Echobelly are currently on tour celebrating the 30^th anniversary of their second album, On, widely regarded as one of the foremost Britpop albums and, to date, Echobelly’s most successful.  Written and produced at an essentially chaotic and high-pressured time for the young band, it nevertheless successfully managed to funnel that restless, uncomfortable energy into a standout work of glossy dream pop with a darker edge, with legendary ‘90s bangers Dark Therapy, Great Things, Car Therapy and King Of The Kerb as its core legacy.

A couple of months ago, I spent the best part of a very pleasant afternoon with guitarist Glenn Johannson in a boozer in Notting Hill, listening to him reminisce about Britpop days (or, in some cases, daze…), how he met singer Sonya Madan, the creation of On, the highs and lows (and some very lows) of the ‘90s, and what’s coming up next for the band.

Where does On stand, amongst your albums, for you? Is it a favourite?

I wouldn’t say it’s a favourite. In a way, some of it I actually find quite uncomfortable to listen to, to be honest with you. I don’t know why that is, I just think it’s a little bit too full on, it just a bit relentless. It’s track after track after track; there’s no breathing space. But I guess you appreciate that more once you get a bit older as well. I realised a couple of days ago, and it was really bizarre, that some of the songs we’ve never played live. So a few of the songs I’ve only ever played when we actually recorded them; I haven’t played them since. There are parts of some songs that I have no memory of, it’s like hearing something completely new for the first time. So I’m trying to figure out to play them!

Having gone back to them, do you think there are tracks from On that you would want to add to your shows from now on?

Definitely, yes. There’s a couple of songs that we should have been playing all along, they’re really good. But there’s also a couple of songs I’m not so fond of.

What was going on at the time in 1995, where were you guys up to? What was going on for you?

We had just released first album, Ego, Everyone’s Got One. We’d been touring that extensively: Europe, US, Japan, UK. They wanted another album, so we had to write on the road. In the beginning, everything was really exciting, – we were more than happy to write on the road as well, we just kept writing all the time while we were touring extensively. When it came to recording On, our manager recommended two American producers, Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie, who had been involved with Radiohead’s The Benz. I think we had most of the songs already by the time we started recording the album. Great Things, funnily enough, was the last thing to be recorded, it was just an afterthought. I had this idea, and that was it really: ten minutes, done and dusted. Yeah, that song’s stood the test of time in a way. We recorded it in Konk Studios in North London, it’s owned by the Kinks’ Ray Davis. Then we went over to a place called Fort Apache in Boston, the home of Belly, Pixies, all that lot, their stomping ground. So we were over there for two weeks, mixing the album, and it was released quite soon after that.

So how soon after the first album was On released?

About a year I’d say.

Was there pressure to put it out or was it just your own pressure?

They wanted a second album as soon as possible because the first one did quite well – so they wanted a follow-up as soon as possible. It was a great time, a really, really good time, because it was all fairly new.  At the end of the day, we were drinking beer and smoking weed – I thought, you know, this is great! I think we were in the US touring when the album was actually released, so we came back to the reception of On.

On does have three or four of Echobelly’s strongest songs on it. I know there are things you don’t like, but it’s a very strong album in terms of your output.

I think so. It’s very much of its time as well. And Great Things, King Of The Kerb, Dark Therapy – we play them all to this day.

They’re core songs –  if I asked anyone do you know Echobelly, those are the three songs that they’re most likely to know.  It’s a really important album for you.

It is, yeah, yeah, it is. And it was at the height of the whole Britpop thing as well. When it came to the third album, People Are Expensive, we were kind of in limbo for a year because of some legal issues around labels. We couldn’t do anything. So we just sat around, couldn’t do anything at all. And then Britpop was basically dying. It took such a long time that by the time we were on our third album, the scene was dead… And that’s when we released our most expensive album! It was a shame because it’s was just the wrong time and place for it. That was in ’98. It’s a good album, but also a little bit too full on, I think. I find it quite hard to listen to as well!

How do you feel about those songs compared with what you’re doing now? What are your songs that you’re proud of now, or across your career?

There’s a lot of songs from the early albums that I’m really keen on still. There are several songs from On that I really like, even the first album and Lustra as well. But the latest stuff we’ve done I think is our best. With the third album, People Are Expensive, it all went tits up. We left Sony and decided to do the album ourselves. That was such a creative period: there were no restrictions of any sort, we worked with a wonderful guy called Ben Hilier, who’s very quirky, very experimental. And another guy called Ken Campbell, who was a real genius. It was all done on analogue. He just did everything in real time, with his analogue synths, and some of the stuff he came up with was just mind blowing. That album was such good fun to make, you really felt you could do whatever you wanted, there was no pressure with singles or whatever. We just had our own range. That was a really good album to do. And the follow up to that was Gravity Pulls which is a really mellow album. It was recorded on really old equipment: it was actually the desk that Dark Side Of The Moon was recorded on, and the tape recorder used to belong to John Lennon. All proper Abbey Road gear.

Which album are you most proud of, do you think?

I don’t know…. I would have to say On in a way, because that was the most successful album. That’s reached the most people, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of all of them. With On, I was playing through some of the songs the other day and some I really enjoyed playing.

How did you get into music in the first place?

I grew up with rock, basically. My mum had a really big family, I think there were 15 kids in all. So I had shitloads of cousins, a lot of them were older and we spent a lot of summers on a farm. And they used to feed me music, Led Zeppelin, Sabbath, that kind of thing, Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix, and all that kind of ’70s stuff, Beatles and Stones. So I grew up on that. I was really into heavy rock, that kind of guitar playing. And then in the ‘80s, when I first heard The Smiths, that changed things for me.  With a lot of bands in the late ‘80s the guitar was a lot cleaner, a bit more jangly, a bit more The Birds, all the Manchester bands, and the Liverpool bands as well – Bunnymen. It was a different style of guitar, because people didn’t really do guitar solos in the traditional sense any more; it was slightly different way of playing guitar and it really appealed to me. So I dropped the whole rock thing in a way and got into that way of playing; trying to play melodies within a song rather than just doing solos and stuff. So that influenced the way I played a lot.  But now I’ve gone back a little bit to the rock thing so I’m a little bit in between.  A bit like Mick Ronson; it’s that whole T-Rex thing, that ‘70s guitar sound that I love. Hearing people like Johnny Marr changed things and I developed a different approach to playing than I used to when I grew up.

Your style, the way you use the guitar, is more integral to the song – it’s not about solos, it’s an intrinsic part of the song.

I love rich and melodic guitar playing.  It’s changed a lot over the years, I’ve got more into acoustic playing as well, different tunings, with folky stuff. And I also got into Indian music a few years back, and actually took some lessons a couple of years ago. It’s a different way of playing – it’s such a laborious thing learning the various scales. They have something called the sargam, and it’s all oral tradition in Indian music. It needs a lot of practice – it was great fun but I stopped because I didn’t have time. I just started to play along to Indian things, different tunes.

Did Will Sergeant do that as well? I love Will Sergeant.  He’s understated, isn’t he? He’s kind of a perhaps not underrated, just maybe unrecognised. He deserves a lot more recognition.  We toured with them in in the US – not as Bunnymen, they were Electrafixion.  It was great fun actually, I saw Will every night. And Dandy Warhols as well.  This would have been a favourite line up for me!

So are there any interesting or funny stories from that time that come to mind?

Well, it was the ‘90s – that was full of drugs. We were on that Electrafixion tour, and arrived in Chicago early one morning in the freezing cold. Our tour manager had gone into the venue to find out what was going on, and we were sitting in the bus. The front door opened and this really, really tall Albino guy, long, like Johnny Winter or something, got on, wearing a black leather coat and black Stetson. “Hi, I’m Satan, I’m your drug dealer for the day. Welcome to Chicago.” I don’t think things are like that any more but it was rife in those days, it really was.  Heroin snuck in during the early days of Britpop, not heavy use, but definitely smoking. It’s so much cleaner these days. The new generation is completely different, it’s all fruit juice. It’s good in a way, drugs never lead to anything good.

We lived with a guy that was a heroin addict as well, me and Sonya, a guy called Jason Gray – lovely guy, very creative, but he was so into his drugs. He lived in our flat for a while, and he would shoot up in the bathroom – Sonya’s so cute, she never wanted to watch. That’s what Dark Therapy is about. He hanged himself in the end. He came on tour with us, he was a budding filmmaker, and he wanted to be a musician. A very unique guy, very bright, but he just didn’t want to get off his drugs.  He went into rehab, came out and started again.  I was supposed to help him move down to Cornwall to clean up and I started packing his stuff up. When I came back in the morning, he’d hanged himself.  I didn’t find him myself – there was no answer at the door, so I called his girlfriend and she called the police and they knocked the door down. So, yeah, it’s not a good thing. I’m glad people now aren’t so much into that. But you know, ‘70s, ‘80s, it was rife, ‘90s as well, you know, I. Even the Jacksons. I mean, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, they were all heroin addicts , even back then in the ‘’40s to 50s. It’s always been around creatives – musicians, especially for some reason. I’m not sure why.

It makes you feel creative in the beginning but that soon goes away. I even remember myself doing gigs and all I was thinking about was going back to the dressing room afterwards. All I could think was I can do some drugs and party. I thought to myself, what the fuck are you doing? Get yourself together, this is crazy.. So yeah, it’s awful.

How did you stop with all that?

I just got bored with the whole thing. When the whole thing imploded, Echobelly, everything else, we had a bit of a hiatus. I wasn’t never addicted as such, but did a little too much. I just lost interest in it and became really boring! I haven’t done anything for 20 years. Never will again.  Done it, got the T shirt..

Obviously, you’re originally from Sweden – so how did you end up coming to the UK in the first place?

I was studying economics, in the University of Gothenburg. After the first term, I found it really boring. I was always in bands and stuff, ever since I was about 13, 14. Me and three other guys from the same town where I come from started doing acoustic stuff in bars and stuff. We were really good at four-part harmonies and started to make a decent living from it. So I dropped out of college and we went busking in Europe, just busking on the streets in Paris, and we ended up going down to southern Portugal. We got a lot of work in bars and we ended up staying there for four or five months I think, in Albufeira, Portimão and a place called Armação de Pera. We met some dubious characters there.

The following year we saved up to buy a Volkswagen van, we put some amps and stuff in, and the plan was to drive down to the Algarve from Gothenburg. We loaded all the gear in the van, closed the door, it fell off. So we had to pull on it and hold it place. We got to Germany, and the starter motor went.  It took us 10 days to get down there because the van kept breaking down and falling apart. In Spain this farmer took out the engine and had it on his kitchen table, and put it back together again for us. We finally made it down. So we did another season down there, and we met a lot of English people. We met these girls who invited us to Birkenhead to stay with them. We overstayed our welcome there by quite a lot before coming to London to try to make it as a band, doing gigs here and there. Nothing much happened, but we did a show at The Rock Garden in Covent Garden and Sonya was there. I was in the corner having beer and she was sitting across the room. She threw a fag packet at me and she put had her phone number on it. I called her and we started talking. So, that’s the first time I met Sonya. After about two weeks I moved into her flat in Goodge Street and I’ve been living in her place ever since, basically!

Sonya wanted to sing and write, so we got this little Tascam four track cassette recorder, and wrote our first EP on that. It was just the two of us, and then we started getting people together.  A friend of our recommended our first drummer, Andy. So I met Sonya in ‘90/’91. The rest of the guys went back to Sweden and I’ve stayed here ever since. I don’t regret it. I don’t think I’ll ever go back, it’s not what it used to be. It was a great place to grow up, lots of nature, very friendly, very safe.   It’s not there any more. You’ve got shootings and bombs going of on a daily basis. It’s lawless, it’s mental.

Have you got lots of family there still? They’re all scattered, but none that I’m really that close to. Most of them are gone now. Both my parents are gone as well. I’ve got a brother and he’s got a kid. So that’s the only close family I have. It’s not enough for me to go back for.

What music do you listen to these days?

I’m much more eclectic these days, obviously. But I don’t really listen to new stuff. I’m not saying that there aren’t any good bands out there, I’m just not into that kind of thing. You get the odd thing and think this is really good. Otherwise, I tend to listen more to folky style, Indian music, jazz, semi-classical stuff, electronic music, and music from the ‘70s, ‘60s. I’ve gone back to things I grew up with.

Are any of these things are coming into your new writing?

Yeah, maybe a little bit. We have written a new album which is in limbo right now, and very frustrating. It’ll come out soon, it’s done and it’s very good, a very good mix.

How do you feel about where you guys are now? Are you comfortable with it?

Yeah, kind of. There’s no comparison to the mid-‘90s, with all the labels and stuff. And in those days there was so much money around as well. You never earn money so much from touring, it’s more a question of marketing the albums. The label gave tour support, we had our crew, we had everything. Nice tour buses, private planes, and a lot of money. That’s not the case any more!  We never really did much of that going up and down the motorway in the back of a transit van, but we do plenty of that now. It’s gone the other way around!

It’s frustrating to see that because, for me, the material you’ve been writing in recent years is really strong. It’s getting people to listen to it and engage.

We do better now than since the ‘90s. There was a long period of nothing for a while. But we’re doing better now than we’ve done in a very, very long time. We’ve got some good people around us. We just need to get this album out. We’ve been in with the producer, we’ve tweaked the mixes, we think it sounds really good. But we’re just a bit stuck right now until we can move forward.

What are your plans for after the On tour?

After the On tour we’re going to start looking at Europe next year, or the US. The US is our second streaming market, but it’s so complicated to go there these days.  The working visa is horrendous, it’s about £3k per person, and the equivalent for an American coming here is £50.  The whole entertainment industry is very neglected, and British culture and music is such a massive export. So it’s tricky.

Can you think of any really challenging times that you’ve had personally, like, performances that you’ve done, or favourite ones – something that was great.

I remember one show in particular, the Astoria, I think it was ‘95 or ‘96, I think it was on the On tour. Sold Out. And I remember catching myself out thinking, I’m actually enjoying this. Which I rarely do. I find it hard sometimes to really get into it and lose myself in it and really enjoy it.  But I remember that show, there was just something about it, the stars were aligned, everything went really well, the sound was excellent, and I was really remember thinking I’m fucking enjoying this. It doesn’t happen that often!

I would say, actually, last year at The Forum you looked like you were enjoying that one, perhaps more than any of the shows that I’ve seen in recent years.

I think so. I mean later in life you do appreciate it a bit more, and try to enjoy it a bit more. Back in the day, it was just chaos – everything was just chaos all the time, go, go, go. We didn’t have much time off, we were constantly touring. It becomes less fun, it’s not partying and you’re just in this bubble, you know? But as you get older, you learn to appreciate things a bit more, you take things a bit more seriously, you want to do your best.

Do you have any advice that you been given and that you would pass on to young guitar players?

If you’re in a band, if you’re a group of people, and you have any problems, my advice is just sort it out there and then. Make it very clear where everyone stands within the band, especially with money. That’s always the big thing that breaks bands up. If people know where they stand, it’s a lot easier. And if you have problems, just fucking talk about it, try sort it out. If you’re onto a good thing, do not fuck it up, make the most of it.  I think we could have benefitted from that greatly.

The old Echobelly represented a certain time. You can’t recreate that. I think we’re better off now having a couple of session people that are really on it, musically, and three people that are not quite so on it. It’s not the same vibe anymore, but we don’t want to be a stale version of what we were.

It’s tricky because we’re not the same age any more, we haven’t got the same energy anymore. But I find a lot of bands who have done the whole reunion thing coming back to the anniversary shows, like Suede and Pulp – they seem to have a new found energy in what they’re doing. Because I think you appreciate what you want, you want to make the best out of it and take it seriously, and try to be as energetic as humanly possible. For me, it has helped having session musicials in the band because they’re younger and they’re really on it. They’re really energetic, you know, as a foundation, that’s been really good. I see that in a lot of bands that come back now; they’re really good.

But I think that in what you’re doing, and also Suede, Pulp, EMF, there’s new material, good material. So you ‘re not just relying on the old songs, there’s actually new and better stuff. 

As long as you can do that, you get energy from that as well. That spurs you on as well – you’re writing music again. Of course, people want to hear old stuff – I’m totally cool with that and happy to play the old stuff. That’s not a problem. But it’s good to have something new as well. It can get a bit boring unless you have something new. With this On tour, I wasn’t that keen on doing it to start with, to be honest with you. To look back like that…

What’s your favourite song to play?

It’s probably Dark Therapy actually. Yeah, I think so. I always enjoy playing that. Or a song called Hey Hey Hey from one of our latest albums. There are certain riffs I love playing.

And, finally, if you could collaborate with anyone who would it be?

Ooh. I don’t know. It’d probably be someone like Anoushka Shanker, some Indian musicians or something worldy. Just with a pop rock kind of thing.  Or electronic musicians, if it was the right person and the timing was right.  I have done some work with a synthy guy, electronic music with guitars. But if I were to collaborate with somebody it would probably it’d probably be someone outside the rock pop field.

Upcoming tour dates (get tickets here)

OCTOBER
11th Oxford – O2 Academy
12th Southampton – Engine Rooms
16th London – Electric Ballroom
17th Brighton – Chalk
18th Swansea – Sin City

NOVEMBER
05th Newcastle – The Cluny
06th Glasgow – Oran Mor
07th Stoke – Sugarmill
08th Nottingham – The Level

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Interview and photos by Naomi Dryden-Smith: Louder Than War  | Facebook  |Twitter  | Instagram  | portfolio