I never believed in heroes or myths: TLOBF meets Banjo or Freakout

Sometimes not even a healthy response to a pertinent question will give you all of the answers that you need. The complex character that donates the answer can only do their best to shed the maximum amount of light on their talents without going headlong into a world of arrogant self-adulation. Luckily, when talking to Alessio Natalizia aka Banjo or Freakout (and one half of Walls), such qualms do not exist. His recent self titled album of the former has already become one of the stand-out albums of the year, and upon catching up with him following a string of shows with The Go! Team, we found a man unperturbed by his own pace talking all things Banjo or Freakout, Walls and beyond.

Hey Alessio – how are you today? How’s the tour going?

Hey, I’m well thanks! I have some time off before we go to the US and am working on demos for the new Banjo and Walls albums. Feeling super excited and can’t wait to finish them. Tour is going good. We did a two week tour with the Go! Team in the UK and it was great fun but also tough sometimes as a support band. No-one has much time for you and you have to be really quick, no matter what’s happening; soundcheck in six minutes and stuff like that but most of it was brilliant and we had a great time. We just came back from four shows in Italy and that was so good… the weather and the people were unbelievable.

How are you finding the reception to the album – there have been some amazing words thrown your way, which must be really flattering?

Yes, it is super flattering! I really try and force myself not to read reviews and stuff, but then it’s really hard not to! I’ve been in bands before and released records sharing the good and the bad with other people, but BOF is just me so it feels so personal… a bad review could really make me sad and a good review could make me feel on top of the world. I get emotional! I’m learning to get more distant from it but it’s hard. I know it shouldn’t but it really annoys me when I read a badly written review, even if it’s a positive one, where I understand the journalist didn’t really listen to the album properly but I am really happy when I understand people have been taking time to listen to the album and absorb it.

From a personal point of view – coming from when I first found you playing a greasy spoon in Nottingham with HEALTH – there seems to have been a pretty big change in your sound. Was that very conscious decision?

Oh, that show with Health was amazing. This thing of how the sound changed is quite funny. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was clear in my head that the album should have been an album made of more structured songs but at the time I loved playing those shows with Daniel (who used to play with me back then) and just jam with no real songs and no structure. The singles I released before the album were defenitely more song oriented but the thing is that they sounded like shit. So, even if in my head they were clearly pop songs, people were getting them in a complete different way. I don’t think songs like ‘Upside Down’ or ‘Left It Alone’ from back then are too different from ’105′ or ‘Idiot Rain’. It’s just that in the past we didn’t used to play those kind of songs live, we were just making a lot of noise. Also at the beginning of BOF I was going a little bit all over the place, trying to explore everything and sometimes focusing more on the sounds than on the songs but I want to write pop songs and not just send myself crazy with loops so after a while I started to give myself more limitations and that defenitely come through in the album.

What do you make of those throwing phrases like ‘The London Bradford Cox’ your way?

To be honest it depends what people mean by that. I have a, let’s call it, punk rock attitude to music and musicians where in the end everyone is the same. I never believed in heroes or myths. I understand it’s easy for people to compare bands and records but it also feels so lame most of the times. I try to do my thing so if you minimalise that as ‘a copy of someone else’ that will piss me off.

You moved out to New York to record the album though – was that to give that added sense of escapism to the whole thing, or simply because the change of scenery gave you a new muse?

These are all songs born and recorded in my house in London but they could have been recorded anywhere, really. I don’t think they are inspired by any particular location. Going to record the album in New York with Nicolas was more or a choice I made to move away from the the lo-fi/bedroom producer thing which I didn’t really want to be part of. Before going to the US I had released three singles recorded mostly by myself at home. With the album I wanted to try and give my 90% finished songs to someone I trusted and see what he was going to make of them.

Did you feel like your work with Sam and doing Walls kind of filled your electronic quota and left you wanting to do something different with BOF?

Yes it did. I have used some BOF’s more abstract stuff for Walls and focused on the more song structured side of BOF. It was going to happen anyway but Walls defenitely helped the whole process to happen quicker and feel more natural. I want Banjo and Walls to be as different as possible and while before I was trying to put all my ideas in BOF now I have Walls too so everytime I write something new I can decide if it is right for BOF or more adapted to working on with Sam. I don’t see either of the two bands as more important or a side project and I love the fact that I can go on stage with Walls at 3 o’ clock in the morning playing a club somewhere in Europe or doing something completely the opposite with BOF playing to a complete different crowd. The two things give life to each other.

Sam Willis (left) and Alessio Natalizia: Walls

How did you find relinquishing creative control in becoming a duo? Obviously you focus on BOF as your own project, but did that come about organically or otherwise?

Starting to work with Sam was really easy and spontaneous. At first we were going back and forth via email for a few months but by the time we met up, the work became super fast. It was completely fluid, like if we have known each other for ages. We share the same musical reference points so working together feels natural and inspiring every time.

How does your writing process work with Banjo or Freakout? There’s one lyric, especially, that makes me think it’s quite meticulous in ‘Black Scratches’, how your mother kept ‘coming in and putting her nose in the air’ (maybe I’m taking that too literally?

Well, yes I am quite meticulous. You know, you end up spending ages on a song listening back to it fifty times in a day and then when you finish to record it you never go back and listen to it ever again. You develope a kind of a nausea to your whole music. It’s weird! My songs are really simple, most of the times they are only made of one chord and I don’t like spending too much time on the recording process of every single track. I prefer to work on the whole thing. There are different ways I can come up with a song. It can start from a drum loop or a or can start from a melody I have in my head, or from me playing guitar and singing in fake english. They mostly start from one sound and then grow on top of that. I usually finish the music first and then when I am happy with the music I take the songs to the second level which includes adding lyrics to it. As for the lyrics I work on them as a collage, I steal sentences or words from magazines and books and then I add my own lyrics trying to connect them to give them a sense that feels personal to me.

I’ve been told about hundreds of castaways from the album process – will they ever see the light of day?

Yes it’s true that I had a lot of demos to choose from for the album tracklist but most of them where just rough ideas or loops. I’ve released some of them on a cd/tape that was released by Lefse last year but I’m not sure I will release more. I’ve used some as b-sides for the album singles or will post some on my blog at some point maybe. I just think you need to write a lot of songs to get a decent one, or at least that’s the way I work, the more I write the more I get inspired. I just realised it doesn’t really make sense to release songs I am not 100% happy about, in a way what’s the point in releasing second choices of your own music?

How drastic is the cultural difference between your Italian and English bases in terms of your music?

As a comparison there is a huge difference in terms of how music is seen in either county. Italy has a bit of a nationalistic attitude towards music, it is a country not really focused on exporting music outside its own territory and if you add, on a bigger scale, that we’ve had fifteen years of Berlusconi and a completely cultural black hole it’s easy to understand how hard it is for italian bands to play their cards and be at the same level of bands from the UK or the US or from Scandinavia… There are a lot of great bands in Italy at the moment and I think the internet revolution really helped a lot so I’m quite positive about the future. Sometimes I get the feeling that a lot of Italian bands have too much of a music fan’s attitude towards music and focus more on emulating US/UK bands instead developing their own sound but things will definetely get better. I can feel it!

Does BOF fit into any sort of alternative scene in Italy?

I don’t think so but not because I don’t want to be part of it. I love Italy but I live in London and this is where I do my thing. I go back to Italy two times a year and even if I try to keep myself up to date I think I am quite out of the loop with the Italian scene and not really part of it.

You’re also pretty well known as touring pretty relentlessly, given how much is going on with both BOF and Walls. How do you cope on the road? And would you say you feel more comfortable in a live environment now with a full band, as it were?

Totally. I love touring with a full band. It gives me way more possibilities in the way I can recreate the Banjo songs on stage and it’s a lot more fun both on stage and on the road. How I cope on the road? I love playing shows and being on the road. I used to be terrified by it when I first started BOF, being by myself it was so depressing and was putting me in a total panic state everytime but it’s great now.

Where does BoF go from here now – if the tangents stay the same, are we to expect some sort of Justin Bieber tribute album?

Ha, why not?! I don’t know where BOF is going from here now. For sure I want to release a lot more music. I am writing some new stuff and I’m quite excited about it. I’d love to do a new album soon really… the first album took so long to come out that it feels like I should do a new one quickly. The new songs at the moment sound a bit like a mix of stuff that wouldn’t necessarily fit together, there’s a lot of ballads and some more upbeat almost dancey ones too as well as some simple guitar/vocals tunes so soon it will be a matter of deciding which songs to take to the next level.

Idiot Rain (Chad Valley Remix) by Banjo or Freakout

Dear Me by Banjo or Freakout

Can’t Be Mad For Nothing by Banjo or Freakout