By Sean Lawrenson, Co-Deputy Sport Editor
Flyte are a band with a catalogue of music to make your eyes water. Not only is their music impressive from a production point of view, but their lyrics will have you lying awake, replaying conversations you had years ago, with people who now seem like distant memories.
It seems fitting that my conversation with Flyte begins with them asking me questions. Nick Hill immediately greets me with warmth, asking about my dissertation and showing genuine interest. Nothing feels forced, and the three minutes we have just talking before Will Taylor joins the call sets the tone.
When we’ve settled, I ask them about the music video for 'Hurt People', the latest track of the new album. Looking at someone in a twelve-step recovery programme, it is a song of self-loathing and the fighting against changing yourself.
‘I have experience going to group stuff’, Taylor tells me. ‘But it was really more between Nick and I, where we clocked onto to this particular melody and kind of felt against the rhythm. Then, the way the ‘hurt people hurt people’ cliché kind of landed, [it] fell quite sweetly in that melody, and we were like, this is something that’s living and breathing now’.
We speak about the band’s relationship with time, emotion and place, each of the three overlapping in different balances across their musical catalogue. On ‘Emily and Me’, it is the breezy yet brooding streets of Los Angeles. In ‘Tough Love’, it is the commitment to a relationship, the difficult jump to admitting feelings of vulnerability and the acceptance that both sides share that same feeling of weight.
Talking about 'Hurt People', Taylor’s thoughts evoked this sense of pinpoint songwriting: ‘You can cover a lot of small things just in that one place. I think across all of our albums, generally speaking, they’re all like vignettes, which kind of helps the records feel like they have a narrative backbone’.
The first album, The Loved Ones, sees these little vignettes come together so vividly, as Taylor himself sees. ‘There’s ‘Victoria Falls’ about someone with bipolar, and then this clear watery theme and ‘Cathy Come Home’ and ‘Annie and Alistair’'. It is difficult for me to hear these song titles listed and not think back to all of the profound emotions I felt hearing that first record from the band.
Discussing the songwriting process between the pair, Will discusses the nature of grappling with different ideas. ‘[You think] have we said it too clearly? Do we need to pull back? I’d say, through our ten years of Flyte now, we’ve kind of settled into the reality of that’.
I ask them about the title of the album, and how they came to settle on that name. ‘Well, actually, the title came about from a song we’d written for a musical we’re working on, and that song was written from the perspective of a wife looking back at a failed marriage. Looking back at all the things that had got in between, got in the way. Obviously, that’s a very transferrable theme. We just felt, first of all, looking at what got caught between two people, does land quite nicely with the themes on the record’.
The album cover says everything and nothing. Taylor describes his happiness at how it all came together: ‘I thought what Aidan Cochrane, who was the artistic director on this record, did was really beautiful. Finding an image that feels very much like an internal struggle, yet at the same time serves as a metaphor for all these other things’.
Flyte are ethereal, their harmonies have been described as a mix between the Byrds and the Beatles, but it has always been their lyrical storytelling ability that drew me to them.
Their most recent tour took place in a series of more intimate venues, and their upcoming show will take place in Bristol’s Trinity Centre, a former church.
Religion and spirituality play an incredible part in their music. One only needs to listen to 'Faithless' or 'Everyone’s A Winner' to see this in effect.
But the focus, always, remains on the human ability to sustain a relationship, or to watch it disintegrate into nothingness. Take the last song on the band’s 2021 record, This Is Really Going To Hurt.
Aptly titled ‘Never Get to Heaven’, the song struggles with ideas of an afterlife rooted in the callousness of personal individualism.
‘You’ll never get to heaven if you stand alone’ they sing, and as the guitar continues with its rhythmic beating, the band explores ideas of militarism and destructive inhumanity.
‘I just want to shut my eyes and wash you clean, when it don’t come easily’ sings like a beckoning call from a divine presence to a lost chorus of floating souls. Two and a half minutes. All that in two and a half minutes.
I cannot help but ask about religion as a theme for their lyrics. ‘I mean, we were raised without really religion at all. Culturally, maybe, but I didn’t really know anyone who believed in God or anything like that growing up. And so I feel a little Godless, in the sense that I wasn’t really given one, in any kind of organised religion sense’.
‘At one point, on hallucinogen, I genuinely thought it was the Beatles. I was like ‘that’s it!’. It’s songs, it’s the writing of songs. If you have an inspiration or a drive. If something’s driving you, that implies that you’re not driving, you’re sat in the back’.
'Chelsea Smiles' evokes the sense of late-Beatles perhaps the best of all the band’s tracks. It is a quite beautiful song, and within the two and a half minutes you grow so attached to Chelsea. Even as a stubborn Manchester United fan, the song conveys such a magnificent portrayal of collective happiness, that it is difficult not to feel happy on behalf of Chelsea.
‘Chelsea Smiles, drops a needle on the forty five’ brings you into the song so easily, but just when you think Chelsea is about to lounge back on her sofa, she is lost in the crowds who gather every week down at Stamford Bridge. But still, the softness of Taylor’s voice brings this community to life.
‘This is our town, nothing will ever send us down. Because when we’re in blue, once in a while…Chelsea Smiles’
I see the first part of that lyric so vividly, as if a marching crowd are approaching me, and yet Taylor’s voice gives the retelling a serenity, even as the crowd marches their way down to the E.R.
‘And that’s what it’s like when a song is coming out. So that is the closest thing I have to having some higher power that controls me that isn’t my conscious mind. But I can only assume that was the case for every creative person out there. Without sounding too pretentious, that’s why art is a spiritual connection in a way. Even though, sometimes I walk into a church and try really hard to feel something’.
Taylor’s answer is echoed by Hill: ‘It feels like a way of channelling something. I don’t if it’s God or spirituality or human collective thought of mother nature. But it is something that we do which we can’t explain how we do it. I know why we do it, but I maybe not how we do it. I guess maybe sometimes our music lends itself to spiritual, holy places. There’s something in our songwriting that works in a church setting’.
Speaking of connectivity through music, Taylor notes how ‘maybe it translates to the listener. Anecdotally, we’ve found that with people [saying] ‘thanks for saying what I needed to say but couldn’t’'.
Nick quickly cuts in, ‘yeah, we don’t actually speak to each other about anything, we just write songs’. ‘This is the most we’ve said in front of each other, for years’, Taylor quips back.
It serves to show the collective nature their music has for bringing people together, and clearly shows that the band is more than simply a band, it’s two friends who play music for their living.
Taylor describes the entanglement between spirituality and music eloquently. ‘They’re basically doing the same thing. Christian revival, or Gospel, it’s all based around the same thing. Get a lot of people together at the same time and unify with song. But then the message at a metal show or a Phoebe Bridgers show or a Flyte show. They all have their own messages, their own intentions. Everyone’s dressed the same looking to connect to the same thing’.
The interview concludes with some quickfire questions about their dream collaborations. Taylor initially settles on either Gillian Welch or Adrianne Lenker, but also sees a collaboration in the world of film.
‘My inclination would be a filmmaker, like a Ken Loach or something like that. I think the idea of collaborating with anyone who could help, in any societal light-shining way would always be a good incentive’.
As the interview draws to a close, I am left with the impression that Flyte are a band who have clarity. Aware of their desires to explore a wide array of subjects, they float in and out of scenarios with ease, leaving an ever-lasting impression on their audiences as they do so.
Featured Image: Katie SilvesterFlyte are performing at the Trinity Centre on Thursday 11th September.
