Music Q&A: Pond

What informs your music and songwriting?
Everything that happens to me, or us, in reality, memory, fantasy and dreams influence what comes out as music. Direct musical or filmic or visual artists are influential. People we love, people we hate, people we admire, people we know or don’t know or who don’t exist outside of our own conception – all influential. Songs heard in snippets on TV are influential. Ideas talked about late at night with friends can stay lodged in your mind and become a constant guiding influence. Everything is an influence.

How has the band evolved over the years?
That is a very, very hard question with a very very long answer, but I guess we’re getting better at expressing ourselves honestly, individually. Being unmistakeably yourself seems to be the only way to be original.

What are you up to at the moment artistically?
We are on tour with Pond in Europe, so not much. Tour is pretty economical – there’s just no time to let creativity do its thing to the fullest, so you’ve kinda got to accept it or be constantly racked with guilt. But we still talk and think creatively together. Me and Gum and Ginolé and Joe make or mix stuff on long drives sometimes. I’ve been making beats for friends who rap.

What’s on your rider?
Booze and cheese and boring shit same as everyone else. Ginger beer too. Love that stuff.

Tell us your most embarrassing or surreal experience.
I won’t tell you the most surreal, or most embarrassing, but one time I went for a really long walk through the Scottish Highlands by myself. I had a smoke and went off the track and through woods and over a hill and was feeling pretty surreal already and then suddenly I was face to face with a deer. We stared at each other in mutual wonder for a long time.

What song do you wish you’d written?
I admire a lot of songs, but they’re all for the person who wrote them, not for me.

What’s your worst lyric?
Haha, what? I don’t know. I think a lot of my old lyrics suck, but there’s no universal, objective measurement of good or bad when it comes to lyrics really, right? Plato didn’t include lyrics in his Forms. Any old crap can resonate with someone out there. It’s subjective.