English indie rock outfit Editors released their seventh record EBM last September to favorable reviews. This next Sunday (February 5th), they are back in Istanbul at Zorlu PSM to play a gig of both old and new songs. We chatted briefly with bassist Russell Leetch in order to catch up.
You played a gig in Turkey just a few months earlier, and your next concert is scheduled for this Sunday. What are some of your earlier fond memories of your concerts in Turkey?
Yeah. That last one was in September, and it was a good time. It was at the end of the festival season, and we went to that town (Bursa) for the first time. Very pretty, by the water. The festival was good, too, we really enjoyed it. People seemed to have a good time.
Your latest record, EBM, has been out for a while now. How have you been observing the audience’s reaction to it during your concerts?
Really good. I think the album translates to a live setting really well. There’s such an energy to it that makes it easy for us to play. Sometimes we have albums with moodier songs in them like In Dream, which was more pieced together in the studio rather than played in a room at the same time. It becomes a tricky scenario. But with an album like this, the songs were so structured and it was very easy to piece together.
If you were to pick the easiest and hardest songs to create from this record, which ones would you choose?
I think “Silence” was a little bit tricky to get right. We took a little bit of time with that, just to get the mood right. “Strange Intimacy” was a little bit trickier as well. The rest of the building blocks for songs came quite quickly, though. Sometimes for songs, it all happens really quickly when you get that spark right. The easiest was probably “Karma Climb”, which was the first song we made. It wasn’t a complicated song musically and was easy to put together.
A quick game: Name the three most recently streamed artists from your search history.
Oh my! Okay. Let’s have a look. I played Jonathan Wilson’s latest record (Rare Birds) yesterday. There is Full of Hell, a metal band that I love. And I finally Philip Selway, who is the drummer of Radiohead.
Let’s imagine we are at a musicians’ theme park 100 years into the future. Which lyric do you reckon would be written on top of the Editors’ memorial?
Wow. “People are fragile things, you should know by now” from “Munich”. I think it would be a fitting note on such a theme park. (laughs)
