Oliver Sykes and Jordan Fish of Bring Me The Horizon had a lot on their minds when they came to Radio.com to discuss their new album, That’s the Spirit. There’s their somewhat more accessible direction. There’s their message about fighting depression. And then, there was the fact that their album was going head-to-head on the album charts in their homeland of England against British indie legends the Stereophonics.
Unfortunately for them, the Stereophonics came out on top on the U.K. chart with BMTH coming in second. They also came in second on the U.S. charts, beat only by The Weeknd; however, here, the Stereophonics didn’t even crack the top 200. They also should pat themselves on the back at least a little; they’ve topped the Alternative album charts as well as the Rock album charts.
And if That’s the Spirit breaks them out of the metal genre to a more mainstream audience, they’ll surely have many other chances to top many more charts all over the world for years to come.
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Oli, the last time Radio.com spoke with you, you said “We want to be the band that gets people into this kind of music.” It was Linkin Park that got you into heavy music, right?
Oliver Sykes: Yeah, I was more of like a general music listener before I got into rock music. Like I liked certain songs and that, but I didn’t really have a genre. I used to listen to all dance music and pop, but it wasn’t like a way of life like it was when I got into rock.
I think one of the first videos I saw was “Papercut” by Linkin Park. I wasn’t necessarily an angry kid, but I was a kid full of energy, and I didn’t have any outlet to express my emotion, you know what I mean? I think when I saw that video and saw how they were singing and how they were acting and performing, it just felt like the most fun ever, and I guess it spoke to me in that way.
So they really were the band that got me into that kind of music. And for me, and I guess for anyone who’s into rock music, it’s a way of life. It’s not just about the music, it’s about how you dress, it’s about what you do on the weekends, it’s about who you hang out with.
How old were you when you got into Linkin Park?
Sykes: Thirteen, fourteen. There wasn’t many people at my school at the time that was into that kind of music; I was like the outcast or whatever. And I think that’s how really I got to know most of the members of our band who just had similar tastes going into town and hang around at the park and the city hall. It’s kind of what you do in England.
I met Matt, who’s our drummer, just through like, we looked the same, and we started talking about the bands we were into and stuff. So yeah, that’s definitely how I met all the people, and that’s definitely how the band started for me.
Jordan, in that same interview, you mentioned that you don’t want to be snobby about who attends your concerts. But a lot of bands start to feel weird when they don’t relate to the people they see in the audience.
Jordan Fish: Yeah. We don’t really have any guilty pleasures, do we? We pretty much listen to a bit of everything, and I think that’s something we’re quite proud of. Anyone can listen to our band, and we’ll listen to anything as well. I mean, we don’t really try and restrict ourselves by any sort of genre in terms of what we listen to. I think there’s good music and bad music in all genres. Like Oli said, if you only listen to one genre of music, you’re gonna have to listen to a lot of rubbish.
When Metallica released …and Justice for All, which had “One,” it was more accessible than their previous stuff, and even got on the radio and MTV. It changed the configuration of their audience.
Fish: It’s a different time, isn’t it really? I guess you can’t compare it with what was going on back then. I think there was a lot more money and crazy figures floating around the music industry. It’s a different kind of industry now. I suppose we feel like this is a big moment for us. And yeah, this album definitely seems to be catching on for us and stuff; it definitely seems to have been a bit of a change, but I don’t know if you can directly compare it to bands like Metallica, it was the glory days for that kind of music.
Sykes: I think the thing that happened back then was, when that happened to bands like Metallica, that wasn’t a preconceived thing; you know what I mean? They didn’t get together and go, “Let’s become the biggest band in the world,” they just wrote an album that they wanted to make, and that’s what happened. And I think after that—really, the problem with rock music is everyone started just copying that and started to emulate that.
And same with the nu metal stuff. Say what you want about nu metal; in a way it felt fresh, it felt new, and it felt like something people could connect with, and then after that people started to try to recreate that and just follow in their footsteps, and I think then rock music went back to being a very niche thing that not everyone can connect with.
Fish: An isolated sort of thing.
Sykes: Yeah, an isolated thing. That’s how it feels for us. It’s awesome that we’re getting everyone saying that this could be the album that breaks into mainstream and stuff. That is what we want in a way, but at the same time, it’s not what we try to do when we go in there, to go, “Let’s make an album that will get us massive and will get everyone to like.”
But at the same time we want to write something that’s not only just original and fresh, but can—you shouldn’t have to like rock music. The same way you shouldn’t have to like pop music to like a pop song.
Fish: We’re not scared to engage with the mainstream.
Sykes: You shouldn’t have to like indie to like an indie song. Bands like Arctic Monkeys I love; they’re essentially an indie band, but if you ask me about any other indie band, I have no idea, and I don’t like them. I don’t believe in bad genres. There’s no bad genres, just bad bands. Yeah. It’s awesome that people are saying that [this album could break us into the mainstream], but I think a lot of that is because it’s not only fresh, but it’s relatable, and it’s going outside the medium that I think rock music’s scared to do.
That first KoRn album was a big game changer. And then five months later, all these white kids were growing dreadlocks.
Sykes: Everything we do is inspired by the bands we grew up listening to. People compare our new songs like “Throne” to Linkin Park. I think they forget that that stuff is classic rock, to us. Like the other bands that sound like Led Zeppelin and stuff like that, that was the band they grew up on; we grew up on bands like Linkin Park and stuff.
I just think the difference is it’s always nice to find out what’s good about a genre and what’s bad and then milk what’s good about it and take what’s good. I mean like when dubstep came out it was a niche thing, and then someone like Skrillex came along and just took the essential, what was good about it, removed all the stuff that was pointless, and it became a phenomenon.
I think that’s what we’re trying to do, because there’s good and bad aspects of metal and rock music, and we’re trying to take the best of it and incorporate what’s good in all genres of music and bring it in.
It also seems like you’re in a different headspace now; not just musically, but mentally. The album is more accessible; I’m guessing that that has something to do with it.
Sykes: Yeah, it is. I guess lyrically I’ve always had a personal crisis to deal with, so there’s a lot of desperation in our past albums, whereas this album’s not even about overcoming stuff, it’s about all the things that I put into place to live a happy life, and a lot of that is actually accepting darkness and being okay with being depressed sometimes and having a negative force and not being happy all the time. And instead of trying to run away from it, embracing it. So as dark as the subject matter is, it does feel like a happy album. I guess it is that light and dark contradiction and contrast. So yeah.
You came into the album pretty quickly after the last one, but were you worried that you wouldn’t have anything to write about?
Sykes: Totally, yeah. I was like, “What am I going to do?”
What was the song that broke you through that writers block?
Sykes: “Happy Song” I think, when we did the cheerleading idea with the “Spirit/let’s hear it” stuff. That’s the theme of the album, and that’s what I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about depression as a whole and why you shouldn’t ignore it. At first you just write gibberish, and then you make sense out of that gibberish. And I realize that’s actually a part of me getting better, to realize you can’t ignore the shadows and the darkness.
So it all started coming together, and I didn’t really think it was gonna be a concept album really. I thought, I don’t have a “thing” to talk about, so I’m gonna have to talk about different things. But then as that came together I started seeing a theme between everything.
Like “Throne” is all about how you can turn grease to gold, how you can turn negative aspects of what you’ve been through into something amazing.“Happy Song” is all about how we can use superficial and trivial things like music or entertainment to forget about the real issues, which is a good thing as much as a bad. “True Friends” is all about how being betrayed by someone can actually make you a stronger person and how you can become a better person for it.
Even though I felt all right about all these different things, a theme started coming together, and I thought, “Wait a minute,” it’s almost cliché to a degree, but it’s like finding dark in the light and the light in the dark. So yeah, it all comes together. By halfway through I was like, “I know what I’m writing about now.”
The idea of taking depressing stuff and making it into great art is probably what creates 90% of all great art.
Sykes: I one hundred percent agree. Happiness does not sell. You don’t watch or listen to stuff because it’s happy. I think that’s because, in my opinion, happiness is like a stillness of the mind. That’s what like Buddhism and all that teaches, and whether you follow that or not, I still think that the principle is right. Happiness is when your mind is calm, when you’re not thinking about anything.
It’s just not about force, so how can you really talk or write about it? Because you don’t remember, really, the happiest times of your life, because if you’re that happy, you don’t recall anything, you just live in it.
So to write something happy, I don’t know. It doesn’t connect with me. Like the song “Happy” by Pharrell, to me it just seems like a song for depressed people. I mean, people have to convince themselves they’re happy… I think when you’re truly happy, that song’s nothing but annoying.
Can you talk about the effect that the success of “Drown” had for you guys?
Fish: We kinda just did it, I guess because we had the Wembley Arena gig in the U.K., the label wanted to do another single, and they were looking at tracks off Sempiternal, and it felt like it’d been so long. And we just felt like we could write a better song I think, a bit more fresh and exciting.
At that point we didn’t really realize that it was going to be a precursor to the album. We definitely didn’t realize it was gonna be on the album. It was just kind of a bit of an experiment. We didn’t realize it was going to do quite as well as it did either.
And then yeah, when we came to writing the album we hadn’t planned to put it on it, it just seemed to sort of… lyrically I think it fit. But it brought something a little bit different, and we kinda didn’t want it to get forgotten because it had been such an important song for us.
Oly’s always said if we write 10 songs that we feel like are all bangers, then “Drown” can be the 11th song on the album, but we have to know that we have 10 songs that either stand with it or better.
Joining a band is a big deal, it’s like joining a marriage. Jordan, I was wondering how long it was before you really felt like you were a member of the band.
Fish: I don’t know. It was weird at first. To be honest, I felt comfortable pretty much straight away, but I think now in hindsight I’ve only really in the last year probably felt like… I guess when you’ve toured together and stuff, it takes a while to fully get to know each other. It’s a weird thing; the band’s got so much history as well. So many people who everyone knows.
Sykes: Yeah. And we’re from the north of England; he’s from the south, and you know how that is, don’t you? There’s cultural differences. But I think in the last year you definitely felt like there’s no problem with speaking up and saying, “I don’t like that,” “I like this,” whereas I think a year ago it might have been a bit like “This is not my band, this is not my say.”
Fish: I think we just know each other better as well, which makes the whole thing a lot easier. Everyone knows it takes a while, especially with a group of people who’ve literally been kind of isolated and together for so long, you almost develop like your own language and sense of humor, and coming into that takes a while. Especially with this band, because it’s a very northern sense of humor, it takes a while to adjust to it.
Sykes: Luckily, we got thick skin as well. We haven’t got any problems, not only saying to each other how we feel, but we can both take it as well. If I’m singing out of tune, he’ll just say it straight out loud, and if he’s doing something I don’t like, I don’t have any sympathy for his feelings. There’s just no time for that stuff in this kind of situation.
From your perspective, Oly, what changed about the band when Jordan joined?
Sykes: He was in a band before this called Worship, which I was a massive, massive fan of, and I was actually gonna start a record label just to sign the band, ’cause I loved it. And it had a very unique style, one you can’t really put your finger on, not really compare to at all.
So not only does that come through to our music I think, definitely, it’s just we wanted to be a band like this for so long. We’ve wanted the digital aspects, but sometimes bands that do this can just have all these digital drums and it’s like… it’s just there because it sounds cool, but it doesn’t really have any weight or…
Fish: It’s not integral, is it?
Sykes: Right, it’s not integral. And we wanted to get it to where it’s really just as important as the guitar and stuff. So I don’t wanna say “more than anything,” but one of the big things that’s opening so many doors for us and making so many things possible that weren’t possible, like the singing. Like if Jordan didn’t step in, I’d have never got through it, I’d never be able to push that barrier and actually get through it, figuring out how to sing and stuff like that.
Fish: At the end of the day, I think it’s come from all the members. We’ve all pushed for this album in particular and for the way the band’s developed and stuff. I think I just came in at the right time, but I wasn’t the driving force. I mean, the driving force is everyone else in the band, and then I’ve just helped enable the band to get to the next step.
Sykes: I think when we got Jordan, we were like, “Right, now I can sing,” and I think, “What can’t we do? We’ve got all the tools to be the biggest band in the world, so let’s really go for it,” you know what I mean?
Fish: Yeah, but we’re still developing that as well. Even when we came to write this album, it was like we can do more than we thought we could. On the last one when we started writing it, it was like once we started to get a few tunes in and stuff, even I was thinking I never thought we’d be able to do this. Some of the vocals and stuff, I was thinking, this is different. This is better.
Sykes: We’ve got the ability now to just push ourselves really as far as we can possibly go.
Explain the electronic music influence; a lot of guitar-based bands just don’t like keyboards, programming or any aspects of dance music.
Sykes: I think for me dance music’s always been a huge part of my life. Like I said before I really got into rock, that’s what I listened to, you know what I mean? And even throughout the
band’s career, maybe I stepped away from it for a few years.
I think where at first it were almost like a novelty or like a joke; not a joke, but like the idea of incorporating it into our music were like… not funny, but it were like “I couldn’t believe
you were doing it,” you know what I mean.
And even now house music stuff, I just always think it’s just the most rapidly evolving genre I think. It’s always, something new’s always out. I mean the people who following in the footsteps of whoever’s big at the time, but it’s changing all the time, what’s big, and I just love it. I don’t know, it just gives me such a buzz.
Fish: The writing’s fun as well. We quite buzz off that, like trying to find a weird blend that shouldn’t work, then finding a way to make it work. That’s pretty much the most exciting thing, for me anyway, that we can do when we’re writing is trying to do something where you’re thinking, “All right, this is like a weird amalgamation of two things I’ve never really heard before.”
How do you get your audience to grow up with you? It’s not easy to do.
Sykes: I think the way we’ve done it, and obviously it’s not a conscious thing, but the way we’ve done it is we have grown up, whereas a lot of bands don’t. It’s easy when you’re 21 to relate with your band that are getting hammered every day and partying, because that’s probably what you’re doing when you’re 21. But then when you get to be 25, 26, if you’re a normal person who has a job, you’re not gonna relate to that anymore. And the same with the bands that are doing it. It gets tied in to the moment. Whereas for us, yeah, we had our party days, and we’ve had our fun and stuff, but we’re growing up like normal people. We’re still ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing, you know what I mean?
Fish: You’ve got more to say now when you’re about so much more.
Sykes: Yeah, rather than still coasting through life on the drugs or on the booze or whatever. I’ve got through that, and I think for a lot of people, you don’t have to have a drug addiction, you could be anything. When you get to this age, you go through a huge shift I think. It can very easily be a depressing time when you get to your late 20s; it’s like, “Oh, no, I’m no longer a kid.” So there’s always some sort of existential crisis you can have when you get to that point. So it doesn’t matter what it’s about.
I think the fact that I’ve had that, every other kid will have had something like that, whether it’s a job doing something they don’t wanna do or a relationship that’s come to where this ain’t working anymore because we’re two different people, I think that’s why our fans have managed to stick with us, because we’ve changed with them; I mean they’ve changed with us, and we’re not still living some kind of lifestyle that you can only live if you’re either rich and famous or you’re a kid that has no responsibilities.
As you grow up , it’s not only about you, it’s about what’s going on in the world. If you have kids, it’s what you’re leaving them; even if you have nephews or nieces or godchildren, you can still be angry about the state of the world.
Sykes: Totally. I think that’s what inspired us in many ways is… before I went to rehab I thought I was mental, and I thought I was the only one that was mental. And when I came out I realized that everyone was mental, like we’re all mental in the exact same ways. All those weird things that you thought only you’re thinking and you wouldn’t dare tell anyone else because you’re mad for thinking it, everyone thinks that.
Everyone has those weird things that they just, insecurities, and everyone, when they think that the whole room’s talking about them. And stuff like that, we’re all connected by that. We’re all connected by our fears and our insecurities and our worries and stuff.
And I think that’s a huge thing, I think that’s such a nice thing to know, that everyone’s just as messed up as you are and there’s no such thing as a normal person. I’ve never met one anyway.
Fish: You have to get older to work that out.
Sykes: Yeah, you do. Sometimes that’s all you need is just that confirmation that we’re all f—ed up together.
Some people are condescending about people dealing with depression, as if it’s not a real issue. Did you feel that way?
Sykes: No, because until I got help, I dealt with it alone. That’s the biggest thing, the embarrassment, you know what I mean? People are worried that they’re gonna come off sounding like a melodramatic, whiney kid, but it’s all relative, init? You can’t use that thing every time, “Well, people have got it way worse than you.” You’re going through what you’re going through, and if you try and go, “Oh, I shouldn’t have the right to feel like that,” then you’re not getting to the bottom of it all.
Places like Japan, it’s like almost a sin to admit that you’re depressed. And that’s why they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, because they go off and kill themselves because they can’t even talk about it and stuff. And that is not right.
What’s it helping if someone turns around and says, “You got it good, you shouldn’t feel like that.” If you’re feeling some of that, talk about it, feel it. You pretending that it’s not that way is not gonna change the fact that it actually is, you know what I mean?
Like if you hate the sound of your own name, even if you’re a privileged white kid, it doesn’t matter. Any day that’s the way you need to feel, and you gotta work through it, and the only way you’re gonna work through it is if you admit it and accept it, and figure out what it is. So I think it’s just not the right way to go, “Oh, you should think yourself lucky.”
Fish: That’s pretty much what the album’s about, really.
If you’re lucky, you join a band with other people who feel the same way.
Sykes: You don’t even need a band. Find the right people that actually wanna talk about it, and don’t wanna pretend that everything’s all sunshine all the time, you know what I mean? We all know that’s not the way.