INTERVIEW: Dan Haggis of The Wombats

The Wombats hit the U.S. again this summer to tour their third and latest album, “Glitterbug.” One of our DJs, Olivia Gehrke, spoke to Dan Haggis, the drummer of The Wombats, before their show at Port City Music Hall in Portland, Maine on August 10.

For the writing of your most recent album, “Glitterbug,” there were times when you guys were on opposite sides of the world—I think it was LA and the UK. Did that help or hinder the writing process for the album, or did it do a bit of both?

Dan: I guess we had to find new ways and new solutions to finish up songs and whatnot. But I guess we were kind of used to it because Murph (Matthew Murphy, singer of The Wombats) lived in London for quite awhile, and we were in Liverpool so even though it’s not the other side of the world, we were still used to not getting together to make music everyday. We’d work on things on our own time and then come together and make stuff. [I guess for LA, at the worst of times,] where it was like “Oh, I can’t just get the train quickly and come and do something. We did a few things where myself and Tord (bassist of The Wombats) would make something in Liverpool and send it over to Murph. Or Murph would record something on his phone and send it over to us. But in general, I think we always needed to end up in a practice room together—playing the music or songs and figuring things out and arranging it—because apart from a couple of anomalies, we always need that to get things feeling right.

For the writing process of “Glitterbug,” I had read that you guys had written like 20-odd songs and narrowed it down the tracklisting of the album, plus the few B-sides released for HMV. Were there any songs on the final “Glitterbug” tracklist that almost didn’t make the cut?

D: There was “Curveballs,” which is the last song on the album. It was between that one and something else. Actually the label at first was like, “Maybe just ten songs on the album,” because we were running out of time, and the producer we were working with was like, “We’re running out of time,” and we were like, “No, no, no, we really want to finish this song.” So, that one almost didn’t make it. We were pretty much in agreement with the whole album. We just ended up doing two extra songs for the deluxe version because those two songs we really wanted to release as well, so the label said; “Okay, we can do that as a deluxe thing.” The B-sides were ones that were in contention for the album but just never quite made it. The tracklisting was done pretty early on which is quite rare for us.

From “A Guide to Love, Loss, and Desperation” to “This Modern Glitch” to “Glitterbug,” there’s definitely been a noticeable evolution in sound. Was that change a conscious decision or something that happened naturally over the course of the past 10+ years you’ve been in the band?

D: I think a little bit of both of those reasons. I think it was kind of a necessity from just playing on the first album—guitar, bass, drums, and a few little kids’ keyboards. We wanted to challenge ourselves and try something a little bit different because when you’ve been playing the same instruments every night for two or three years, which is how long we toured the first album, we just wanted to try something fresh and different. Obviously, you get naturally excited by the sounds that you haven’t explored yet, whether it’s a ukulele or an ‘80’s synth. So it was partly just wanting to try something new. Also it keeps things more creative. Even though I think the songwriting is—not similar—but that thing is quite consistent throughout the three albums. Obviously, we just try to change around it. We’re big fans of bands like Radiohead that just change their sound every album, but you can still always tell it’s Radiohead. I’m not comparing ourselves to Radiohead at all, but we’re just big fans of bands that are not afraid to change up things. You end up with a few fans that say, “Oh, I don’t like your new album because it doesn’t have as many guitars on.” There’s always going to be people or fans that have comments like that, but just in general, it seems to be that our fans understand we want to change from album to album.

Going back a little bit in time, on “This Modern Glitch,” you guys released pretty much an entire album’s worth of B-sides. What prompted that release originally, and is it something you have since considered doing again at any point?

D: There are quite a few songs from writing that we’ve got on our iPods that have never been released. We just want—as every band probably—every time you make a new song, for people to hear it straight away because it’s so exciting. But obviously when it comes to making an album, you have to be a bit more selective and think about the album as a whole. We wanted to do some of the B-sides, because now singles don’t really seem to get released in the same way. It seems to be like people buy 7” singles. There’s not as much need for all the B-sides in the way that the record labels release singles nowadays. So, I guess that was the main difference between this album and the last ones. Hopefully some of these songs will see the light of day one day because we put in all the time making them, and so it would be a shame not to put them out sometime.

It sounds like, in your music, you guys draw from a bunch of different influences, eras, and genres, but has there been anyone—musician or non-musician—who has influenced the band in one way or another that people would be surprised by?

D: Murph and I bond over Christopher Nolan films, like the “Batman” trilogy, “Interstellar” and “Inception”—some like mind-altering films. They’re so awesome. And the perfection that he manages to achieve in them—anyone like that in whatever art or field they work in—I think it’s really inspiring to see someone who’s at the top of the game and who makes something that, from the start to the end, just blows you away. There’s not one weak part of the story or one weak part of the filmmaking or the images or anything. It’s just like, “Wow. If he can make a movie that good, then we need to step our game up!”

Some bands say they can’t connect to their debut once they’re further into their career, whether it’s because of sound, or topics of songs, or any other reason. Has that been the case for you guys and “A Guide to Love, Loss, and Desperation?”

D: Not so much. I mean obviously we play more songs in the sets from our later albums, especially from “Glitterbug,” because they’re the newer songs and the ones that we really want to play and the ones we get more excited about. But we still like to change up which first album songs we put in. We actually just played “Laura” for the first time in awhile the other night. It’s always really nice playing those songs. It’s like seeing an old friend again after five years or something. It just feels the same as the last time you saw each other. I think that’s the best way to describe it, really.

You guys are somewhat notorious for doing some fun covers. There was Take That’s “Patience,” “Postman Pat,” Jessie J’s “Pricetag.”

D: Oh wow, you’ve seen those?

Yeah! Are there any new songs you guys have been itching to cover?

D: We did some stuff on this album. We did a Taylor Swift cover—“Blank Space”—for a radio station. That was quite fun. We played together the night before after a gig in Amsterdam. We sat down with kids’ keyboards in a room and just sorted that. Anything else we did? Oh! Carly Rae Jepsen! We did “I Really Like You” for a radio station in the U.K. because we needed to do a pop song. That’s how most of these things come about. It’s like radio stations say to you, “we want you to come and play one of your songs, and then we want you to play one of the top 10 hits at the moment, but in your own style,” like acoustic. There are some great pop songs out there, so we always try and find those and do our own thing with them. The problem with doing songs you really, really love, is that you worry that you’re going to kill them—that you’ll ruin them. So, I’m not even going to suggest any because I think it’s better that we stick to doing funny, little pop songs that, if we don’t get them right, no one’s going to get on our backs about it.

If you switch it around, if anyone could cover one of your songs, which song would it be and who would cover it?

D: As we’re at different extremes, I’d like to hear maybe some of our songs done by a really heavy band. So, let’s imagine “Techno Fan” from the second album covered by Deftones. Or I was going to say Rammstein at first, but that might be a little bit difficult because then they’d have to translate them all over into German. Actually, no, let’s go with that. Let’s go with “Techno Fan” by Rammstein in German.

I’d listen to that. Wrapping it up, is there a single moment that you’ve had in The Wombats that you feel sums up your career with the band thus far?

D: Yeah. From the last year’s touring, we did a festival called Splendour in the Grass in Australia. I think we were headlining it or second from top. I can’t remember. Oh yeah, we were second from top. Florence + the Machine was headlining. Oh! I’ve just found out what “I never knew I was a techno fan” is in German. Are you ready? It’s Ich wusste nie, ich war ein Techno-Fan.

Oh, wow! Put that out as the next single!

D: That’s ridiculous. Our tour manager is showing me things now. Oh yeah, Splendour in the Grass. We were second to top from Florence and there was like 20,000 people in this natural amphitheater in a rainforest setting on the east coast of Australia. Island Bay sort of area. I don’t know what it was. Just all of us walked onstage to goosebumps, feeling almost emotional. It was this insane hour of energy, and the crowd over there—all of them were singing along. It was such a big, overwhelming moment. You have those moments where you feel we’ve come quite far from a little practice room in Liverpool to playing for 20,000 people over in the rainforest in Australia. You know something’s gone right along the way.

O: Wow, that seems pretty cool. Were there any wombats present there?

D: There probably were, actually, sniffling around in the bushes there!