Elbow’s Guy Garvey: ‘I have a long history of failed relationships, toxic and drug-fuelled’

Guy Garvey is in a reflective mood. The morning we meet in Dublin, the broad-shouldered Elbow frontman is a few days past his 50th birthday, recalling, between sips of coffee, his teenage efforts to make a name for himself.

His first band was called Synoptic Reverb. “14, I was – and you, Mark, were in a band called Blue Flame,” he says to Mark Potter, the band’s guitarist, who is sitting beside him. Garvey had lied about being able to play drums, but then one another boy, a “cool bloke” called Joe Devlin, who’s still a friend, “wandered over and said, “I hear you play a bit of the old skins”. “I was, like, ‘Oh, yeah?’ and then he asked me to join his band,” says Garvey.

“We got together on Saturdays in a scout hut where we tried to grow mushrooms in pieces of bread on top of the boiler – that didn’t work. We smoked Berkeley Red because we were a garage band, and that was a garage cigarette. We had Monster Munch because that was the garage crisp. It was all about the kind of band we were, but we never did a gig. We just used to stand under a bridge looking like a band – but it had the desired effect, because I got a different kind of attention from the other kids at school. And for me it was, like, ‘God, this is great’.”

[ The Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor-Taylor: ‘It was me against them. Earrings, high hair, eyeliner, army boots, Mom’s blouse’ ]

Garvey, who’s unusually modest and genial for such a successful musician – Elbow have just released their 10th album, Audio Vertigo – still looks as if he’s delighted at being allowed to walk on stage. “I’m proud that we’re still doing it together 33 years after we met, and hopefully for another God knows how many. Being in a band, you go through stuff; you’ve got to look after each other as you go through things, and there’s probably going to be more of that in the years to come. Perhaps what I don’t do is think I should have done more with my life, because at this point I’ve done loads. I don’t have any regrets at 50, but I might have at 60. It depends what life throws at you.”

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Garvey knows all about life’s detours. He says that Elbow’s previous album, Flying Dream 1, from 2021, received little airplay and virtually disappeared (“like a fart”) almost as soon as it was released. Conceived remotely during Covid and then completed and recorded in Brighton’s shuttered Theatre Royal, the songs were softly articulated, undemonstrative and empathetic. Not exactly cheery radio-play material, but there were reasons for this.

“Most of it was written at my back door, chain-smoking, leaning on a dustbin. It was Covid. I had my mother-in-law, the late, great Diana Rigg, dying upstairs and we also had our then three-year-old boy to look after.” Garvey is married to the Olivier Award-nominated actor Rachael Stirling; their son was born in 2017. “When all three of my gang – my wife, my son and my mother-in-law – were in bed I’d check emails, and resting in the inbox would be little love messages from the boys in the form of bits of music. Lyrically, that album dragged out of me the most personal words I’ve ever written – about my childhood, my son’s childhood and Bury, in Greater Manchester, where all the members of Elbow grew up. The songs were culled from life, every word of them.”

If you’ve got kids, and you are lucky enough to get to think for long periods and stare out of a window, you straight away go into wondering about how they are doing

For Audio Vertigo, he says, “there was an opportunity to create characters. I felt that nobody wanted to know how verdant my trees are, how lovely my garden is, or how steady my relationship is. Everyone’s heard all about that. Luckily for me, I have a long history of failed relationships, toxic and drug-fuelled, so I’ve been grabbing bits of my past lyrically and exploding the characters, giving them steroid injections. For this album, of course, we were able to get together again, but it wasn’t a reaction to the previous one. It just came along quite naturally. It was a long time since we were shouting over amplifiers to each other, and going back to it was great, because it generated new energy throughout.”

Potter says, “Because we’d been separated for the previous album, when we got in the room we wanted to make some noise. A lot of the songs arrived with grooves and drums first, and being in little sweaty rooms, rocking out, changed our work methods.” Music needed to be changed, Garvey says, “but only for ourselves. Stuff that sounded remotely like anything we’d released before we threw in the bin and restarted. The word ‘fun’ as a motivation came up maybe for the first time, and we thought, Yes, let’s go with that – it’s valid.”

What hasn’t altered, Garvey agrees, is the seam of melancholy that has run through Elbow’s songs since their 2001 debut, Asleep in the Back. He has no issues with being crowned the King of Glum, has he? “If you’ve got kids, and you are lucky enough to get to think for long periods and stare out of a window, you straight away go into wondering about how they are doing. It’s about collecting things – I think the phrase ‘gathering your thoughts’ is wonderful.”

One of those thoughts, he admits, is how knocked out he is by his life. “As for melancholy, well, there’s a purity to it, a steadiness, a predictability, and I think it’s an exquisite feeling. I don’t see it as sadness but more calm reflection, and I think people are drawn to it as a way of ordering ideas and planning the next thing. Mark is an outdoorsman, aren’t you?” His bandmate nods in agreement. “You’re happiest roaming with your dog in the hills, where you’ve got only your thoughts, whereas I like staring out of a rainy window with a jotter in front of me.”

Processing joy (marriage, birth, long friendships) and despair (the end of relationships, death) through their music is a type of therapy that Garvey and Potter are inordinately grateful for. “We gather around whoever’s in trouble, don’t we, Mark? And we always have, albeit in perhaps in a predictably stoic, northern-English-male way.” Garvey mimes shuffling with his arms by his side. “We would just kind of surround them and stay there till they’re all right again.”

Elbow have been releasing albums for almost 25 years. Longevity is one thing, but considered, contemplative music across 10 albums – which has earned them the Mercury Prize (for their album The Seldom Seen Kid), a Brit Award (for best British group) and an Ivor Novello Award (for best song musically and lyrically, for One Day Like This) – is another thing all together.

“None of us can believe we’re allowed to do this, let alone being well received and playing to thousands of people. The reason I can never imagine not doing it is there’s nothing better than recording something you’ve written, sending it out to the other lads and getting a response back saying they love it. That’s the feeling that keeps me wanting to do this. And I always will.”

The coffee on the table is long cold. We start to leave, but Garvey isn’t finished just yet. “Here’s another thought about longevity. Nobody takes home any more money than anyone else in the band. With the best will in the world, if one of you is driving a Ferrari, that’s the end, isn’t it?”

Audio Vertigo is released by Universal/Polydor. Elbow play Trinity College Dublin on Monday, July 1st