Interview: ME REX

Interview

20 Dec

ME REX have quickly become one of our most listened-to artists. Their recent album Giant Elk is amongst our favourite releases of the year, and they’ve headlined more of our radio shows than any other group. As I wrote in my album, it's like they bottled up everything we love – the best bits of indie and emo, anthemic gang vocals blending with punchy punk rhythms, and lyrics so vivid you can practically taste them.

With the band taking in a date at Exchange in Bristol on their recent UK headline tour, it was too good of an opportunity to not venture from our Wiltshire base and have a chat. Packed around the table of the Exchange’s green room, we chatted with Myles McCabe (Guitar/Keys/Vocals), Phoebe Cross (Drums/Vocals), and Rich Mandell (Bass/Keys/Vocals/Productions) about their creative process, fascination with mythology, and, of all things, we learned way more about slow worms than we bargained for!

Hanging with ME REX was pure joy. Their chemistry was undeniable, and to top it off, Rich and Myles ended our interview with a rendition of an early 2000s alt rock one-hit wonder.

How's the tour going so far?

Myles: It's been a lot of fun. Started in Brighton, which is now my hometown and that was lovely. It was the first time we played a lot of the songs on the new album, which was a lot of fun. Then last night was Moth Club in London, which is the biggest venue that we've headlined.

**When I was listening to Giant Elk for my review it struck me that there was a circular theme to the whole record, was that intentional?**

Myles: Absolutely, the album is like the illustration of the split worm on the back it splits and then loops. It’s an infinity of circling but also dividing each time into its own new thing.

What was the inspiration behind the circular theme and the worm illustration?

Myles: It's an image that kept coming back as I was writing. I moved down to Brighton a couple of years ago, and one thing that I've seen a lot of since I've got down there is this creature called a slow worm, which is technically not a worm nor is it a snake it’s a legless lizard. It evolved from a lizard with legs into its current snake-like form. Unfortunately because of local cats (none of the ones that I know), you will see them on the floor cut in half. One of the first ones I saw appeared on our doormat, making that circular shape that you see on the back of the record.

Another influence was that old myth about worms that if you cut them in half, they will carry on living as their own two separate organisms. Which turns out to be true of a certain type of worm. It's a very powerful image to me and translates to a lot of the themes of the record.

Phoebe: I had a slow worm as a pet when I was a child. Also, my first job as an ecologist in London was catching them on the motorway and translocating them to a refuge so that they could build a road. It's a bit of a weird job.

Rich: There is a lot of slow worm lore in this band.

Phoebe: I found out that their bum holes are in the middle when I was a kid because they would poop from the middle. Hence they can survive when they lose their tail.

Myles: You'd want to be the half that gets the bum hole.

Rich: It's a shame we couldn't incorporate that image into the record.

Myles: If I had known that earlier it would have been track one.

Phoebe: You never asked.

Myles, have you found the move to Brighton has influenced your writing at all?

Myles: The odd sea reference has crept in, I'm also living more or less out in the out in the countryside now as well. I feel some of the EPs and especially Megabear are tied to London. A lot of that was written as I was cycling about. I used to do bicycle delivery, so quite a lot of the time while I was doing that, I would get notes for writing. I don't know whether, with the new stuff, it feels as specifically tied to Brighton in the same way. But for me, it feels like it's not located in London in the way that the other ones were.

**What was your approach to songwriting for Giant Elk it must have been a complete shift from doing Megabear where it was a collection of interconnecting song fragments.**

Myles: Very different, in part because this record started as revisiting the EPs Woolly Mammoth, and Woolly Rhino. Because we had used 'Rites' on the Triceratops/Stegosaurus vinyl, I wanted to have a new song in there to replace that. The first song I wrote was 'Pythons' and I found myself trying to write back into the world and pick up on themes from the songs on the Woolly EPs. I found as I was doing that, it spilled over into more and more songs. And it felt good to reaffirm that I didn't have to write everything in tiny segments because I got very used to doing that after Megabear.

There are quite a bit of seasonal themes on the record. Is that a reflection of what was happening in your head then?

Myles: What's central to the record is a grief metaphor, I lost my dad in 2020. The metaphor ties back to the worm thing, the idea of losing a big part of yourself, then going on to become whole, and how that is a continuous process. We are continually losing people, losing things, dividing, then becoming whole and that is a process that goes on. That's something that really took hold in 'Pythons' and within that, there's the direct reference to the seasons. The track is about the strange way that time stretched around that event, and seemed, like living on a timeline that had a fixed endpoint then living past that. Being out in the wilderness of this time that didn't seem bound to any kind of structure compared to before. It was also during the COVID lockdowns, and for a lot of people, time took on a very strange sense around then.

Your lyrics touch on quite mythological and fantastical themes such as angles, what's the inspirations behind that?

Myles: So part of that comes from the story of William Blake's hallucinations of angels coming down on Peckham Rye, and that is another one of those things that show how Megabear was very tied to London. Another thing that comes up a lot is the Heaven's Gate cult. The idea of communal communication between heaven and earth. Also, the place that angles, fairies, and aliens hold within cultural consciousness is something that resonates and evokes those ideas of communication with another world.

Is there anything you’d want people to take away from your stories and the grief you process via the metaphors you’ve just talked about?

Myles: I don't like to be too prescriptive, about what to take from it. I like to think that if I personally put enough into the words and they have a meaning to me, they can then be flexibly applied by a listener. When you write a song, you're going to be putting things in there that you're not aware of. Quite often I'll be playing one of our songs and a part will relate to something that's going on in my life now that I had no idea about at the time. So the idea that I should say to anyone else, this song is about this, really only cuts away from what it could mean to another person. But also referring to these mythologies and stories, I find it fun sometimes when I come across a new idea and then it puts into context a reference from a song that I heard years ago, and I'm like, oh, that's what they were talking about. It extended the life of a song to have more that can be read and revealed from within it.

I remember when you released the single 'Eutherians (Ultramarine)' you were talking about Disney's version of Tarzan and Phil Collins' soundtrack being a big influence on your writing of the song, were there any other slightly more leftfield influences like that on the record?

Myles: Tarzan was a big one, we do a thing quite often where we will watch an animated film from our childhood after practice to help us zone out. Tarzan ended up being quite a grim one in a way.

Phoebe: Oh god that was traumatic as a child it's a hardcore movie.

Myles: So that was just one of those times where we watched the film, and then obviously there's a lot to the music there. And afterwards, the riff came out.

Did you intend to make a song in that kind of Phil Collins-esque vein?

Myles: I think it just sort of happened.

Phoebe: My drums definitely became influenced by his style.

Myles: Once I think once we had the awareness of the influence the song reflected that.

Phoebe: We leaned into that for certain.

Rich: You should hear the song that we wrote after watching Flubber.

Myles: Haha oh yes the 'Flubber Tango'!

Phoebe: We've got to watch what we watch. We are very heavily influenced by the media.

Has the songwriting process become more collaborative for the band over time after starting as Myles’ solo project?

Myles: We made it a lot more collaborative, certainly on this record.

Rich: Myles recorded some acoustic demos, and then we would send demos back and forth. I'd tear his version apart, then he’d tear my version apart and then we finally get in a room and ...

Myles: … I'd change it back to how it was.

Phoebe: Depending on my mood and what I'd been listening to the drums would be completely different.

Rich: It was the first time we figured it out in a rehearsal room, we used to just go into the studio not knowing how to play the song and just record the song and get it done. So there was not that much room for experimentation. But for this one, we took the time to really workshop it before.

Myles: With a couple of the EPs we didn't get a chance to workshop, because they were written in lockdown. We just had to do demos, and then go in and record it without having a chance to rehearse together before. So it was nice to be able to write together.

**Rich, you produced Giant Elk and a lot of the previous ME REX releases. How long have you been doing that?**

Rich: I think 2017 is when I started producing. It's fun to do it with ME REX as I've got a little bit more of a say.

Not to be like what's next what's next because you are allowed to just do a thing and rest but any plans for next year?

Myles: We're doing three hometown dates with Foxing (London, Southampton, and Brighton) which we're looking forward to. And then we're gonna do a lot of planning for what the next thing is. It is something ambitious that might take all of next year, that's all I'll say about it.

So last one, if you could listen to any song in the whole world anytime again for the very first time what would it be?

Myles: 'Rock DJ' (Robbie Williams).

Rich: That's a good one, I'll have to think about mine.

Phoebe: 'Teenage Dirtbag' (Wheatus).

Rich: Maybe 'Heaven Is A Halfpipe (If I Die)' (OPM).

Myles: Oh, yes.

Phoebe: Why Robbie, Miles?

Myles: That intro and the verse are so perfectly structured. It takes you on a journey. Where you just sit back and feel it, it's not one of those songs where you have to listen to it a couple of times to get it. You get it on the first listen and it is a huge banger.

Phoebe didn't you support ...

Rich: … Robbie Williams

Phoebe: I wish I supported Robbie Williams. No, though I did support Wheatus in my other project Cheerbleederz. 'Teenage Dirtbag' was honestly quite a big part of my childhood and as soon as I turned 13 My dad would call me a teenage dirtbag, very funny dad.

Randomly one day, they just tweeted about us saying something like “this slaps” and we asked ourselves if this was a fake account or if this was the real Wheatus. It turned out to be the real band that was so cool, and they offered us to go on tour with them. We couldn't do the whole tour but we did a date and it was magical.

Rich: Magical?

Phoebe: Yeah it was, well it's a cool memory anyway.

Did you hear that the masters for 'Teenage Dirtbag' were lost I think in a fire so they had to re-record the song?

Phoebe: Yeah, they got the 2020 version.

Phoebe: Also there was a fire at Aardman back in the day and that destroyed all the Wallaces and Gromits, the chickens from Chicken Run and everything. Chicken Run is another film we love to watch.

Myles: They are making a sequel to Chicken Run.

Rich: Hell yeah!

Myles: With the same chickens.

Phoebe: Is it called Chicken Sprint?

Phoebe: Sorry back to Wheatus and 'Teenage Dirtbag', can you tell I have ADHD? I picked it as the last song at my and Rich's wedding.

Rich: Why 'Heaven Is A Halfpipe (If I Die)'? well ... "When most people think of Heaven, they see those pearly gates, but I looked a little closer and there’s a sign that says do not skate…" I can't remember the next line.

Myles: "And while the world is warring, we just sit back and laugh at you, singing…"

Rich and Myles: “If I die before I wake, At least in Heaven I can skate, 'cause right now on earth I can’t do jack, Without the man up on my back … h-h-heaven is a halfpipe!”