The lack of physical communication seems to have oddly strengthened people’s bonds in other ways…
“Yeah, and not in a flippant, vapid way that we have been communicating for the past 10 years or however long. Now we’re using social media to communicate well; now we’re using it as the tool it was intended to be, and it’s not so much about ego. There’s something in the air and people are missing something, and that’s a good position to be in, when something is taken away from you that you didn’t even realise you cherished so much. I’m quite an antisocial person anyway – I quite like sitting by myself, just writing music most of the time. But I have to say, as soon as the choice is taken away from me, I miss it, and I want to see all my friends all the time! It’s a good reset, amongst everything,”
The last time we spoke to you, you’d said that A Celebration Of Endings was a reaction to having spent a long time touring the MTV Unplugged set, and that you were looking forward to getting back to making some noise…
“I know (laughs). And now I’m fucking stuck in my house! It wasn’t lost on me either. I spent the first months of this year saying to everyone, ‘You know, I can’t wait to get away from that acoustic nonsense…’ I think I also told Kerrang! the classic, ‘Things can’t get any worse than this,’ right? The great soothsayer Simon Neil: whatever he says, believe the opposite (laughs)!”
READ THIS: 13 essential Biffy Clyro B-sides
You used one recent acoustic livestreams to play a new song, Holy Water, which didn’t make the cut for the new album…
“The reason it didn’t make the record was because musically, it didn’t really feel outlandish enough for this album. This record, I wanted it to be eccentric and off the wall, and have moments of complete dislocation. Holy Water just felt a bit too ‘traditional’ a song. When I wrote the song, it was more about reaching the end of our tether with the climate [crisis], and how society just can’t keep going on the way that it is. It was my way of saying, ‘When are we reaching the end of this? When is enough going to be enough?’ And I felt like that sentiment changed the more we’ve been going through this [coronavirus].
"The opening line, ‘The sinner’s in the hospital room / The saint is in the bed’, I wrote that last year and it just kept coming back to me, and I thought, ‘I have to share this now.’ I know it’s a bit weird 'cause it’s not on the record, but it felt so apt. With the new album being delayed, too, I just wanted to get some new music out now, for me as much as anything else, and to bring something fresh to the Biffy fans. I also think it’s quite cool for people to see the hard decisions we make about records’ tracklisting, too! It’s nice for people to say, ‘I love that song, why isn’t it on the record?’ because it is really hard to choose. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong, but we have to follow our instincts. It’s nice to get to reveal that process to people a little bit.”