How did you guys all first meet and come together as a band?
Lewis: We lived in a studio house with Hamish and a guy called Chris; Hamish was looking for multiple singers at this point, and he was put in touch with Leo who came along to the house and we all just fell in love with his voice. Ever since then it’s been us making tracks together until we decided to take the band live.
Kirsten: So far they’ve not told me I’m not in the band, but but they’ve also not told me I’m out of it yet, so guess I’m here to stay…
Is there an era that you guys particularly draw upon?
Kirsten: Not really, the 90’s maybe…we’ve all got guilty pleasures from each era.
Who are you musical influences?
Kirsten: As a band, Arcade Fire is a massive daily influence; I think it’s the only one we all like too! Lewis is a massive Bowie fan.
Lewis: Yeah Bowie, Talking Heads too.
Kirsten: We’re just a fan of bands that go on stage and play their heart and soul; it’s basically the party bands, as that’s what we want to be.
How did you guys come up with the name WHITE?
Lewis: We literally wrote about 500 names on bits of paper, we never used any of them as our band name but we got different song names for them; for instance, Blush is the title of one of our songs, future pleasures might have been one, but I think WHITE was just one of them. I liked it but no-one else really seemed to; everyone else was like “white neon” and I remember thinking if I keep saying it will stick. We wanted the band to be quite flamboyant, quite colourful, and WHITE we see as this blank canvas, like we write the logo in pink writing: you can make it anything.
What’s the thought behind some of your songs?
Lewis: Leo does quite a lot of the lyrics for the tracks but quite a lot of them we take different things from; I see the lyrics as placing you in a situation of extreme glamour or an extreme situation. If you’re going to a party, it’s going to be the most extreme party, if you’re going for a night out, then it’s the most extreme night out. The focus is so magnified, and that’s what future pleasures is about. There’s a track called private lives which I see as a magnifying glass on a private life, compared to a famous person who doesn’t get that.
Kirsten: Basically as far away from mundane reality as possible is what we aim for.
How do you guys all come up with songs together?
Lewis: No-one’s precious about shit, because we’ve all been writing for so long together. If someone says “I need a wee bit of time”, then that’s cool, we give them twenty minutes, and if they can’t sort it out in 20 minutes, then you’re out [laughs]!
Because you guys all have quite different musical backgrounds and have varying tastes, is there ever a time where you guys clash?
Kirsten: I think because there are five of us we don’t really; there’s quite good democracy. We’re always quite well grounded in what the end goal is, and we always work as a team.
Lewis: It’s always quite nice when something like that happens, for instance there have been tracks where they’ve started off as a piano ballad which you’d think “piano ballad, our band?”, but then we just pull it back and you’ve got a big fat synth at the bottom of it and some electronic stuff on top of it, and then you’ve got a WHITE ballad.
What’s your preferred type of venue? Do you prefer bigger venues or smaller gigs?
Lewis: For me personally, somewhere where they can pump it loud and turn the lights down low, because it’s kind of a club atmosphere
Kirsten: Whether it’s five or five hundred; obviously we’d prefer more though [laughs].
We recently played Glasgow and Edinburgh, both of which sold out. Edinburgh’s a 250 people venue holder, and there was about 300 people rammed in there, and that was tight and close, and you’re like face to face with the audience. And the Glasgow show takes up to 500 people and that was a larger show, larger production, with screens, and we had friends at both; some preferred the intimacy of Edinburgh because we were so up close – it’s hot, it’s sweaty, but some liked the spectacle of the Glasgow show. To me, I prefer both.
Have you ever had a bad concert, or do you just bounce of the audience?
Kirsten: I don’t think we’ve ever really had a bad time!
Lewis: We broke a PA once, for being too loud.But it was fine out front, but all you could hear backstage was my high hat. So we just pretended it was the best gig we’d ever played.
What’s been your favourite festival that youguys have done?
Kirsten: The Secret Garden Party was pretty awesome. We got invited to play basically on a whim and we put a band on that no-one knows – we put them second from headline on the main stage, because we think it shows our support in new music, and we got to do that which was absolutely unreal.
Lewis: We played at this place called the Paradiso which was almost like a derelict church or something and we played at about half-one in the morning, everyone was fucked, and the music was so loud, the lights were flashing, and everyone was dancing which was good because usually people can be quite reserved. Our first ever festival was Reaper in Germany, and we’re grateful for them for that.
And where do you see the future of WHITE going?
Kirsten: Just keep playing harder and faster.
