Guy Garvey on acid trips and becoming a father

Have you been reading the childcare books, Guy? “Yes. I could perhaps read some more.” What happens if the baby arrives in the middle of the tour? “You can’t plan these things. Trying to reschedule the tour is crazy. If Rachel makes it to term she gets a medal for long and distinguished service.”

In any event, he’s ready. Well, he thinks he’s ready. Ready for the sleeplessness, the upheaval. “I’ve just moved house. People tell you that’s the most stressful thing you’ll ever do. It wasn’t. It was loads of fun.”

Hmm. There speaks a man, women might be saying right now.

“All the band have had babies and understand,” he continues. “And the band has always made way for family life, so the last few gigs are insured and should I have to disappear dramatically there will be something special planned.”

Becoming a parent. It’s thrilling and scary. “I’m quite late to fatherhood,” he points out and then reconsiders. “Though am I late to fatherhood in this day and age?”

Maybe not, but what he does know is that “we’re both really f****** excited. It’s going to throw up so many new thoughts on the world and everything”.

And there is Guy Garvey in essence. A big, broad, sweary enthusiast for life. That’s a good, if pottymouthed, basis for fatherhood, isn’t it? There are much worse. In our time together we might even talk about some of them. In the course of an hour we manage to cover masculinity, the time he looked most like a “twat”, his love of New York and Gargunnock and the aforementioned Stirling, who, as well as wife, the actor best known for Tipping the Velvet, Detectorists and being the daughter of Diana Rigg and Archie Stirling, aka the Laird of Keir, qualifies as his muse.

Stirling has also been on the cover of The Herald Magazine herself. We like to keep it in the family.

Elbow are big on family. Formed in the early 1990s in Bury, Greater Manchester, the band’s members Craig and Mark Potter, Pete Turner and Richard Jupp have always prioritised real life over band life. When they were first ready to try to conquer America back in the days when that meant you would go and live there for a couple of years, Jupp announced he was going to become a father.

“We sat and thought about it,” recalls Garvey, “and we decided the smartest thing to do for the sustainability and longevity of the band was to agree that life and family and children are more important and if we wanted to keep the band a passion we might have to accept that we are not going to conquer America. We are going to have children instead.”

Garvey has just taken his time getting there. Elbow didn’t conquer America, but they’ve raised their standard all over the UK. Indeed, from this end of the telescope, where they are a headline act, it’s maybe hard to remember that in the pop race Elbow were always more snail than hare.

We might associate them now with Glastonbury-rousing festival slots pouring out the anthems. “Throw those curtains wide …” And all that. But it took a long time to get to where they are. Indie giants, arena fillers, a band with gravitational pull. A band whose core elements – two-parts warm uplift to one-part orchestral oomph – now include a relationship with the Halle Orchestra.

Elbow are a band, too, that can now scale back out of choice rather than necessity. Hence this month’s tour is going to theatres rather than arenas.

“Theatre gigs are better for the band. They’re better for the audience,” says Garvey. “It’s only since 2008 that we could fill an arena. There’s something really satisfying getting that many people to sing at once. The lid comes off. You can’t do that in the theatre. But aside from that it’s pretty soulless. It’s pretty impressive and it’s a spectacle, but there’s no intimacy. And so much of our music is intimate.

“It’s not like we’ll never do arenas again. We’ve got a load of songs that fill them. But we’ve also got a load of songs that require a little bit more warmth.”

CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES. Elbow in 2017 are now a fourpiece rather than a five-piece after Jupp opted to leave. Probably for the best, Garvey says.

“After 25 years you can’t really hold him at fault. You’ve got one life. It was a shock but it was refreshing. I don’t think we realised how the situation had affected us. As with the end of any relationship you acclimatise in increments to something that isn’t right. Then when it’s gone it’s the absence of the thing that makes you feel elated.”

That shock and elation fed into the band’s new album Little Fictions. That and Garvey’s change of circumstances after meeting Stirling in 2015. When I met her at the end of that year she said the two of them were in negotiations about her role as a muse; about what details of their life could and couldn’t be revealed.

How did that work out? Pretty well if the reviews of the new album are anything to go by. “All the good reviews of Little Fictions so far, you would think were my wife’s reviews,” Garvey mock complains. “She’s lying there heavily pregnant going: ‘I haven’t worked for months and I’m getting all these great reviews. Am I the best muse ever?’“

"The five of us …’” He corrects himself. “‘The four of us might have had something to do with it, but it’s all your hard work, Rach.’” He stops, smiles. “She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

The songs for the album began to come together on a writing retreat in Stirlingshire. The band, newly shorn of their drummer, dug in to lick their wounds in Gargunnock House, not far from where Stirling grew up. “I’ve always enjoyed stubbornly being loving and caring in the face of being a large northern male, you know?” says Garvey.

“It wasn’t just me. It was all my friends, all my contemporaries hugging each other. “We were just a little bit too young to be part of the ecstasy generation. But what we had been brought up with is the second summer of love. It was baggy and ecstasy appearing in Manchester and if you weren’t doing ecstasy you were smoking weed. And it wasn’t ‘Aceeeid!’ And it wasn’t cocaine, and it wasn’t the craziness of MDMA. “It was take a pill that makes you hug your mate or smoke a joint that makes you giggle with your pals.”

Well, most of the time. “I did acid a couple of times. I wonder if I should be talking about this,” he considers for a moment. “We’re about to start looking at schools. The PTA will tear me a new a***.”

He does so anyway. “The most significant time I did acid my mate’s uncle owned a garden centre in Bury. And it was really, really traumatic. Everyone had done acid over this weekend and had a terrible experience. It went from one of my friends thinking he’d become a primate and was sat making ape noises at the end of the table. Another one thought he was losing his mind. And I was inconsolable about how beautiful the moon was.

“It all got a bit too much for me. About six o’clock a flower delivery turned up. I went round the front and said to this guy: ‘Look man, I’ve been up all night. I’ve done some acid. Are you going anywhere near Prestwich?’”

Bands are often the product of the drugs they take. Garvey tells me about a conversation he had with Jenny Lewis, the former front woman of Rilo Kiley. “She had just worked with Elvis Costello, who I came to late. I said to Jenny: ‘How was it working with Elvis Costello?’ And she said: ‘Fast.’ And I said: ‘What is it? Costello, Nick Cave. They just churn them out.’ And she said: ‘Speed.’ “And I was like: ‘F*** off.’ And she said: ‘No, not now. When they learned to write songs. Fast drugs. I guess Elbow were stoners.’ And I went: ‘You’re absolutely right.’ There you go. That was a bit of a tangent.”

What were we talking about? That’s the thing about drugs, they always make the record skip. Oh, yes. Masculinity.

Here’s the thing, Guy, I say. Rock is not short of alpha male a***holery. It goes with the territory of the rock god. Did you never aspire to that? “Perhaps when I was 17. I remember stumbling around like I was more drunk than I was, Jim Morrison style. And I shaved my hair into a ridiculous thing. I shaved it all off apart from a fringe, like a twat.”

Didn’t Vince Clarke have that haircut for a while in his Yazoo days? “It didn’t look as good as Vince Clarke’s because it was twinned with National Health spectacles. I would have bullied me, do you know what I mean? It was that f****** dreadful.”

The story of Elbow’s rise to success is a slow, meandering one. In their early days they were signed to Island Records and dropped before their first album was even released.

“What that meant on a practical level was back to the same dole office, back to the same chinless bitch signing us on. Really vindictive. An awful human being. She should not have been given authority over anyone. It was awful.

“And also having to face my family. They are the kindest, big-hearted … They don’t give a s***. My mum always says: ‘I’d love you if you were a street sweeper.’ But still, when your family and friends are so proud of you, to go back and say, ‘It’s not coming out.’ Jesus. What a kick in the balls.”

But there was always the music. It’s still the main thing, he says, even now they’ve become pop veterans. “It’s normal for a band of people who enjoy making music together and have a real lust for that and spend their days daydreaming about it when they’re not – which I do – it’s normal for you to be really hungry to get into the room and get going.”

If that desire had waned in the days before Jupp left, it’s returned with a vengeance. “Making the last record, despite the sadness of Jupp going, was a time to try new ways of working and reset our ethics creatively. And it’s been an absolute riot. I’ll avoid phrases like ‘young again’ – it just reminds people you are old.”

These days, inevitably, given the fact his wife is based in the capital, he spends more time in London than in Manchester, though he still has a flat up north.

“I could never leave Manchester. Apart from anything else I would be stoned to death by an angry mob of taxi drivers when I got off at Piccadilly.

“Moving to London, even putting one foot in the city, is a massive betrayal. For years I’ve enjoyed the taxi drivers saying: ‘You’re good lads. You never moved away like them f****** Gallaghers. As soon as they had the money they were off.’ And I’ve always sat there proudly thinking: ‘No, I haven’t.’”

Until now. “But I’ve moved for the only thing that you should move for, for love and for family.”

It’s almost time to go. He’s got to go down the Westfield Centre and buy “pink fluffy s***”, he says. “I’ll say hello to Rachael for you.”

Time for one last question. When it comes to it, what’s Elbow’s paternity plan like? “Like I always say, the longest surviving non-corrupt democracy in the world is Elbow. Cradle-to-the-grave care. There’s even an Elbow plan and as the kids come of age and we start sliding off the plate they can start learning the instruments and they can make it a family concern.”

Elbow. It’s a family affair. Or in Garvey’s case it soon will be.

Elbow play the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on March 12 and March 13. Little Fictions is out now