Left alone in Editors’ dressing room for a couple of minutes, it’s hard not to fear the worst. A well-thumbed copy of George Orwell’s 1984 lies face down on a low table while, a few feet away, a small wardrobe pays host to an entirely black selection of garments. Frankly, you would expect nothing less from a band whose modern reconfiguration of early Eighties overcoat indie has seen them labelled in some cheeky quarters as Boy Division.
It’s a tag with which Editors are familiar. Mention it again and they are commendably unrattled. Tease guitarist Chris Urbanowicz with the suggestion that the opening line of their recent hit Munich — “I’m so glad I found this” — might refer to the time he found his dad’s box of Echo & the Bunnymen albums, and he’s a picture of Zen equanimity. It probably helps that more than six months since its release, the group’s debut album, The Back Room, is enjoying a lengthy residency in the national Top Five.
But over the course of an afternoon in Amsterdam, the truth is a little knottier. You join us shortly after news emerges that a key band in the musical infancy of the frontman Tom Smith has re-formed. No, not Joy Division fronted by an animatronic Ian Curtis. And it can’t be the young U2, of course, because they never split up in the first place. No, instead think Britpop. Think amusingly psychedelic posh-rock with mystical pretensions. “Did you ever like Kula Shaker?” asks Urbanowicz.
I confess to him that hindsight has left me with a guilty regard for the ersatz Hindi-pop of Tattva. It takes only a nod of assent from the Editors’ guitarist to prompt outrage from Smith. “Hang on!” he exclaims. “In the dressing room the other day, I said that first Kula Shaker album . . . well, it wasn’t totally s*** — and I got completely ridiculed for saying so!”
The debate rumbles long enough to yield a further confession from Smith — that, for a time, he was also partial to the Scally stoner pop of Cast. And, as it does so, the plot thickens. How to reconcile the glacial sense of desolation that informs Editors’ tunes such as Blood and Camera, with Smith’s insistence that, actually, it was Oasis’s Definitely Maybe that first made him want to pick up a guitar? Comfortingly, it’s a question that has also crossed the 24-year-old singer’s mind. While he doesn’t have much to say about Ian Curtis’s impact on his life, he needs no encouragement to wax nostalgic about his arrival at secondary school in Stroud, Gloucestershire, when Blur and Oasis were “all over the telly and I had a new bunch of mates”.
Fast-forward a few years though, and it’s a different story. If Britpop taught Smith how to play, perhaps we can credit the ensuing “character-building” period of his life for setting the emotional temperature of his band’s oeuvre.
By the beginning of this decade, both school and Britpop were out for ever, and indie music was tetchily looking at its watch, waiting for the Strokes to be invented. Editors had yet to meet, but they had all come to the same realisation. Seeking to “somehow get involved with music”, they all applied to study music technology in the Midlands town of Stafford.
It wasn’t the best of times. It was the worst of times. “There’s a tendency for people to look back fondly at their university days,” explains Urbanowicz. “But there was none of that where we were. We had ideas of being producers or engineers or whatever — but then we quickly realised that we were terrible at it.”
“We didn’t really embrace student life, did we?” ponders Smith. “But then, we had no choice. Because it was an engineering college, there were lots of boys and nobody really used to go out because it was quite geeky. The union bar would be half-full, even at weekends. We would go to rock nights and there would be about 12 people there.
“And yet they still wouldn’t play our requests. They played System of a Down, who are very popular in Stafford.”
A mental picture emerges of the soon-to-be Editors — Urbanowicz and Smith, as well as bassist Russell Leetch and drummer Ed Lays — clustered in the corner of an empty bar bemoaning the local ubiquity of nu-metal agit-rock. In fact, the sheer torpor brought on by their predicament meant that, “actually, we were dancing too, charging around the place”.
Making the best of a bad situation? “You could say that,” concurs Urbanowicz. “The nearest they got to playing a record we liked was the Strokes — and that was in our third year.”
Bonded by adversity and apprehension at what the “real world” had in store for them, Editors moved to a house in nearby Birmingham, their hunger sharpened by a series of “unpleasant” jobs in call centres (in the case of Smith and Leetch) and shoe shops (Urbanowicz).
More than a year before it became their debut single, a 2003 demo of Bullets acted as something of a message in a bottle. “We sent it to two or three people,” says the guitarist, “and then two weeks later 30 A&R people came to see us play.”
As anyone who watches Smith on stage will attest, Editors’ singer — currently raising his Heat currency thanks to his relationship with the Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman — doesn’t “do” happiness as such. Some artists register an audience’s energy with grinning or between-song banter. Caught between his band’s pounding, military whip-crack and his audience’s fervid reaction, Smith channels his own excitement into the six strings of his guitar, thrashing them with solemn abandon. Then, when that won’t provide an adequate emotional outlet, he places the instrument on his head — as though resetting himself. At which point it happens all over again.
Inevitably, such intense music provokes an intense response. After perusing one of the band’s message boards, Smith’s schoolteacher parents recently told him about one fan who has tattooed his skin with the words “Keep with me” (from Fingers in the Factories).
Despite being aired for the first time last week, a new song, Weight of the World, has already flooded the net. “People are wetting themselves over the fact that we’ve finally written a song,” says a mildly taken aback Urbanowicz.
It would be nice to write a few more but, deprived of the solitude Smith needs to sketch out new songs, the 11 tracks from The Back Room will have to see the band through America, Japan and the festival circuit. Editors have effectively been thrust into a creative limbo by their own success — a quandary that threatened the existence of bands such as Radiohead and Blur early in their careers.
Right now, though, the buzz of playing to bigger, more improbable audiences seems to be invigorating them. Smith relates an episode from the group’s recent appearance on Channel 4’s Friday Night Project: “We walked in and there was a security guard at the door, who looked pretty much as you’d expect a security guard to look. I told him who we were and he started to sing Bullets at me. Having a burly security guard singing ‘You don’t need this disease’ across the foyer — now, that was a moment.”
Of course, crossing over to that elusive “lad” demograph is something Joy Division never managed. Does Editors’ success suggest that Ian Curtis was merely 30 years ahead of his time? It’s a view with which Urbanowicz has some sympathy. “The thing that interests me is when Manchester United fans sing ‘Giggs will tear you apart’ at Old Trafford. That seems quite strange — a terrace anthem out of a Joy Division song.”
But it’s surely just a matter of time before the same accolade befalls an Editors song? Bastardising the words of Munich, Urbanowicz ventures: “‘Your defence is a fragile thing/ You should know by now.’ There. How about that?”
Smith is unconvinced. “It doesn’t quite flow.”
“Give it time,” says the guitarist. “Give it time.”
Hear Editors at www.timesonline.co.uk/podcasts
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