Years & Years
Concorde 2, Madeira Drive, Brighton, Saturday, March 7

In a previous life Emre Turkmen was part of the team at KSS Group who designed the American Express Community Stadium.

Now he is returning to Brighton to play his first headline sold-out show with his band Years & Years – fresh from being named the BBC’s Sound of 2015.

“I went to Brighton pretty much every other week when I was working on the stadium,” he says. “We’ve only played Brighton once though – when we were on the NME stage at the Great Escape.”

He is not fazed by the extra attention the band is now getting, despite only having a handful of EPs to their name.

“You can drive yourself insane with that sort of thing,” he says. “It’s still just the three of us in a room with our synths. If you take yourself too seriously then you will go potty – just as if you take it seriously when people slag you off.

“It just makes me a bit happy that people are buying tickets to see our little band.”

Years & Years grew from a meeting between Turkmen and Mikey Goldsworthy on a band website. Actor-turned-vocalist Olly Alexander – who took leading roles in UK films God Help The Girl and The Riot Club – was supposedly recruited after being heard singing in the shower after a house party.

“For a couple of years we had fun with it,” says Turkmen. “We would set ourselves little goals – to see if we could write a song together, to see if we could play live, to record a song, to make a video and put it on YouTube.

“Now the goals are a little bit more adventurous and ambitious – to tour the UK and Europe, or to go to the US. It’s still a case of having fun and doing our best.”

That sense of fun comes across in their music. Although starting out playing guitars, ukulele and melodica, over the course of five EPs and one collaborative top 10 single with The Magician, the band has developed a party-friendly sound based around skittering drum machines, vintage synths and Alexander’s high, emotive vocals.

It has been helped along by a series of YouTube-friendly videos, helped along by the band’s previous experiences.

“Olly used to be an actor, Mikey went to film school, I was an architect and production geek, so we did all that stuff anyway,” says Turkmen, who paid for the band’s video to Real out of his own salary. “We can just do it with a bit more confidence.

“We did the Real video in one day – we roped in people we knew [including Ben Wishaw and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett of Misfits fame] to work for free, just paying for the equipment hire and food for everyone. It still remains a really good video.

“You realise that if you sign to a major label you don’t need to hire a CGI guy or get a load of pyrotechnics. A good video is another way of expressing what you’re doing with your music – so we take great care with it.”

The video for latest EP King did see the band hire Sia’s choreographer Ryan Heffington and a team of dancers to throw Alexander around.

“Our videos try to get to the heart of the song,” says Turkmen. “We don’t want to do a literal thing though, because that’s boring.”

Following all the EPs the trio are focusing on their debut album – which should see the light of day this summer.

“There’s a lot of talk about the death of the album, but I don’t personally think that’s true,” says Turkmen. “The people who care most about albums are the people who make them.

“EPs were definitely a great way to find our sound. Most of our singles will be on the album, but we have a lot of new stuff too.

“There are a lot of old songs that people might not recognise, and stuff that we have come up with in the last few weeks.

“We have put a lot of effort into it. We didn’t get two months in the studio – we did it in pieces, a week here and there.

“Doing it that way was quite good in the end – we got so obsessed with the album it would have driven us mad!”

Turkmen says they’re happy to succeed or fail from their own efforts.

“We like to be involved in every part of what we do,” he says. “We don’t like to give away control – we still make our own videos and tinker around with everything in the studio.

“With the album we did stupid things like Mikey playing a Theremin or his own face.

“There are so many cool bands out there – we don’t think we’re any better than anyone else, it’s just nice to be recognised.”

Duncan Hall

Doors 7pm, SOLD OUT. Call 01273 673311 for returns