Saint Agnes: “It’s Our Record, We Just Didn’t Do The Barcode.”

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Hello, I’m Fraser Kerr and you join me backstage here with Jon from Saint Agnes. How are you?

Jon: Very good, thank you. Yeah.

How does it feel to be at Trees again?

Jon: Great. It’s an honour to be asked to do a returning heroes thing. It’s not often in life you get called a hero in whatever context it might be. So, yeah, we played the main stage last year and it was great. And I feel like our material’s even better now because you’ve got this album coming out and yeah, I feel like we’re really firing on all cylinders. So it’s going to be great to see what the kind of more hardcore Wednesday crowd think of it.

Yep. And so talking about the new album, ‘Bloodsuckers’, how has the response been to the announcement to that?

Jon: Yeah, great. You know, we’ve got a dedicated fanbase that are very open minded to the fact that as a band we develop… we’ve developed quite a lot stylistically, not intentionally. It’s just the way that we do stuff. It’s just kind of a natural evolution and it’s great that our fanbase is so happy to kind of go with that. And so I think the response has been great. We’ve picked up new fans, we’ve had more radio play than ever before, which is crazy because there’s like… there’s not a single song without a motherfucker in it, like it’s just the most angry, sweary album – that we thought also sonically was really abrasive. You know, we didn’t mix it with radio in mind, we mixed it because we kind of wanted it to sound quite hard to listen to in places. You know, we’re big Nine Inch Nails fans – hence the t shirt – and we like using the studio as part of the kind of art of what we’re trying to get across. So yeah, I’m pretty amazed at the response. Would be the sort of short answer.

Right, and so how does a Saint Agnes song grow? How does it form?

Jon: There’s a few different ways that it might come about, but the general way is that I have a… I have a musical kind of idea, like I write my songs just kind of in my head, not on a guitar. And they just have a thing that I like the idea of doing, and it kind of comes to me in that way. And I’ll figure out a really rough version that I’ll play to Kitty and then Kitty will very quickly help me hammer it into shape, into kind of a song lit, like a verse and a chorus, kind of like musical idea. And then we’ve often got like a group… a whole bunch of lyrical concepts that we want to explore. That depending on what’s bubbling to the surface on that particular day, we’ll be like, Oh, that line we were singing to each other the other day that we thought was a really cool idea for a chorus. Will kind of come into it and so it’s very organic. We just kind of go with the inspiration of the moment. Sometimes there’ll be something that Kitty in particular was like I really want to say this. I want to do a song. Like on the album, there’s song called ‘At War With Myself’ and Kitty suffered with really difficult mental health struggles on the build up to the album, and she lost her mum just on the build up to writing the album. And so she was really struggling and she’s like, I really want to write a song that is about what it’s like to have a panic attack and a kind of a mental health episode. There’s no better way to put it.

Yep.

Jon: And she’s like, and I want it to sound like this and get to here. And so we did literally write it with a concept from right at the beginning, and that’s why it starts with this… It kind of this almost the sound of like a light bulb flickering, kind of like the tiniest little beginnings of, “Oh God, something bad is starting to happen.” And then lyrically kind of develops and then the kind of maelstrom sound that is a full blown mental health episode and her kind of lyrical refrain of like, “I’m so sick of myself,” just repeating and repeating, just it was really powerful. So yeah, anything from that to something where we’re just kind of going with the vibe of the moment, it can develop in any way.

Jam it out.

Jon: Yeah.

And so creating this album, how hard did you find to curate the songs for it? Like did you have to cut a lot out?

Jon: Er, No… we didn’t have to cut much out. We were quite self-editorial early on with each of the ideas. It was really down to a kind of enthusiasm thing. Like if we did one of these little song lits and the next day we listened to it and we were really excited about it. It would become a song by the end of that day, and we were like, that deserves a place on the album. And if it didn’t become a song in a day, then it didn’t deserve a place. And I think because Kitty was in such a difficult headspace that she really knew what she wanted to write and what she wanted to say. And so when she was done, she was like “That’s it. That’s what I wanted. And that says exactly it.” You can’t then cut that song off an album, do you know what I mean, like you don’t write 30 songs like that, you write the ones that tell the story you want, and that’s the album. So I think that some bands, they’re more of like a hit factory.

Yeah.

Jon: and they write 40 songs and choose the ones that are going to be the most popular. We were like, no we’ve got a thing inside us that we want to convey and we will keep going until that’s done and we only finish the songs that were… ever had a chance of… So there’s not loads of like unused material sat there at all.

And was it easy to pick the singles for the album?

Jon: No, not at all. Not at all. As I said, it’s a really sweary album. It’s really like a lot of it’s quite angry. And so it wasn’t to me like obvious, well, this is the radio song or anything, but equally I could see that all of them for the right person would be really engaging and catchy. So I was like, that was kind of an argument for any of them to be a single at the same time is an argument for, well, clearly that can’t be. And in the end, we just had to kind of go with, well, what’s going to tell a story? Well, if… you know… manager and label and stuff they’re kind of like, well, release the most commercial one first and then work backwards and we were like no, we don’t want to do that. We want to release the first one that’s going to frame everything we do afterwards because we’ve just done a song called ‘Outsider’ that’s just been released, and that’s probably the most commercial sounding song on the album. But we are like, we want people to hear that in the context of the band, and not to hear that and then be annoyed that everything else after that is too noisy, too heavy. But I know it’s come out with something intense full on that gives people the true framework the album was created in, and then that song ‘Outsider’, can come out and people can hear that, Oh, it’s a moment of lightness within the darkness, which I think is a more important reflection of it than it just being, you know, a radio song.

Yeah. And talking about the label there, the new album is coming out on Spinefarm.

Jon: Yeah,

How has it been working with them?

Jon: It’s been great. We’ve been a 100% DIY band up until this moment and the only thing that’s been weird is someone else doing jobs that we’re used to doing. They had absolutely no involvement in the creative side, as tale trust from them, that we know our band better than anyone else, and they were like, you just go and make an album. You do your thing, we trust you. Whatever you give us, we’re going to support, which has been great. You know, like a lot of bands don’t get that.

Yeah,

Jon: and there’s a lot of meddling that can happen. There was no meddling whatsoever. The only thing is in the past, you know, we’ve done everything. So I have to make a barcode for the vinyl and one for the CD and do the catalog number. And it was so weird handing that off to someone else. I found myself ringing them, and being like,

Getting rid of that admin.

Jon: “Guys, have you got the barcode thing sorted yet and what are we doing about talking to the distributor? and everything.” And they were like “Honestly, Jon, leave it to us, we know what we’re doing”. So that’s, that’s the only bit that’s been really weird is kind of taking a step back with some of the hands on approach that we’ve had to do in the past. And I kind of miss a little bit of it because it really feels like when you hand that record over to someone that you’re literally handing them…

You’ve put your blood in to it.

Jon: Yeah. And we, you know, we really like tp think, by anyone’s measure it’s still is 100% a thing. We recorded ourselves and mixed ourselves, you know,

Absolutely

Jon: Done all the artwork, so it’s our record, we just didn’t do the barcode. And we didn’t choose the pressing plant. Other than that, yeah, everything else is us, we make our own videos and yeah. It’s all us.

And do they give you the full creative control over the videos?

Jon: Full creative control. Yeah, they might have an opinion, but they don’t expect us to listen to it, and so say something like the ‘Bloodsuckers’ video we were… they were like, “Well, we think that there’s a chance that we won’t be able to advertise this on YouTube because of some of the scenes that are in it.” It’s nothing insane in it, but if you cut this and cut that, we’d be able to put advertising into it. And we were just like we don’t want to, and they’re like, “That’s fine, that’s cool.” You know, just accept that we’re not going to get quite as many like random views on it. But equally it’s the art that we wanted to make and hopefully that will stand us in better stead in the long run. We just don’t want to compromise. You know, you have to live with yourself at the end of it. And I don’t expect to be making millions from this at all. All I want to do is be able to look back in a few years’ time, and go “Yeah I am proud of that. That was fucking cool.”

Proud of your art.

Jon: Yeah. Yeah.

And so finally throwing it back a little bit coming out of the pandemic, you guys played Download Pilot

Jon: Yeah.

How was that for you?

Jon: That at… that particular time it felt like an unbelievable lifeline. You know, it’s easy to forget how bizarre that pandemic period was for everyone. And then the unique perspective of being a musician, my entire identity or self-identity is as being a musician, you know, I live for being on tour and creating and we got to create. We made quite a lot of music and we stayed busy. We made videos, made music, we didn’t play any shows and we didn’t rehearse. We didn’t play together – because you couldn’t. I believe in like following those rules, and like, I really think people should think about the greater good and stuff, you know. So we were really strict about that stuff. To get to do the Download Pilot, such a kind of great event, playing the main stage.

Momentous

Jon: Yeah. So it’s… Yeah… If we had just been playing any gig, it would have been great, for it to be that gig was scary, you know? We hadn’t seen each other as a band. We had two rehearsals before it. We were doing entirely new material. Couldn’t remember what it felt like to be on stage. You know, I thought, I’m just going to fall over. I haven’t got my sea legs on stage anymore. Like, the whole thing just felt crazy. But we got great response, felt very welcome. And everyone backstage was like… all of the kind of backstage rivalry that can be present had totally gone. And everyone was just like, “This is fucking cool.” We’re all back. And everyone’s, you know, really happy to see each other and it was great.

Post-Pandemic high.

Jon: Post-Pandemic high, yeah, it was incredible.

Anyway, thank you for joining me.

Jon: Oh cheers mate, thank you very much.

It’s been great, and have a good day.

Jon: Yeah, thank you. Enjoy the show later.

Yeah will do. Thank You.

Jon: Thank you.