Getting the band back together.

Spoon will bring us together.

A year ago, the five of us met up at Sydney Opera House to see an old friend play the forecourt. Jim Eno and his band Spoon were in Australia supporting The War on Drugs tour and he had put us all on the door. In the few weeks between SXSW and Coachella 2014, Jim had produced what would become the bedrock of Blue Planet Eyes at his studio Public Hifi in Austin, Texas. For five old bandmates who hadn’t hung out or even spoken for five, six, seven years, he was a leveller, someone we all adored and wouldn’t say no to.

In 2013 after the success of Is This How You Feel? which had been entirely recorded, produced and mixed by Jack (with a lot of unsolicited input from the rest of us), our main goal was levelling up without losing the thing that made us cool. We had our own studio and a DIY attitude, but our success the year before and the fact we’d signed to multiple majors worldwide had made everything suddenly very serious, which is a real killjoy for making cool shit. Jack could almost touch the sounds he wanted, he just needed someone with confidence to help guide the process. so we started looking for a co-producer for the album. Someone that knew about deadlines.

Our team were wrapt at the chance to get us in the room with someone BIG. In LA we were carted off to meet producer after producer, a few we looked up to and a few who were outrageous. One super famous guy sat with his bare, hairy feet up on the dash of the console the whole time with his back to us.

Everyone in the band has different taste and this made it hard to decide too, but we knew we wanted someone to fit into our world rather than try to shape it. Touring through a lot of 2012 the car stereo was always playing Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the Spoon record. Jack on that:

“It's a deeply detailed sounding album, everything refined with just the right grit. Their records have a certain integrity, the identity of every element impresses me (still!); That's what I wanted for BPE, and so we reached out to Jim Eno.

I met with Jim either late '13 or early '14 - he might've been on holiday in Australia with his family. Our management got us in touch, and in our emails I think we talked about hotdogs, so I took him to Harry's Cafe de Wheels then we strolled to the Old Fitz to talk records. I liked that Jim had a curious mind, a good nature and a sense of humour - he felt like someone we could spend a month with, he also struck me as firmly principled which I admired.

He might not like to be outed for this but he's some kind of computer genius who has a patent on some niche invention. I don't know what it is exactly, but he's a clever guy. And apparently was a mean wrestler in high school.”

That day a year ago, seeing Jim, he asked us - so, are you guys getting back together?!

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