Winds of Change

“We were sick of Aquilo. We felt like we couldn’t make music. We felt like we weren’t good enough to write a song,” admits Fletcher, pulling at his grey hoodie. There’s nothing new about Aquilo’s story - band meets label, label has high staff turnover, band are left stranded - but there is a joy to be found in their journey.

The pair grew up in Silverdale, a small village in Lancashire on the edge of the Lake District. It sounds like the setting for a schmaltzy teen drama or ITV crime-thriller. “The more you stay away from it, the more you fantasise about it,” smiles Higham. “And when you go back, it’s like, nothing’s changed. Think Hot Fuzz,” he laughs.

With a population of two-thousand, it’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. Fletcher and Higham played in competing bands, often sharing the same bills in the local area, but with an age gap of around five years, growing up they were never friends. “If I was in Tom’s position and I was like, fifteen, I wouldn’t want a ten-year-old to be in my band,” laughs Fletcher.

As they got older, the psychology of the age gap shrunk, once Higham returned from University the pair began spending time together. “I heard a song that Ben had done and the thing is, a lot of my friends stayed in the cities they were in, so I didn’t really have any mates back home, so it was a really weird time,” explains Higham as Fletcher interjects, “He was forced into hanging out with me! I’d get home from school, Tom would get home from work, we’d just make a song and then the next day Tom would just listen to our ideas. Because he was in a factory doing something pretty monotonous, so he’d just listen, go home, and then we’d work on it a little bit more.”

The pair began writing acoustic, folk songs, eventually incorporating more electronic production. ”We actually even called ourselves Fletcher and Higham. It feels really lame looking back on it, but at the time we were like: Fletcher and Higham, great,” laughs Fletcher.

It was Higham’s mum who landed on the name Aquilo whilst researching Greek mythological gods. “I don’t know why or how this came up... but the actual meaning behind Aquilo is it’s the Greek mythology for the God of the Northern Wind,” shrugs Higham. “And we were like, ok, well that kind of has a relevance for Ben and I because we’re from the North of England. It sounds super pretentious.”

Pretentious, yes? Better than Fletcher and Higham? Absolutely. And the gods must have been smiling on Aquilo as they picked the right moment to share their music online. Blogs and the Hype Machine were still influential, but streaming was starting to come into its own. Aquilo hit right in that sweet spot between the old and new worlds of music discovery, their emotionally-driven, soundscaping pop the perfect complement for both.

A girlfriend of Fletcher’s sent one of their tracks, “Calling Me”, to a blog and things took off. “You can’t plan that shit,” he laughs. “We were just so fortunate the way it all panned out. It just started getting loads of plays. It went from like, 100 plays to 500 plays to 10,000 plays and then it just starts to go. I was at school at the time and we’d get emails from lawyers and managers and labels and I was saying to my friends, fucking hell - look at this! Look who’s messaging us! It was so weird.”

The duo planned a trip to London, complete with a night in a youth hostel booked by Fletcher’s mum. The boys took in back to back meetings with half the industry, “We were literally rabbits in headlights, we were just like, what the fuck is going on?” Higham shakes his head. “We’d been in countless bands and got nowhere with it and it’s like, how do you make it? It was so unexpected getting these blogs coz I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t even know what a blog was.”

They returned to Silverdale with a prestigious manager and set about to write more songs. “We just disappeared for a while and just made music,” says Fletcher, unfazed by the spectre of hype. “The weird thing is, you’ll always compare yourself to everyone else who’s in that time. The pressure wasn’t like, oh my god, everyone’s watching us. We’d look at artists who’d get the same amount of plays as us and they’d be doing bigger gigs than us. Maybe we were just too young and naive to really see what was going on, fortunately so it didn’t really affect making the music. We were just in Tom’s basement making more music and it was really nice.”

Signing with Island Records and realising they had a debut album to write, the pair moved to a flat in Manchester’s Northern Quarter with the intention of setting up a studio in the living room. “We didn’t exactly pick the best place to live, it was kind of like a cave,” sighs Higham.

“We didn’t come up with anything good for a whole year,” Fletcher admits. “Anything that was good, we wrote it when we were in London or LA. It was almost like we needed to be distracted from Manchester. Because Manchester just kind of felt like a party. All of my friends were at university in Manchester, so it was just really bad for us.”

Eventually they relented and moved to London. “When we were young we had mates going, ‘don’t move to London, you’ll just become another London band.’ I do kind of understand that, but in hindsight it’s a load of bollocks,” Fletcher laughs. “And then we moved to London and like a lightbulb just hit us, we just got our shit together and basically wrote Silhouettes.”

Featuring songs like the moving, piano mourn of near title-track “Silhouette”, and heartbroken falsetto rip of “Sorry”, it’s a record that has surely served many a lonely walk home. Take Aquilo’s streaming numbers as a source of comfort should you ever feel low - you’re certainly not the only one.

As well as working on their debut with SOHN who they describe as an “incredibly talented human being”, the duo flew to Reykjavík to record with the master of emotive soundscapes, Ólafur Arnalds. “We didn’t really know Ólafur Arnalds,” Higham admits. “Obviously we’re massive fans now. I remember my friends being like, ‘what the fuck you’re going to work with Ólafur Arnalds in Iceland?’ I was like, yeah, I’m sure he’s a good guy…”

The pair went to Arnalds’ studio, complete with Sigur Rós practising in the room next door. Higham recounts the experience of recording strings with a still incredulous awe. “I remember him getting four chairs out and two microphones over the top and I’m like, this is a bit weird. And then one violinist would come in and she’d play her part in a specific seat, and then another person would come in throughout the day and sit in a different place, and then by the end of it we had four people that came in separately to emulate, incredibly well, a string quartet. And it was a really interesting way of doing it and I remember recording it and just being like, oh my god this is our song. It was a real moment, sitting in the chair listening to what had been happening like, wow this is incredible.”

Aquilo often speak about working as a unit, writing together in isolation - in a basement in Silverdale or a cave in Manchester. But they excel in their many collaborations, be it SOHN, Arnalds or Madeon.

“We never want to set ourselves restraints in terms of collaborating with other people, and the fact is we do collaborate a lot with other people,” explains Higham. “I think it’s just healthy to have a balance when it comes to me and Ben writing together, or even writing on our own. I think it’s been an incredibly interesting situation in quarantine, writing on our own and sending ideas back and forth. I think that’s been healthy as well.”

“When we first started making music together, Madeon had a song called “Icarus” that had been floating around,” smiles Fletcher, cheekily. “It’s totally not Aquilo, but me and Tom always used to test whether speakers sounded good by just blasting “Icarus”. Tom used to be into dubstep at University,” he laughs. “We do tend to gravitate towards artists more than just songwriters. We actually started a really good song with Rhye we haven’t finished. We just didn’t have time. We were over in LA on a recent trip. He was trying to shift stuff round in our diary to get us to finish the idea, but we’d been put in with loads of big pop writers, people wouldn’t let us shift the thing.”

Moving on to the writing sessions, and the start of the end for their relationship with Island Records. “It started with a meeting,” sighs Higham, tentatively. “Me and Ben went into Island Records and they wanted us to have a hit song. Essentially, in a nutshell, they were like, moving forwards we need a radio single. And we were like, ok. And obviously, as soon as someone says that, for us that was like the kiss of death. You’ve already lost the battle if you’re going off and trying to write a hit. It just doesn't work like that.”

“People that have written hits, say that’s not how it works,” laughs Fletcher.

So the duo were sent to Sweden, Nashville and LA in search of a hit song. “It very much felt like a quest,” Fletcher jokes. “Just to rewind, we had actually asked after album one to get dropped but they wouldn’t drop us because the streaming numbers were good. And they hadn’t even realised the streaming numbers were good, that's how much of an insult it was. And the same thing happened with the second album. It’s like hundreds of millions of streams, but they just had bigger fish to fry. We’ve basically always been a slow grow. We’ve never had one thing that has put us at the forefront of anything. We’ve just quietly been building a fanbase with our music and we’ve been really comfortable doing that. But it just didn’t work out that way. Because we’re being sent off to write with these people who, and no discredit to them, but they definitely hadn’t heard our music before. We were just another day at the office and it got really soul-destroying.”

Stagnation and writer's block hit. The original team at Island who had signed the band had moved on. “We were no-one’s baby,” half-jokes Higham. The pair came back from their trips empty-handed and entirely deflated. “We literally came back and we were like, we haven’t got anything to show you,” says Higham. “We just felt like we were rubbish at what we did. We were really fucking bummed out,” adds Fletcher.

Resigned from Aquilo, the duo started making music for fun with musician/producer Jack Sibley, also known as Pedestrian or North Downs. Together they were Trip The Light Fantastic. “It was just wacky. There was no pressure. We didn’t really think anyone was gonna hear it,” smiles Fletcher. Although they did propose releasing it as a side-project through Island. “They were like, errrrmmm. And then a few days later basically they said no,” he laughs.

So they played the tunes to their old A&R from happier major label days, toying with their new trippy identity. “He was like, this isn’t a side-project, this is the new Aquilo,” deadpans Fletcher. “This is blatantly Aquilo and if you put it out as a side-project everyone will be like, oh look at Aquilo’s new thing. He was like, you’ve just accidentally gone and made the new Aquilo record. We left that meeting feeling really inspired and we were just like, fuck, yeah, maybe we have.”

And so Aquilo was back. They were eventually released from Island Records, found a new manager, and signed an artist-friendly deal with AWAL. “For the first ever time, in theory, we’ll actually be earning off our own music, says Fletcher. “We signed that Island deal just as Spotify was starting to pick up traction, so no one knew what was going to happen. Well, maybe a few had a little tip off or an idea, but we certainly didn’t,” he laughs. “So this new deal, it’s just healthy, they seem to be rigged in the artist’s favour. There are successful artists who are choosing to go there because this is the way deals should be done moving forwards.”

Having released no music for nearly two years, a long time compared to their previous prolificness, they released new single “Sober” earlier this year, the title-track from a forthcoming EP. “I think it was good for us to take a break from releasing an album,” says Higham. “I think it was very healthy for us to step back a little bit because the experiences we were going through were big for us. It was a very natural progression of, oh my god we are shit, to, actually we can do something. It’s good to experience rock bottom because you can learn from that. It’s the experience in itself and I think that was actually really important for us because if we hadn’t been there we wouldn’t be where we are now, musically. We’re definitely in a better head space than we were.

Their Sober EP, out this July, is four tracks of delicate vocals, impactful storytelling and as you’d expect, a lot of emotion. It charts the journey of a break up, from realisation, through turmoil, to acceptance. The final track “Moving On” marks both an ending and a fresh start.

Recent single “Just Asking” is a gorgeous ballad full of haunting harmonies and lucious echoes while “Always Forever” is a playful, sweet ride. A little more upbeat than traditional Aquilo fare, it was the first thing they wrote with Sibley. “We made that on the first day of meeting him,” says Fletcher. “Well, you can imagine, it was the first thing we made after that horrible trip. We were like FUCK, finally, there you go. We worked with Jack on the whole EP. We’ve kind of got this system now with Jack where we give him an idea and then close our eyes and then Jack goes ‘how about this?’ And he gives us something back and he’s just kind of fucked it up a little bit basically. We wrote “Moving On” and “Always Forever” with Jack. And “Moving On”, that one blatantly sticks out like a sore thumb, but we kind of like that.”

“I think the whole EP represents, in a very Aquilo way, a break up,” explains Higham. “As we were choosing the tracklistings it just made more and more sense to end it with, you’re moving on.”

The narrative of the EP, the relationship thematics and ending with “Moving On” almost like a coming to peace, there’s a certain significance there given the past twenty-four months. “It’s kind of like a step into where this album’s going,” continues Fletcher. “We’ve labelled this EP as a stepping stone but we like to think it’s more than that. It’s kind of like a moment in time for us where we’ve just about gotten over that shit and are able to venture into this new thing that should hopefully take over the next year of our lives. “Moving On” is essentially the stepping stone into it.”

And the album, will it continue with this new found, playful, upbeat vibe? “We’re still working on this album and this morning me and Tom were looking at a really rough tracklist and it looks like quite a positive album!” says Fletcher. “Obviously there’s some heart-breaky stuff…”

“We need that sync!” shouts Higham.

Self-deprecating, honest and upbeat, there’s certainly a confident contentment to the pair, and a positive outlook for a future in control of their own path. And once lockdown lifts, they’re excited to move that new found assertiveness into their live shows. “With this new album that we’re making, we’ve said to each other that we really wanna give this a shot on the live side of things,” Fletcher states. “Previously, we’d do the tours that we got told to do, or that our management and label would go, oh it’d be good to do this here and this here. Maybe it’s because we’re more mature now, but it’s just like, we wanna play there, we wanna play there, we wanna play there.”

These Northerners just got a second wind.