Modern English are known to casual music fans as a one-hit wonder from the 80’s. I can see that line of thinking, but I have to disagree with them because there is way more to this band. Yes, they gave us the iconic 80’s staple “I Melt With You’ which has been used in everything from the movie Valley Girl to a Burger King commercial. Yet, this band refuses to be just a nostalgia band. In 2016, the re-formed lineup of Robbie Grey (vocals), Steve Walker (keyboards), Gary McDowell (guitar), Michael Conroy (bass) and augmented by Roy Martin on drums released a brand new studio album in 2016 called Take Me To The Trees. It was a great album, but it didn’t really get any radio play. It’s a different era and a different market for radio which doesn’t really cater to the brilliance that these guys create. The guys toured the world for the album and reminded people everywhere that there was much more to them other than that iconic 80’s tune. Then Covid hit and gave the guys a lot of stay at home time and they decided to be creative.
Fast forward to 2023 and after much teasing, the band unleashed upon the world a new single entitled “Long in the Tooth.” It’s a song that is easily relatable in its older but wiser meaning. The song is a bit of a throwback to the Mesh and Lace days but now the guys do know the art of writing a song thanks to producer Hugh Jones. He showed the guys the art of songwriting while making 1982’s brilliant After The Snow album. “Long in the Tooth” is our first taste of their new album 1 2 3 4 which is due out in early 2024. I had the privilege of sitting down with Modern English founding member Robbie Grey and Mick Conroy before their show in Smithfield, North Carolina on September 29, 2023. The guys were doing a run of dates here in the U.S. (with drummer Ric Chandler and guitarist Gabriel Sullivan rounding out the band) to promote the upcoming album. We talked about touring, recording the new album and even about their first celebrity crushes.
You guys have a new album coming out next year called 1 2 3 4 and it’s the follow-up to 2016’s Take Me To The Trees. Was there a catalyst for the decision to make a new album?
Robbie Grey/Modern English: Well, Covid happened, didn’t it?
Yes it did.
Robbie: We were in lockdown in England in 2019-2020. Mick has a studio near my house in Suffolk in England and at the time you were able three or four people go to work in a closed environment. We had been sending files songs to each other by email and then we got together in Mick’s studio with Gary (McDowell) the guitarist and occasionally Steve (Walker) the keyboard player. That was the starting of the album really.
Mick Conroy/Modern English: We always planned on making new music anyway, we always do. We were waiting for a body of work to be collected. It’s not as if we don’t write on a monthly or daily basis.
That’s something that I really respect about you guys. You don’t sit back and rest on the nostalgia aspect. You do look back, but you also forge ahead with new music.
Robbie: We’re trying to stay away from those 80’s packages at the moment (laughs).
Mick: For a lot of people it’s easy to rest on their laurels. We’re songwriters and it would tend to get a bit boring playing the same songs over and over again. One of the things that keeps us inspired is around the corner of the next day is a song that we haven’t written yet.
Robbie: We’ve already written seven songs for the next album, so we’re working pretty quickly at the moment.
What? That’s amazing! So, the new album 1 2 3 4 is coming out sometime early 2024?
Robbie: I reckon it’ll be January or February, probably February because January is a pretty dead month.
The first taste of this new album that we’ve heard, unless you’ve been to a live show, is “Long in the Tooth” and it has been referenced as a bit of a throwback to the Mesh and Lace days. When you were writing for this album, was that something that was intentionally or did it just happen?
Robbie: I wrote that on an acoustic guitar in the bedroom. I’m not the best musician so I know about a dozen chords so that’s probably why it has a basic feel to it. I was moving from A to E back again quickly to shift the song really fast in between parts. So, it has that feeling of a post-punk Boys Don’t Cry, Buzzcocks, The Only Ones. That was really the idea for it to sound something like that, so that’s why it has a throwback to it I suppose.
I know bands have different reasons for choosing which producer to work with. Why did you guys choose to work with Mario J. McNulty on the new album?
Mick: Obviously Mario’s pedigree was very impressive. He was very up for the idea of recording the album live and doing it in as few takes as possible. There are no more than maybe three or four takes on each song with the whole band in the room together all miked up. You hear on one or two of the songs the drummer counting everyone in.
Robbie: That’s why the album is called 1 2 3 4; there are at least three songs where Ric Chandler (drummer) counts as in ‘one two three four.’
Mick: Although Mario’s worked with minimalists like Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, he’s also very good at capturing the live performance.
I’m not a musician myself but I do prefer the way that you guys are doing the recording because some bands that I hear live are better than the actual album. The album process can tend to sterilize the raw emotion by doing take after take after take. It’s like you’re trying to polish a car to get it as shiny as possible.
Robbie: That’s not what we were after. We were definitely not looking to sound like all the songs on the mainstream radio because they’re all kind of homogenized. We wanted to do a live version of ourselves. Funny enough, we played in Athens (Georgia) a couple of nights ago at The 4O Watt Club. Somebody this morning put a review of it on the Facebook messages that night and they said exactly that. They said the sound was absolutely brilliant and they had seen so many bands in that club over the years including My Bloody Valentine and a bunch of other really good bands. They said we were probably the best sounding and best band they had ever seen.
I love that rawness because it really impacts you as a listener.
Robbie: That’s working a lot for a lot of people and it’s getting a lot of radio spins as well. You can see there’s a connection there. People want to hear something that has a bit of an edge to it. It seems to really be working.
This run of dates is almost over, so looking back how has this run been for you guys?
Robbie: It’s been great, except for a few gigs. We’ve been doing a lot of radio where we’re playing live in the studio sometimes with audiences. Our manager helped us book the dates, actually going back to small venues of two to three hundred, and that’s worked really well
So other than the new single “Long in the Tooth,” you’re playing one or two new songs from the new album?
Mick: We’re playing a song called “Crazy Lovers” and one called “Not My Leader.” There are two or three other songs on the album, probably more, that are equally as raucous and noisy as those.
Robbie: We’ll probably play those on the next tour in March.
The March dates are overseas or back here in the states?
Mick: Back in the states, plus there’s talk of European and Australia dates as well.
You guys are staying busy.
Robbie: Of course, we have to support the album you know.
How do you gauge how successful an album is these days? You used to look at Billboard Magazine to see chart position, but you don’t do that anymore.
Mick: In this day and age, it’s figures and algorithms. Management, agents and especially promoters, like in Australia, look at Spotify and Apple music plays. That’s how people judge success and being mediocre. They pull up the Spotify figures which breaks it down country by country where your listeners are. They used to look at Billboard charts and Alternative Music charts and take it from there.
They’ve changed but yet they’re similar; you look at the numbers of different sources.
Robbie: We get results from radio plays every week and it’s hard to understand some of them. I think we’re number 18 in the Sub-modern Pop Chart this week, whatever that means. I don’t even know what that is (laughs).
Mick: They also look at your Facebook page and your Twitter page and Instagram and see how many followers you have. It’s like looking at the old Nielsen reports
They do that to us to when we put in a request to cover a show. They want to know how many followers on social media that we have. If we don’t have what they consider the minimum Instagram followers, then we don’t get approved.
Mick: Even magazines are getting put through the mill these days.
I mean, I can buy another 20,000 followers if I wanted to pay for it but that’s not how we do things here.
Mick: Exactly! We don’t like to do that kind of thing either.
I have to remember to work in this fan question from @RealStanFarley on Twitter/X. He wanted to know “Who were the dancers in the AMAZING music video for “I Melt With You”?
Robbie: We used to get asked that a lot in the 80’s. We didn’t know who they were other than two London dancers who turned up for the shoot on the day.
Mick: There was only the band, the cameraman and his friend who had in-door fireworks and the two dancers.
Robbie: And a Bunsen burner (laughs); it cost about $1,000 to make that one.
Mick: I’ve often thought that and I would like to track them down. I think there’s a Netflix series in there somewhere.
I think we should do that; kind of a where are they now segment.
Mick: It might have just been another day and another job.
Robbie: I think there’s officially like 52 million views on the YouTube video now.
What about the humming part of “I Melt With You”? How did you decide that the song needed humming right there?
Robbie: That was the producer Hugh Jones. I think he was thinking along the lines of a country and western song where there’s a breakdown. There could have been la-la’s or whistles.
I don’t think I could hear it in any other way now.
Robbie: The humming seems to win the day and it does sound really good. It has that iconic feel to it.
Mick: At the time we were thinking about “Walk On The Wild Side” and the ‘ doo do doo do doo do do doo’ part.
Unfortunately, our time is about up, so is there anything you’d like to close with?
Robbie: Just about the new album; there will probably be two other songs, “Crazy Lovers” and “Not My Leader” that will become radio songs or streaming songs. Listen out for them and listen out for the album early next year.
We’ve loosened you up with the other questions, like stretching for a big race, and now here come the really tough ones.
Robbie: Oh blimey!
We like to close with something called Three For The Road. It’s three, not so typical questions and hopefully fun questions. Do you remember who your first celebrity crush was?
Robbie: Farrah Fawcett Majors (laughs).
Mick: Suzi Quatro.
What was your favorite cartoon when you were growing up?
Robbie: Tom and Jerry.
Mick: Probably the same actually.
If music was over today and you had to go into professional wrestling, what would you wrestling name be?
Robbie: Roberto Longo (laughs).
Mick: Ernie Cheesecake.
Robbie: Jack Midlife and I’d wear a Scottish sporran as I come up on the stage with my skinny arms (laughs).
As I’m taking pictures tonight, I’ll be thinking about that (laughs).
Robbie: I’ll wear it tonight especially for you.
Interview by I’m Music Magazine Owner/Editor Johnny Price
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