who knew one another and had more of a bond than a mish-mash of models.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories from the project that you would like to share?

There were a few times I had come up with a concept that I thought would be really hard to explain to the band – and I’d find out that the band already had that idea in mind.  When Sarah from the Happy Hollows saw the tree I’d painted, she squealed “Oh my gosh!  It’s just like the trees I’ve been drawing!”   And I hadn’t the slightest idea how to tell Afternoons what I wanted to do with them  (gothic dust bowl migrants in Oz?) until I got an email from Steven that said “We’d love to do something with a dust bowl feel… or something dark, and yet still sort of vibrant.  Does that make sense?”  To which I simply replied:  “Yup.”

What is the story behind your band name? It just fits, no real story behind it unfortunately. It just fits the music well, and that is enough for us.

What are your music backgrounds? We all played lots of instruments from an early age, Charles (the bassist) and myself (Jack, the drummer) went to music school together on the weekend when we were about 12 years old. Eventually we all stumbled across the instruments we play in White Lies at about the same time, when we around 15 years old, and decided to form a band so we could learn to play together rather than keep having lessons.

Who are your influences? As a band we don’t share many influences, we all like fairly different things. I’d say Talking Heads were the first band to encourage us into songwriting together, and the Secret Machines first album inspired us when we started learning to record music, but really they’re just 2 examples from a massive pool of influence.

What image do you think your music conveys? I think our music is very cinematic, and I think different songs stir up different emotions and images. A lot of the songs are narratives and stories so I think escapism is important in our music – very much in the same as it is in a lot of cinema. I guess themes of love and loss are covered fairly comprehensively in our songs, and I think people can relate that to their own personal experiences, so hopefully people take away different feelings from the music.

How would you define the term “success”? Success is really subjective. I think success for White Lies is more about reaching personal goals and targets than numerical ones. Our first real aim as a band was to get to make a debut album that we were all really proud of, and we were definitely successful with that aim.

What are your thoughts of downloading music online? I think that people should really pay for the music they own. You can buy a brand new album through iTunes for £7, compared to about £13 a few years ago, and I think if people don’t pay for the music they own it becomes completely throw away and valueless. Legal downloading of music one of the most cost effective and simple ways to buy music, so I think it should be embraced. I think that bloggers who post entire albums for free download are in the wrong. Posting one track for free in blogs is acceptable, as it can definitely help spread the music in a more controlled and positive way, but in general, illegal online downloading is not a positive thing for the music industry and artists.

What is the biggest obstacle that you’ve come across? Recording our debut album in such a short space of time, and having to write part of it in the studio was a massive task, and it’s definitely the thing I’m most proud of achieving. In more literal terms, crossing the Russian boarder recently from Norway was a pretty big obstacle! Scary boarder.

What is the best and worst thing about playing clubs? The best thing about playing club shows is that the audience is usually ready to move. They want to dance and have a good time. The down side is that sometimes the audience don’t really care what they’re dancing to, they’re too wasted already. Also playing at 2am is a drag.

What genre do you consider yourself? It’s a new genre called ‘cathedral pop’. Or maybe ‘widescreen rock’. Your own choice really.

Which songs do you perform most frequently? We’ve never played a show where we didn’t play Unfinished Business and Death. They’re the first 2 White Lies songs we wrote.

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