In the grand scheme of things, the sunlit sitting room of a cosy Selkirk bungalow doesn't seem like the proper place to be discussing backstage riders, rock tattoos, sibling rivalry, appearing on The Late Show With David Letterman and what happens when you go on the road with US rockers Death Cab For Cutie.
And it certainly doesn't feel like the proper place when the centrepiece of that sitting room is a low, square coffee table groaning with biscuits, cups of tea and plates of buttered Selkirk bannock. But forget the grand scheme of things. This is exactly the right place for all that.
Why? Because the tattooed siblings in question are Scott and Grant Hutchison, respectively singer-songwriter and drummer with indie-rock five-piece Frightened Rabbit (or "Scottish everydudes" as influential American music website Pitchfork once billed them), and this Borders house is the one in which they grew up. It was their mum, Marion, who brewed the tea and buttered the bannock.
It's here, then, that the Frightened Rabbit story begins and here that it continues: as recently as 2009 the brothers were using this room to record demos for the band's third album, The Winter Of Mixed Drinks. "Right here," says Grant, spreading his arms wide. "I didn't know anywhere else to set up my drums and we could make as much noise as we liked."
Scott, at 31 the elder by two years, has only been back in the country for a few hours. He landed in Glasgow on a flight from New York at 7.30am - it's now noon - after spending a few days in the city with his Los Angeles-based girlfriend. He needed to decompress, he says, after the band's 38-date tour of America and Canada, though by his own admission he didn't get much in the way of R&R. "All you need at the end of a tour is three days solidly sitting in bed watching telly, but because it was New York, we felt we should do stuff." Cue tired smile. Grant nods his head the way you do when you know all about the Big Apple and its various temptations. "New York and decompression don't really go together," he adds sagely.
In a few hours the brothers will leave for Newcastle and the first date on an equally gruelling British and European tour that merges into a New Year birl round Australia and the Far East. "If I said December 5, would you know where you're going to be?" I ask. Somewhere in the middle of Europe is their best guess. (Not bad: it's Zurich.)
One venue which is fixed in their minds is Glasgow's O2 Academy, where tonight they play the first of two sold-out dates. Their days of performing at Selkirk's Victoria Halls are long gone so this is as close as they'll get to a homecoming gig. Grant still lives in Glasgow and Scott, though now resident in Edinburgh, studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art. "We did the Barrowland earlier in the year and that's big in terms of the honour of playing that venue," says Grant. "But these are definitely going to feel like the biggest shows so far."
"It's funny," adds Scott, "in the last 12 months we've played Los Angeles more often than Glasgow. There's something really wrong with that. But coming back to play in Glasgow, specifically because it seems we do it so seldom now, is always a big event for us."
The chances are there are even bigger events in the band's future, however. In late 2010, a few months after the release of The Winter Of Mixed Drinks, Frightened Rabbit said goodbye to Brighton-based independent label FatCat and signed for Atlantic Records. Founded in 1947 and headquartered in Manhattan, it has been home over the years to artists such as Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, ABBA and The Velvet Underground.
Already a band with a cult pedigree, it marked them out as a band with serious unit-shifting potential too. But did they have any misgivings about signing to a major? "I did but they were allayed really quickly," says Scott. "I thought they were going to be really heavy-handed. I thought we'd have that dirty word 'single' coming up. But it never did."
"Respectful" is the word he uses of the label's overall aproach. Grant prefers "cautious".
"There was a period when it seemed to be taking a lot longer than we had hoped to get an album done," he says. "What started going through my head was: 'Are we ever going to release this record or are we going to be another one of those bands that signs to a major and just disappears?'"
It didn't happen. That album, Pedestrian Verse, was released in February and met with hosannas from some critics and nothing less than quiet approval from the rest. It went top 10 in the UK and gave the band a Scottish No.1. Pitchfork (them again) praised the lyrics ("lucid assessments of social and emotional turmoil" if you will), while noting the steadying hand of in-demand producer Leo Abrahams and - the best bit - employing the word "rhotic" to describe Scott's voice. Nice.
It means rolling your Rs, by the way, and being Scottish, Scott does it. James Graham of The Twilight Sad and Adam Thompson of We Were Promised Jetpacks, both former labelmates at FatCat, are just two of the many other singers in Scottish bands who have also made using their own accents a cornerstone of their sound.
An honourable mention goes to The Proclaimers here, of course. But to Scott's mind it was Falkirk duo Arab Strap who were the real innovators, thanks to what he calls their "personal lyricism" and "unfaltering colloquialisms". Nearly a decade after their last studio album, Arab Strap's bleak, blackly comic pen portraits of drinking, drugging and loving in small-town Scotland are a continuing influence on younger bands, not least because of their use of the demotic.
"We emerged from a post-Franz Ferdinand phase where Glasgow had started to become more about style than substance, or so it seemed to me because I was living there at the time," Scott continues. "What ourselves and bands like The Twilight Sad were doing, apart from being influenced by Arab Strap and Belle And Sebastian, was returning to a more honest lyrical content that wasn't about dancing and going to matinees."
The intention was to write songs which were personal, emotional and transparent. It was natural, then, that the voice and the accent remain true to those aims: rhotic, in other words. "I think we all just drifted into it. It made more sense that way. None of us were trying to hide behind anything."
Take a step back, though, and something else becomes apparent: that in using their own accents these bands are surfing a wave of cultural self-confidence that's due (to my mind at least) to their having come of age in a devolved Scotland which has seen a flowering of music, drama, cinema and literature over the past decade. The brothers agree.
"Scotland's creative output is one of the finest in the world," Scott says simply.
Given that, where do they stand on the independence question?
"I'm Yes," says Grant.
"I'm definitely on that side of the fence," adds Scott. "I've got one leg over and this one's sort of creeping over as well."
Don't think, however, that talk of independence over tea and Selkirk bannock makes Frightened Rabbit an inward-looking concern, preoccupied with the local at the expense of the global. Both Hutchison brothers, but Scott especially, have their eyes fully trained on the west: America, to be more precise, which seems to have fallen hard for their brand of intelligent, widescreen indie rock. To date, Frightened Rabbit have undertaken 14 American tours of one sort or another and ended the most recent one with an appearance alongside Denzel Washington on The Late Show With David Letterman. They performed The Woodpile, the second single from Pedestrian Verse.
"It started with them," says Grant. "It was the fact people in the US liked the band that allowed us to go there that often." FatCat were amenable too, quite happy for the band to tour the US at the same time as they tried to make inroads into Britain and Europe. In 2007, shortly after the release of debut album Sing The Greys and still effectively a duo, the brothers headed for the influential South By Southwest music festival in Texas. They've been picking up fans in America ever since and with Pedestrian Verse they made the all-important Billboard 100 chart.
In part, it was inevitable. Scott was never into punk - "I didn't have enough anger. I've never felt a need to rebel. Life here was fine and I didn't feel trapped," he says - but found his head turned and his ears and eyes opened instead by the music coming out of America's western seaboard in the early 1990s. He can even remember the day it happened: his elder brother Neil's 15th birthday.
"I would have been 12. Mum said, 'He's asked for these two albums for his birthday but he's going on a school trip to France and wants them taped for his Walkman.' They were Vs by Pearl Jam and Superunknown by Soundgarden. I was going to just press record and let them run, but I listened and by the end of those two albums I was hooked."
Later, when he picked up his father's old guitar and began trying to teach himself to write songs, it was to American acts such as Ryan Adams and Wilco that he turned for tutelage. It's no surprise, then, that America hears something of its own past in the music of Frightened Rabbit. "There's definitely a great deal of American influence in the way I write."
There will be a fifth Frightened Rabbit album and certainly some new material released next year, but Scott also has plans for a solo record and is applying for a visa which will allow him to spend longer in the US. He's even toying with the idea of moving there, possibly to write for other people.
I turn to Grant. "I presume this isn't the first you've heard of it?" He shakes his head. "We've talked about it," he says.
There's no sense of division, but all of a sudden it's hard not to be reminded that brothers and rock bands can be a combustible combination. I give you the Gallaghers, Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks and Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson of The Beach Boys. I sense it's something the Hutchison brothers have made a study of over the years.
"A lot of the pairings tend to be singer and main guitar player and they tend to be the people in a band with the largest ego," says Scott. "I have to admit to a certain amount of ego. But Grant is far less interested in that. It's not like he wants my job or wants to be at the front. On a day-to-day basis that's what makes us be fine with each other."
Mind you, he adds, "We've also found it's very unproductive for the two of us to be sitting in a room together for any length of time. I've been annoying him for as long as he can remember. So we've found a way of working that hopefully avoids anything coming to a head."
Older brother Neil has a degree in maths and physics and Grant has some of that same methodical approach to life. Scott, remember, went to art school. A classic middle brother, then? "I would say so. I stood quietly on the sidelines …" Here Grant chips in: "Observing the chaos you created."
Creative chaos is good, of course, and both brothers know it. Chaos on tour is not, a lesson they learned watching veterans Death Cab For Cutie go about their business. Despite the name, the Americans take an ascetic approach to life on the road. Or do now, anyway. The Frightened Rabbit backstage rider still contains two bottles of spirits, but then there are five of them in the band. Grant once ended up in hospital after a tour and now doesn't drink on what he calls "show days". "Playing with a hangover is not fun and I'm not good at it," he says. "You start considering exactly what you can and should do for your health," adds Scott.
After they've shown me their tattoos - both brothers have been inked with artwork from Neutral Milk Hotel's cult 1998 album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Grant on his calf, Scott on his hand - there's time for a short tour of Selkirk. We visit the Victoria Halls where they once played in the band for a performance of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. We pass Selkirk High School, whose music department they still can't thank enough. And we climb high above the town, to the slopes where they went sledging as boys and where as teenagers their schoolmates would search for magic mushrooms. "Fruitless," Grant tells me.
These days it's another kind of trip that occupies Scott and Grant Hutchison: the Frightened Rabbit journey. You can't see all the world from the A699, just Selkirk Golf Course and the hills beyond. But if your song is good and your words true, all the world might see you one day. n
Frightened Rabbit play the O2 Academy, Glasgow, tonight and tomorrow. Pedestrian Verse is out on Atlantic Records.
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