Back on the road

ANYONE who thinks the album as a format is dead clearly hasn’t seen the effort Bristol five-piece Coasts have put into their forthcoming full-length release this year.

Sessions for the as-yet-untitled debut began in February, and when The Guide spoke to keyboard player David Goulbourn earlier this month the band was still writing and reworking material.

“We wrote and released our first song Stay in 2011,” he says. “We’re now in the process of reworking it for the album.

“We’re still playing it live too – we dropped it for a year and everyone was asking why we weren’t playing it!

“Your debut album is such a massive thing – in this day and age if you blow your first chance you don’t get another. We’re hoping to have about five or six singles on there.”

Coasts broke through on the blogosphere with a signature sound of uplifting, summery pop collected across a series of EPs. Songs like A Rush Of Blood and Oceans are based around epic guitars, booming piano sounds and anthemic choruses designed to burst out of speakers and get audiences moving.

Goulbourn says this sound will still be very much in evidence on the album – although the band is working to include some dark and brooding moments in there too.

“It’s not always the easiest thing to write an uplifting pop song,” admits Goulbourn. “It’s harder to write a three-and-a-half-minute pop song than a seven-minute brooding song.

“We’ve got two or three songs left to record for the album now. We spent a lot of time in the summer writing and recording – it’s going to be nice to get on the road again.”

Indeed the album has so dominated the band’s 2014 schedule they even had to cancel a planned US tour to get everything finished.

Along the way they have employed the skills of Duncan Mills, who has worked with Jamie Cullum, Lissie and James Murphy; Two Door Cinema Club producer Eliot James; Alan Moulder of Foals, Arctic Monkeys, Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails fame who remixed EP favourite Ocean; and Rudimental and Emeli Sandé producer Mike Spencer to rework early live favourite A Rush Of Blood.

“Doing different songs with different producers is a good way of getting new ideas on board,” says Goulbourn. “It doesn’t all sound the same, you have lots of elements. Everyone is learning different things with each producer.”

The band is currently signed to Warner offshoot Good Soldier Songs, and recently inked a deal with the legendary Capitol Records in the US – so big things are expected of them.

For now the band is looking forward to getting back on the road, and paying their fourth visit to Brighton – although their city debut wasn’t all that auspicious.

“The first Great Escape show was a bit of a disaster,” admits Goulbourn. “It was at midday so everyone was hungover and there weren’t a lot of people in the room. Our laptop fell off the back of the stage so we couldn’t finish off our set.”

This year’s appearance at the new music festival saw them play an ITB showcase at a packed Prince Albert.

Getting back on the road is also a chance for the one-time Bristol housemates to catch up again.

“We were at university together in Bath,” says Goulbourn. “We decided to move to Bristol together as the five of us. None of us live together anymore [guitarist and songwriter Liam Willford now lives in Brighton, while the rest of the band are based around London], but we used to share a house with the five of us living together, rehearsing together and touring together. It did get a bit fractious when you’re with each other all that time – now we don’t see each other sometimes for a couple of weeks so we have stuff to talk about.”

When it comes to the live show the ethos is very simple.

“We always aim for our shows to be a big party,” says Goulbourn. “It’s not enough just to play the songs – we have to have a stage show. We’ve got palm trees and a backdrop which looks like the sea, and neon lights. We are slowly developing the look – we started out with no money, just going to Maplins to get a couple of lights.”

Support from Racing Glaciers and The New Union.

Duncan Hall