Deaf Havana: Fight off your demons

DEAF HAVANA HAVE BEEN TO THE EDGE AND BACK. WITH THEIR NEW ALBUM ‘ALL THESE COUNTLESS NIGHTS’, THEY’RE BACK TO FACE DOWN THE WORLD.

DEAF HAVANA HAVE BEEN TO THE EDGE AND BACK. WITH THEIR NEW ALBUM ‘ALL THESE COUNTLESS NIGHTS’, THEY’RE BACK TO FACE DOWN THE WORLD.

‘All These Countless Nights’ ends with James Veck-Gilodi wondering if his name is still written on a wall in a bar in Pensacola. It’s a small question in the grand scheme of things, but it’s very human. With Deaf Havana, the little things matter the most. The band have had a long time to reflect on all the things they’ve done, to try and make sense of it all and to get wistful. They have been gone for a long time, after all.

And as much as album number four, part comeback, part next-step, wallows in their past, it’s a record that lays it to rest. Or at least tries to. ‘All These Countless Nights’ is “basically a long list of things I’ve done wrong and want to make amends for,” explains James. Opening track ‘Ashes, Ashes’ is out the door with one last look back, all driving determination and hopeful escape, as the band “lay to rest that previous chapter. As basic as it sounds, it’s the end of a period that wasn’t particularly great and the start of probably the best one yet,” explains James, standing somewhere between hope and knowing.

He’s quick to criticise himself, calling his songs simple or saying that certain lyrics aren’t the best. He’s honest about the process, happy to explain he doesn’t know why certain things have ended up the way they have and is reluctant to look too closely at what’s yet to happen. He figures fans have stuck around for his band because they’re “nice people who enjoy our music”, and is very appreciative of that fact. Deaf Havana have been a part of the fabric of bands who have defined the past decade of British rock, but they’ve always been on the outside. While others have played with hyperbole, evolution and swagger, James et al have stood back and let their music do the talking. It almost cost them everything but now the band are back from the brink, and they’re not simply waiting for things to happen anymore.

"I wasn’t even remotely thinking about writing a new Deaf Havana album. I was sick of it."

Deaf Havana ended their previous chapter at the end of 2014 with main stage performances at Reading & Leeds alongside a lengthy headline run across the UK. It should have been a victory lap for a band who’ve never invested in anything but their own music and let it speak accordingly, but things rarely work out how you plan them. Behind the scenes, Deaf Havana were at the end of their tether. They were done.

“I wasn’t even remotely thinking about writing a new Deaf Havana album at the end of 2014,” admits James. “I was sick of it. I didn’t think there was going to be another one. It went weird for a bit; we didn’t lose contact, but we went through a period where we didn’t do anything. We didn’t play shows; we didn’t write music, and we didn’t hang out.” For a band who’ve been playing together since they left school and have known each for even longer, it was a bizarre situation. “We never actually officially said we weren’t going to stay together or we were going to get back together, we just drifted apart.” Weeks turned into months before James wrote a couple of songs that were too heavy for his solo project. He sent one through to the rest of the band, Lee Wilson, Tom Ogden, Matthew Veck-Gilodi and Max Britton, and “didn’t expect any replies. ‘I’ve written this song, see what you think. It probably sounds shit’,” he explained. “But they all emailed back immediately, ‘Let’s get back together, let’s play’. It snowballed from there and ended up here, which I’m really happy about.”

There was no catch-up after the break, no exploration or explanation about what they’d been up to or who they’d become in their months apart. Ask James what the rest of the band got up to, and he doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to. Deaf Havana know who they are around each other. They find sense in one another. ‘All These Countless Nights’ makes the same discovery.

“What kept us together was probably the fact we spent time apart and realised that we enjoyed hanging out with each other. I released a solo album and toured [alongside Max]; it was fun and easy, but I missed having the band there. Not only to talk to and have a laugh with, but I missed having that musical foundation behind me. I missed the guitar; I missed the drums, it all stemmed from that. I think we needed to fall apart to come back together because now it’s stronger than ever, which is weird.”

Dealing with beginnings and ends, ‘All These Countless Nights’ seeks out a sort of closure and Deaf Havana live it. Announced during their set at Reading last year - not just because it was one of the few gigs the band would play that summer, and it was in front of the biggest audience - but because “it was sorta the anniversary of when we almost broke up.” Deaf Havana find poetry in the everyday.

“We wanted to announce it, but we didn’t want to be boring and do what we normally do and post on Facebook or whatever,” explains James. Taking inspiration from the front cover of comeback stormer ‘Sing’, the band joked about playing in front of a blank canvas before someone came and graffitied the title onto the backdrop. Jokes quickly turned into plans and “it actually worked out way better than we thought it would. It’s weird for us when stuff like that goes well because normally it goes wrong.” Luckily there were no missing ‘o’s. “That was my biggest fear. Can this person actually spell? Because that would have been horrendous.”

“We were playing around with a bunch of titles for a while and ‘All These Countless Nights’ [taken from ‘Happiness’] is one of the ones that probably had the least thought put into it. In the vaguest, lamest way ‘All These Countless Nights’ sums up every single song on this record. As vague and basic as it sounds, they were all written about countless nights I can barely remember. Inspiring both hope for the future and a resignation of the inevitable, the title and the record tells both sides of the story in lush, horrid and rainbow-drenched detail.

From the self-disgust of ‘L.O.V.E’ and the destructive misery of ‘Happiness’ that both deal in the opposite of what they promise, to the endurance of ‘Like A Ghost’ and the fight back of ‘Sing’, all swagger and curled lips, Deaf Havana don’t hold anything back. Nervous before showing anything off and still a bit anxious before giving it over to the world outside, James doesn’t let that stop his pride. “I think it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.” After debating his nerves for a few moments, he comes back with: “No, I’m quietly confident, to be honest.” More diverse and taking in more stops than anything the band have previously put their name to, their fourth album sees Deaf Havana stretch like never before. Everyone likes to mix their drinks, but it’s not a deliberate move. The band have never been ones to try and please other people. Instead, they write what they write and let it happen. It’s how ‘Old Souls’ and ‘Fools and Worthless Liars’ came to be, and ‘All These Countless Nights’ is no different. They’ve never followed trends. “We probably should have done,” laughs James. “We are outsiders in a way, but we have been from the start.” The breadth is “purely because it was written so naturally over a period of three years. I was in a different head space and a different geographical location. All the songs have different influences. That’s where the diversity comes from, and it’s a much better record for it.

“The danger in that is that none of the songs will fit together and it won’t sound like an album but somehow, it does flow. I’m really happy about that. It could have gone differently.” That’s the Deaf Havana story, really.

And while the spirit of doing their own thing and not paying attention to trends is the same as always, getting to ‘All These Countless Nights’ was completely different. “Normally the studio time is booked before I’ve even written a record, or it has been for the past two albums, so I have to rush and write songs in a month-long period. For ‘Old Souls’ we had exactly twelve songs, which isn’t particularly good. This time, because it was such a long time and such a natural writing process and I didn’t even know if we were going to use them, I ended up with this whole bank of songs, which is a nice problem to have. You can just pick the best ones. We spent a lot of time working out which ones fit together.”

Flirting with politics and religion against a backdrop of James’ life, ‘All These Countless Nights’ is a more aware, eyes-open record. “I was going to say I ran out of things to write about, but I guess I’ve just grown up a lot. I think differently now; I’m not as obsessed with depressing stuff. I realised there are bigger things. The songs on this record just came out naturally, I didn’t sit down and think, right, I’m going to write a song about blah blah blah. It was an organic process. Obviously, the songs are quite different because I wrote them in different states and different periods, but the overriding theme is trying to be a better person and acknowledging the things I’ve done wrong and the mistakes I’ve made in the past. When I listen to a record, I want to hear the highest highs and the lowest points of someone’s life. I like to hear that vulnerability, and I want people to be able to relate to it as much as they can. I hope this record does that job. It should have been released two years ago, but it’s definitely the one. It’s the one,” James repeats before pausing. “If we hadn’t taken that time away, I don’t think it would have sounded like this. It probably would have been another rush to get ready and not end up sounding so diverse. I’m actually glad everything panned out the way it did.”

"It’s the best thing we’ve ever done."

Deaf Havana have always been a band for everyone. Open and to the point, they talk to people on the level and never try to raise their platform above yours. They’ve always dealt in honesty, but this time around, songs like ‘Fever’ or ‘L.O.V.E.’ have an almost voyeuristic intrusion to them. “Sometimes I just have to write a song. That sounds like a pretentious thing to say, but sometimes it just comes out. ‘Happiness’ and ‘L.O.V.E.’ just came out of nowhere. I want to share them with people for the same reason that I listen to music when I feel like shit, or when I feel amazing. You want to, especially in those low points, you want to know that you’re not the only person that’s ever felt like that or the only person who’s ever done something. I want to connect with other people. I do write very openly, so it’s not that open to interpretation because it’s pretty direct with what it says, but I want this album to do everything. I want it to make people laugh, cry, and let them know that as an overall thing, we’re not going anywhere. We feel this is our strongest thing yet.”

Finding the romance in every day, they’re not ones to glamorise or hype their own world. While others try to maintain the mystery of being in a band, Deaf Havana hold open the door so you can see inside. “It’s nowhere near as glamorous as you think it is. You realise very quickly that backstage is just a bunch of dudes sat around on computers drinking Red Bull. It’s not as cool as it should be.” That open door admission goes for everything, and there’s no sugar coating or chaser with ‘All These Countless Nights’. ”I think it’s the only way I know how to write, to be honest. I would never write that it’s all glamour because it’s not. It’s almost the opposite of that, but you do want to romanticise it a bit because that’s what makes good storytelling. I only really know how to write about myself. I don’t consciously think about the audience when I write because that would take my train of thought too far away from writing songs, and we’d end up with something that wasn’t as sincere. I guess I always thought that there’d be someone who feels the same way I do. So as long as I keep writing about that, I think people will be able to latch onto it and relate.” From falling in love with strangers on trains to struggling to keep flames alive, ‘All These Countless Nights’ offers a comforting reflection. “I constantly need reassurance that I’m not alone and not really weird, so that’s what I want people to take away.”

Despite their tendency to shy away from vocal self-belief, there’s a confidence to ‘All These Countless Nights’. From the “good for fucking you” shrug of ‘Sing’ to the brazen and unashamed honesty that rages throughout, you can feel Deaf Havana’s self-assurance at every turn. “I’m glad that comes through,” shares James. “I wasn’t sure it would, but it’s the most confident we’ve ever been. It was the most prepared we’ve ever been; it’s the most together we’ve ever been. The experience was totally different to any record we’ve done before.” These flashes of confidence outside of the music are still cut with an uneasy reluctance. “Arrogance gets in the way,” reasons James. “I’ve just seen a lot of people that I wouldn’t want to be like. And also I want to tell it like it is, I’m not proclaiming to be a genius songwriter. It’s simple stuff; it just seems to work somehow.” The line between arrogance and confidence is a fine one. “When you’ve got people around you whispering in your ear that you’re going to be big and good things are coming, it’s very easy to cross over that line.” It’s not a concern for the band anymore, though. “We’ve had all that already. Luckily most things that can happen to a band have happened to us, so we’re very aware of everything now. Plus we all loathe ourselves too much to ever become arrogant.”

James has always wanted to play music. “I never really wanted to be a singer but since I picked up a guitar when I was eleven or twelve, I’ve always wanted to write music, and I always have. The songs were terrible back then,” he grins. “We first started taking Deaf Havana seriously probably as late as ‘Fools and Worthless Liars’. That was the moment I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I’m going to do now’. Even before that, when we had Ryan [Mellor, ex-vocalist] in the band and I was just the guitarist, I was only doing it because you got free beer, you could hang out with your mates, and it was a laugh. I didn’t care about the songs; they didn’t mean anything. They were just fun riffs to play, but when we wrote that album that turned it around really. It became a new band when Ryan left. We should have changed our name really because people still associate it with that old screamy stuff, but oh well.”

It’s been a long time coming, with plenty of highs. “For me, recording this album because it’s this massive stepping stone, but there’s probably something more exciting than that. The weirdest thing is when we went to Australia, and there were 400 people there that knew all the words to all of our songs. That was a moment where I was like, what the hell is going on? That was pretty bizarre. That’s one of those things that turns it around. Even thinking back on it, it makes you realise that there things that are worth it. I don’t even know if it was real, I might have dreamt it. It’s that kinda strange.”

"We all loathe ourselves too much to ever become arrogant."

There have been a few lows, too - and regrets. “We toured around America at the very start of 2014 and it was freezing cold, we did it in a van, we were driving twelve hours a day and we were playing to no one. We were there for five weeks, and it was so grim. We had no money, we couldn’t sleep, I lost my mind. I went insane. That was the lowest point. We should have changed our name,” he adds. “That’s been detrimental a bit; we should have changed it ages ago before we released ‘Fools and Worthless Liars’. There are a lot of stupid decisions and things I’ve done, like being rude to certain people years ago. There’s a lot of things I feel bad about but nothing that’s affected us too much.”

Enduring, Deaf Havana have finally made sense of it all. For now, anyway. “It’s taken this long to work it out, and even now, I’m not 100% sure. It’ll probably evolve into something different, but this is the surest I’ve ever been. It’s the most on-board I’ve ever been as well. I’ve always had one foot in, one foot out and I’ve always had something else on the back-burner and thought this was something, not a stop-gap, but I always thought that I’d do something else as well. This is the first time I’ve been 100% committed to this. We have a plan, a direction for the first time. It’s pretty weird, but I like it.”

It’s been a struggle. A real struggle. But against all the odds, Deaf Havana are somehow still here and still battling forward. Why? “Because I still love it. In truth, there are probably more lows than highs, but you can go through a year of shit, and this one amazing thing happens, and you forget about all the shit. I still do it because I love it more than anything and I’m terrible at everything else.

“In the immediate future, we’re just going to make sure we do everything for this record properly. We’ll tour properly and do it like we should have done with the other records, and not just leave it to other people. Musically, though, I’m honestly not sure what’s next. We’re all in much more mature mental states now, so it’s a lot easier for us to think about things in a more logical way, and it’s a refreshing thing. I almost feel like when I first started this band again, which is weird. I never thought it would happen. It was getting stale for a while.

“It’s so bizarre because even a year ago I wasn’t sure we were going to do anything. I’m so proud of this record, and hopefully, it’ll do what it needs to do, but who am I to say? This is make or break because it was so close to ending. We worked so hard on this record, and we put all our energy and creativity we had into it. It’s a big thing for us. It’s kind of a comeback album, but it’s also if this one doesn’t work I’m not sure what we’re going to do after this. This album means almost everything to us right now.” Maybe their names have disappeared from bar walls, but Deaf Havana are back to make sure it’s not for long. It’s the little things that matter most, but that isn’t stopping them from flirting with big. After all those countless fights, Deaf Havana might finally have a victory on their hands.

Deaf Havana’s album ‘All These Countless Nights’ is out 27th January.

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