Hexham band aim to bring intelligence back to pop music

Songwriter and lead singer Jonathan Higgs is from Gilsland, on the Northumberland-Cumbria border. And guitarist Alex Niven, who like drummer Michael Spearman is from Newbrough, near Hexham, believes living in the sticks has shaped their music.

Alex said: "A lot of Higgs' aesthetic comes from being from Gilsland - a very marginal, strange place.

"It's very much away from the centre of fashion and hype that is London and bands like Razorlight."

The band formed when Jonathan struck up a friendship with bassist Jeremy Pritchard, from Kent, while studying music in Manchester.

Alex said: "Our music is multi- dimensional, very complex and layered but, at the same time, it's pop music - in a profound artistic sense rather than a commercial sense.

"It's very much about seeing a pop song as a perfect art form - a way to condense lots of disparate ideas into a tight format.

"There's a sense of eclecticism, a contrast between the tunes - there's a very broad range and that relates to the name, Everything Everything."

The band, all of whom are 24 aside from Michael who is 23, released their first single, Suffragette Suffragette, earlier this month.

Their sound, or playful resistance to a singular 'sound', is there in this track - fusing a danceable verse with, as Alex puts it "a completely incongruous massive riff".

"We are really desperately trying to make something new out of existing elements, trying to synthesise existing genres," he said.

Alex said Everything Everything are excited about putting intellectualism back into the art form.

"We are proud to be intelligent basically and that's slightly different. British indie has got to a stage of utter infantilism with bands like Razorlight and The Courtinas. We are sort of angry about that - reacting against it."

Everything Everything are appearing tonight at 8pm at The Head of Steam in Newcastle.