London based three-piece, The High Wire, set tongues wagging at the tail end of 2009 with the beautiful slice of dreamy shoegaze pop that was their single, ‘Odds And Evens’. With its lush, woozy use of distortion and soft, floaty boy girl harmonies, the song instantly whisked you off to a golden, shimmery Summer dream. ltd was hooked. So we went to check out the live show and, yep, we were even more hooked. There’s an album out in March which promises to be a blissful prelude to Summer 2010 - and an early contender for soundtrack to the Summer. ltd got high with frontman, Tim Crompton…

Hello…
Hello! Well, we’ve just started gigging for the first time since the January 2009, which is fun for us because we get to play loud guitars again after having had to be quiet all the time when recorded the album.
 
It’s out soon. Are you excited?
Nervous... It’s a strange period in between finishing a recording and then releasing it. You want to be cool and not care what anyone thinks, but it’s pretty impossible; I can’t pretend that I don’t really hope people like it.
 
How does it sound?
I’d probably give a terrible description; it’s definitely best not to try to describe your own album. There were records I used to listen to when pretending to do homework and I think maybe it’d be good for that: a sitting-in-your-bedroom-skipping-homework album? Oh goodness... It’s an indie album with a Canadian girl and two English boys singing on it.
 
How did the recording go?
We recorded everything except the drums in our guitarist Stuart’s flat. The drums were done in a beautiful Georgian house in the country belonging to the drummer who helped us out (thank you Max). It all took ten weeks.
 
You self produced?
I didn’t really want to self produce.  I wanted to work with Julian Simmons (who produced our mini-album in 2008) again, but then Stuart really rose to the challenge and led us through it. He basically did everything technical and I just sat there being annoying asking lots of questions about how this Pro Tools thing works. We did have a vision of an album held together by the various short and instrumental pieces we already had written. That was in order to keep the theme of sleep running throughout and, although we had to drop a few of those in order to keep the album short, we did pretty much stick to that.
 
Was that lush, distorted sound something you set out to capture?
The only thing I remember we consciously set out to capture on a few parts was the feel of the Lost In Translation soundtrack, which I guess is lush and distorted. It was the first time Stuart and I had recorded together, so we went through a few albums we liked and that was one we kept coming back to, particularly in terms of things such as keyboard sounds. Obviously there are lots of different artists on that record, but it has a really unique vibe running through all the tracks.
 
It was mixed by Rik Simpson... He’s worked with some really big names. What do you think he added to the sound?
It was like Rik took a small flickering TV set and turned it into a wide-screen cinema. He made it bigger and bolder in every sense. The original tracks really do sound very intimate and brittle; he managed to both sharpen up and thicken the sound through the use of his very clever brain.
 
We love the boy girl vocal harmonising. Do you write together?
Stuart and I write separately and, in general, just sing the main vocal on the songs we’ve each written.
We write lines with Lex’s voice in mind and then she really makes them her own. One thing that developed during recording was Lex and I singing some of the lines together exactly the same (‘New Lovers’ and ‘It’s No Secret’ are examples) because we really liked how that sounded.
 
Are there any persistent lyrical themes?
We realised sleep kept coming up. And break-ups...
 
There’s a sense of cushioned drama about the sound? Would you say the writing is very personal?
Stuart’s songs, like ‘Pump Your Little Heart’, are very personal and quite brave I think. I definitely keep a bit more distance between the finished song and the things that inspired it.
 
Words like ‘shoegaze’ and ‘dreampop’ are used a lot to describe you. How do you react to that?
We always want to protest against being given tags, but I guess as I’ve just admitted that we consciously looked at the Lost In Translation soundtrack, which is pretty shoegazey, we can’t argue too much. I like that word ‘dreampop’.
 
We love the single ‘Odds And Evens? What’s the song about?
I read something Robert Smith said about some of their songs essentially being sad lyrics put to the most upbeat music. I think ‘Odds And Evens’ is maybe the closest thing we have to that. The references are St James on Piccadilly and St Giles In The Fields on St Giles High St. It’s a song about my best friend and my family.
 
What are your plans for 2010?
The biggest thing for us in 2010 is the album being released and then we’d just love to tour as far and wide as possible.

The High Wire play The Hoxton Square
Bar and Kitchen on 14 January and
Club Fandango @ 229 on 20 January.