JA: it was repaired

RH: Yeah, yeah, she did it! So yeah, the banner that hangs behind us, it was made for us by some good friends Rona and Malcolm Cruikshank who we first met, I think, we did a house gig for them up in Edinburgh. Yeah, they're amazing, creative humans. So, when we said we needed a backdrop, and we ended up with .. when we used to play with Embrace, they were like “our backdrop's not that big”. We did the main stage at Glastonbury, and we were playing bumps, you know. We hung it up in the studio and rats or mice ate it so it did have some holes in. And then I think we mentioned from stage that it needed some repair. And Edwina Hayes, darling of Radio 2, an amazing singer-songwriter, Edwina Hayes was in the audience. We came back out, she's on her knees!

JA: Did she really do it?

RH: She did it there and then, yeah?

JA: Oh my goodness!

RH: I've got that picture somewhere, yeah?

JA: I thought you made a lot of that up, but it's the truth!

RH: No, no, no! But we are, yeah, we are open to theatre, and definitely we've definitely done that thing where we're like, oh, we need to have a private chat. I don't really know what normal gigs are like anymore, though, so, like… That feels like the norm to me.

JA: It's abnormal. The Brudenell, when you'd found some radio-controlled floating hot air balloon toy things, and then you got two people upon stage, blindfolded them, gave them the controllers, and then got the audience to shout at them with some kind of goal in mind. I mean, you know, it's… these are not normal things, this is creativity, right?

RH: They're definitely not normal things. You don't get that at a U2 gig. They've got a bigger budget. So yeah, you've got to be a bit creative about it. Like, although we take our art seriously, I don't think we take it ourselves too seriously.

RH: That thing about, them not being normal things. It's always interesting. Say you go to a family wedding, and a family member you don't see so much asks “what is it you do for a living?” They're the things I think of. Difficult to explain sometimes. We do gigs where we get people to drive animatronic dolphins around an audience. You can see them going…

JA: Yeah.

RH: I don't really… I don't really understand it. But that's alright, because what we try and do is create a world so that when you're in that space, when you're with us, even though you can occasionally see some people going “is this a gig, or is it a cult?” I think most of the time, people are willing to come on that journey with us, and enjoy it. Years ago, when we were the former band, Four Day Hombre, we worked with some people from that London, who I still rate, and I'm friends with, and they were kind of… it was for free, they were kind of helping to steer our mentality. And one of the things they said was. “A band should look and feel like a gang.” You know, you should either want to be in the band, or want to hang out with the band.

RH: So I think we want to create an environment that feels friendly, safe. That you can be ridiculous and can fail. You know, there's definitely risk involved in doing a gig that doesn't have a setlist, that doesn't have… you know, it has a shape, and we know broadly we're gonna end up with something bigger at the end than in the middle. But yeah, there's definitely risk in the things we do, and in terms of sustainability, it's possibly one of the things you might pick out. Really, as soon as we've realised that the thing is achievable, it’s no longer interesting, apart from gigs.

RH: We've done a couple of projects, we did a project initially with Kate Beard of Grassington Festival, the amazing Kate Beard. Which was a band anyone could join. And in 2014  that became a much bigger thing. So we taught people how to play with us along the route of the Tour de France, because the Tour de France was coming to Yorkshire. And we did 12 gigs in 12 towns, with those people joining us on stage. People from each town, playing in their town, to their audience. And we made that their problem, you know? We said to them, you're in the band now, like any band member, it's your responsibility to get… if you get 5 people to this gig each, we've got a gig, we've got a show. So that developed into a huge thing. It all came out of that initial a band anyone can join, remove the barriers. It's great to do gigs, it's awesome to stand up in front of people from your hometown, friends and family, and delight them. And it feels like only a small section of our population get to do that, so, it was wonderful to be able to do that on a large scale, and as you know, we ended up opening the Tour de France opening ceremony at Leeds Arena, to, they say, 12,000, people in the room, and 300 million people on the telly.

JA: Wow.

RH: Following day, one less Facebook follower. Yeah, so that's… we did that a few times, and that was definitely something that could earn us money, but once we'd done it a few times, it was like, well. We know this is possible, so do we want to do it again? Is it interesting enough for us to keep doing the thing, or do we wanna challenge ourselves again and find another way of working.

JA: it's either ADHD, or some brain chemicals that makes that happen. It might be autism. It's the solving of the problem that’s interesting, the journey.

RH: And there's so much more information now, isn't there about neurodiversity. I think it was, like, less than 4 years ago when I was talking with my awesome wife, Hannah. We were in our kitchen, and she was, like, one side of the breakfast bar, and I was the other, and I was like, it's funny, isn't it? Every time I see something on Instagram about “this is your brain on ADHD” I'm just like, isn't that how everyone's brain works? And she went, “oh, you've definitely got ADHD.” I was like, what the hell? We've been together 22 years! Why's this not come up?

JA: Mine was the exact same experience. I was last year I decided I was autistic and everybody around me went, well, yeah. Did nobody… did nobody think to mention it? This is my whole life we're talking about. But it's great, isn't it?

RH: Neuro-spicy is the expression I like. Neuro-spicy and neuromundane.

JA: One specific thing that I wanted to get to regarding values, so you were in Four Day Hombre. And in Hope & Social you wrote a song about going down to London thinking you were gonna get a big record deal, and they kind of went, “well, we changed our mind”. And then you came back again but that's what caused Hope & Social to spring out. So I'm just… if that is accurate, I’m wondering what that twist was. You had been trying it, you got kicked and then you decided, okay, what really matters are these values of community and art and creativity and freedom. What was that like, that moment where you kind of decided to do that, and set off on this journey.

RH: Yeah, it's pretty close to the reality of it. We had a really fun time in Four Day Hombre.

I'll try and do the pre-Hope & Social as quickly as I can. So the first thing we ever recorded, got played by Steve Lamacq on the radio. Then we had another bunch of songs that we recorded ourselves, and it was the first thing we'd entirely self-produced, and we sent it in to Steve Lamacq thinking we might get another radio play. 

RH: What actually happened was they changed how they handled incoming demos and we got entered into a competition. It's called One Music, I think it was. We didn't pay a lot of attention. We'd done some Battle of the Bands, and we felt like Battle of the Bands in real life was quite a… again, loads of fun, but you need your fans to come to the gigs in order to progress. The majority of the money is going to the venues, and… hats off to the venues, you know, they're providing a whole bunch of exposure. I'm thinking of Fibbers in York, and I have nothing but good things to say about Tim Hornsby from Fibbers. But we're like, we've done that. We don't need to push it. It's an online thing, nothing's gonna happen. And then they contacted us and said, oh, well, you're in the the top 10, so you're gonna get playlisted. 

RH: So they put us on the radio, and we did, like, a live in Leeds thing with Chris Moyles. And we had management be interested, we had deals offered by Roger Truss of Beggar's Banquet, who's a good, good man. We had Sony coming up and taking us out for tea. (We realised that would have been billed back to us at a ridiculous interest rate had we signed with them.) We felt like, in conjunction with our then-manager, the Beggar's Banquet offer wasn't enough money, and we felt like the Sony deal, f we were to pursue that, we lost creativity that we were unwilling to let go of. So that, I think, was already instilled.

RH: So, out of that, we ended up splitting up with our manager. But we formed what we think was potentially the world's first fan-owned, fan-funded record label. So all the people who had ever got us in a headlock after a gig and gone ”if we ever win the lottery, we'll sort you guys out”, those people, we went and talked with them and venue owners that we'd worked with, and people invested, sometimes you know, a goodly proportion of their life savings in our record label.

RH: So we took, I think, over 2 share issues, around £100,000. Our failure, I think, around that time was we spent it like a major. So we did employ those cultural intermediaries, we did employ the PR people. We did employ the pluggers, the press people. But, and I understand that people have to live, but what became apparent is, we'd lost our relationship with Radio 1  at that point, because we'd put someone in the middle. Same with press. And no one, I think, can be as good a champion for you and your music than yourself and, because we'd come from this kind of DIY we-made-the-record-ourselves vibe, I think there was a bit of a break in… what's it called when there's a disconnect between what you think and the actual reality?

JA: Like a decoupling.

RH: It might come to me, but it felt like there was a separation between what we were, you know, that everyone back to ours mentality, and then how we behaved in business. And we got to do wonderful things, we got to go to Canada, our good friend Rue licensed the record out in Canada, he worked for the label, and we got to do tours there, and made a record in New York in a day, in a church … lots of great things. But, we never saw a penny out of Four Day Hombre. And because I think we'd kind of messed up the relationship with radio. I felt, and other people in the band felt, that if we go back to radio, as Four Day Hombre again. The next thing we do is going to be perceived as, are you with that nearly next big thing?

RH: So I wanted to… and some of us felt the same, but not all of us, I just felt like going back with a different name would be freeing, really. And that's where we made that two-point plan. And it really was, at that point, if this isn't paying the bills then… let's only do stuff that is fun. Because that way, if we don't get paid for it, at least we've had a good time and done what we want to do. And it turned out to be a really good business decision. Suddenly, we seem to have stories of these wonderful situations of people giving us money because they want us to have money. For coming together and communing and having moments. I think that's something that's really, it's become increasingly important in our, increasingly mediated experience of life, where we don't have everybody watching a certain TV show every Saturday and then talking about it on the Monday. You know, we experience stuff at different times. One of the things I think is amazing about a gig is you've got 50, 400, 2,000, 20,000 people coming together in a space, and having an experience. And those memories of that experience grow and develop over time. It's not just that you have the moment, it's that those moments are then shared amongst and between fans as well. Like, you've just said, do you remember when you did this, or do you remember… you've probably had those conversations with other people. And I think that's… unless you've got hundreds of thousands of pounds to disseminate your music and media to people, for the indie, that is always the, that's the lifeblood of Hope and Social. It's people talking about things they've done, made, seen together.

RH: One of my faves has to be the Wine Bottle Orchestra. There's a song called Eurospin that we do, the video is on our YouTube. We had a song that we felt sounded a bit like French supermarket music. We should have a cheese and wine night. And that idea extrapolated out and became… let's get gourmet food cooked, let's wait on tables, and at the end of the night, we'll make a… wine bottle orchestra. People get to make a record with us. It was the last thing that we made on the album April. And I think we've… I think it was the Friday night? And on the Saturday night, on, like, by the Saturday or the Sunday night, the record had to be sent. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the CDs to sell on the tour. It was that tight.

JA: I remember that event and being so gutted that we didn't actually come to it. I remember seeing the videos afterwards, and I can't stand it.

RH: Yeah, the video really captures, the two videos they're kind of making of, and the actual song really capture that so beautifully.

JA: We've mentioned a few people, so Shot By Sodium is obviously a big deal.

RH: Oh my god, yeah. What amazing, amazing humans. And the people there became the best 70-strong PR team that you've never had to pay. Better than that, they paid to be there. And the money we took on that night ended up, that was the pressing money for the CDs. Even though we'd not paid ourselves for making the album, at the start of the release of that album we were already at zero. So people came, they made the record with us, and then they become the people going “oh, you should listen to this band, look, check this out, I'm in this video. it's one of the best things I think, we've ever done as a piece of internet, you know? Not only making records, not only doing gigs, but making a piece of internet. I think that's one of the best examples of our stuff.

JA: There was also the bigger event where you had the guy who took waste food and made, basically, a whole room full of people, was it Christmas dinner? It was pretty much that.

RH: Yeah, yeah, it was Christmas too, and it was Adam from The Real Junk Food Project. Again, a wonderfully inspirational human being who essentially turns food that would be destined for food waste from shops and supermarkets, and, there's the Junk Food Cafe, it’s free to those who can't pay, as well, so we contacted him, and he was well up for it. So again, if you make the category narrow enough, anything could be a world record, can't it? The world's biggest Christmas dinner made entirely from food destined for food waste isa niche category, but…

JA: So you’d better tell everybody, all the masses of people who will be watching or reading this what you're up to next, and how they can experience Hope & Social for themselves.

RH: We've got a relationship with a wonderful venue in Leeds called The Attic, and this year we decided to try and do one a month. We've had a couple where we've been on tour. But, essentially, each month is different. So I think the first one was all acoustic instruments. I think the second one was all the keyboards we own,  everything from your little Casio right through to James's multi-thousand pound modular Moog rig.

RH: We did one where I wasn't there, and that was all toy instruments, and we've done some with, like, a massive extended 8-piece brass section.

RH: We did one at the end of the school year, so that became a school assembly, almost, we're in the middle on the floor, and we get people up on stage, and they do their performance, which they learn there and then.

RH: Things like that. So, we're gonna be doing a bunch of those through the new year. We've got one in every month from January until June?

JA: New records or anything?

RH: so we've started working at a great place in Wales, and so we've done two… I think two weeks' worth of writing and recording there already and we probably need another week or two … maybe we've had three weeks, actually. We probably need, like, another week or two just to finish that off, but I think we're gonna do that probably locally. So we can dip in and out a little bit. Whereas, when it's in Wales, we're there for the duration, which is great. Iit's an awesome place. In fact, it's so good, I'm not even gonna say the name of it, because I don't want anyone booking it up.

RH: So yeah, we will have a new record out next year, but it will be for our September, October tour, which is in… which is in the month. We're also trying to work out a way that we can do a concerted block of festivals this weekend, and, you know, try and really you know, even as a loss leader, just be like, hey, we want to play your festival. We normally charge this much, tell us what you can pay, we wanna be there, and see if we can get in front of, you know, new people. We still want to, you know, meet new people. Get in front of new potential fans, like we love the ones we've got, but let's have a few more.

JA: Cool, alright, fabulous. Well, it's been lovely to talk to you.

RH: Same

JA: Thank you very much.