Everything Everything to play The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, as part of Revive Live tour with Music Venue Trust and The National Lottery | Big Interview

With five top 10 albums, a brace of Mercury Prize and five Ivor Novello nominations under their belts, the art-rockers have never been ones to compromise.

And on their latest album Raw Data Feel they have again being pushing the boundaries of their creativity, through their use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

They are currently on a UK tour as part of the Revive Live campaign, playing a series of intimate shows which finishes at The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea on August 24.

The Music Venue Trust (MVT) has teamed up with the National Lottery for the scheme which sees major artists such as Charlie XCX, Paolo Nutini, Sleaford Mods and The Amazons playing far smaller venues than they would usually, emphasising the importance of the grassroots circuit to the overall live scene.

Fans can buy a ticket, and as long as they bring a valid National Lottery ticket with them to the show, can bring in a friend for free.

For Everything Everything it marks a long overdue return to the city.

‘We haven’t played Portsmouth since 2015, I don't think,’ says bassist Jeremy Pritchard, ‘and we haven't played The Wedge since 2012.’

And it sees the band playing smaller venues than they have in some time. ‘That's kind of the point of this tour,’ says Jeremy, ‘to reinvigorate local scenes and reinvigorates grassroots venues and the network after Covid. It's a really good scheme –you get bigger artists than would normally playing those rooms, and the punters get a lot out of it as well. We're really pleased to be doing it.’

‘It feels like it gives us a certain amount of licence with the setlist as well because we're playing smaller gigs, it's going to be pretty intense fans – we're not going to have to play a festival set, we can go a bit deeper.’

The importance of the Music Venue Trust

This is the third run of Revive Live shows, with previous legs in 2021 and earlier this year proving a huge success. Everything Everything jumped at the chance to take part.

‘We hadn't done any of the shows before – we'd wanted to, but the timing wasn't right. We were either in the studio or booked onto other tours, or whatever, so we're really glad that it's worked out this way.’

As a patron of the MVT, it’s a cause which is close to Jeremy’s heart. Although Jeremy was born in Portsmouth, his family moved away to Tunbridge Wells when he was just two.

‘The charity was set up by two people I know who ran the Tunbridge Wells Forum, which is where I grew up. The Forum is a long-standing grassroots touring venue, and the guys who ran that place were very aware of the pressures that venue owners are under commercially and even emotionally to keep those community resources going – because that's what they are, community resources. Financially it's so difficult.

‘They set up this charity (the MVT) to protect those venues and it does a brilliant job of doing that.’

Releasing an album during the pandemic

This year has seen the band finally able to resume something like normal business. Their previous album, Reanimator was released in September 2020.

‘We did discuss delaying Reanimator – we had the finished record, but we hadn't started doing anything like videos or photos or anything like that, so we had to kind of do all that sort of stuff remotely, which did force a particular kind of aesthetic, which was quite good in the end, I think.

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‘We also got bored of that though, and just wanted to tour! We could have delayed that album, but I'm glad we didn't, to be honest. The right thing to do was to get it out. The shelf life of any album is really reduced now, but during the pandemic everybody was ecstatic about something for a week – then they'd move onto the next thing!

‘Even before the end of that calendar year, we were saying: “Well the right thing to do now is write another album”.’

And of course touring behind Reanimator was out: ‘We did two socially-distanced launch shows,’ recalls Jeremy, ‘and that was all we could do – 200 people in a 1,500 capacity room, twice in a day, that's all we did. And then in 2021 we started to get sporadic festivals and things back which had been rolled over from 2020, It's been difficult.

‘But this year's been much, much busier – touring the UK and Europe and festivals in the summertime and this run in August.’

How they wrote new album, Raw Data Feel

And so to new album Raw Data Feel – on its release in April it gave the band their highest charting release to date when it hit number four.

While the full band is always credited with writing their songs, frontman Jonathan Higgs is the lyricist. In the past he has often embraced political and major sociological themes, but this time he tried something completely new. Higgs created an AI programme and fed it the entire terms and conditions of business networking website LinkedIn, the epic poem Beowulf, 400,000 posts from the controversial anonymous online forum site 4Chan, and the teachings of Confucius. Its responses have been used as a basis for the record’s lyrics, song titles and artwork creation.

Jeremy explains: ‘Jonathan wanted it to be involved in machine learning from quite early on in the writing process, in a way to force himself out of his own lyrical comfort zone.

‘I think he thought he'd been talking about the same sort of stuff in the same sort of way for a while. It was an almost arbitrary way of approaching things differently.

‘We thought of it as a modern version of what David Bowie used to do – like William Burroughs’ cut-up phrases, assembling them at random, and that forces a different way of thinking and writing. But the data that he chose to input was quite wide-ranging.

‘We've probably overstated how much of it made it into the lyrics! It was more about getting these reams and reams back and choosing individual lines to insert into songs, either to put a different slant on the song, or to make Jon think and write differently.

‘It was a kind of reciprocal process – it wasn't like this stuff was just spat out and we used it. And sometimes it would throw up these amazing juxtapositions and phraseology that a human being wouldn't come up with – it was slightly wrong but it was also quite poignant. It's just peppered around the album – it's probably only about five per cent of the actual lyrics, but it's enough to put a particular slant on it.

‘Then with the AI stuff beyond that, we used it a lot with the imagery of the album and the artwork and the photographs we did around it.

‘Just those few months we were working on it, the technology itself was evolving so rapidly. It was quite interesting to see.’

Creating the artwork for the new album campaign

As you can see from the images here, it gave the band some striking images for the album campaign.

‘We quite enjoyed those – there were different levels of intervention, some of them were really extreme, and it's all made up of non-existent stuff.

‘The album cover itself, you sort of think you're looking at a robot face and it also sort of looks like one of those old Kodak cameras. It has this sort of nameless nostalgia about it but you're not looking at anything real – and yet it still provokes certain familiar feelings, even though you're not looking at anything familiar.

‘It's a really interesting grey area.’

They also used the technology in the accompanying videos, including for the single Teletype, which consists of human faces, completely generated by AI, singing the song. Some of these faces ended up as ‘grotesque experiments’ where the machine thought it was making a person but failed. The end result is effective but somewhat unnerving.

‘It is unnerving,’ agrees Jeremy. ‘It's like that website, have you seen This Person Doesn't Exist?

‘Every time you refresh the page, it generates a new person, and they're completely generated by AI – they're not real people, it's the same sort of thing with the Teletype video.

‘It's unnerving, but there's also a very basic "all together now" feeling to it too, I quite like that dichotomy.’

So is this the future?

‘I don't know, I suppose there's an aspect of everybody's lives which will include more machine learning, more AI – it's going to be everywhere. It's already involved in ways we don't quite understand.’

Everything Everything are at The Wedgewood Rooms on August 24. Check wedgewood-rooms.co.uk for availability.