Doves: ‘If you get to the age of 50 and you’ve not had a proper job, you’re winning’

The ‘Three Manc Amigos’ are back with their fifth album following a 10-year break and are keen to put the world to rights. They talk to Mark Beaumont about a divided Britain and their survival as a band since the Nineties

‘The country’s run by buffoons isn’t it, and we’re seriously divided’ (Rob Allen/Perspective)

I’m not into conspiracy theories,” says Doves guitarist Jez Williams as a swarm of screen glitches suggest that, somewhere in its back-routes, the internet might have just suddenly grown ears. “But I don’t think the economy should’ve been totally locked down. The death rate is 0.04 per cent so to close the whole world’s economy down is f***ing nuts … There’s over 45 million people jobless now [in the US], going into poverty, it’s f***ed. They issue debt so they can own everything. It’s part of the culling of businesses.”

If you’ve missed the rambling warmth of long hostelry nights, try an hour on Zoom with Doves. Jez’s two bandmates – his drumming twin brother Andy and gruff, gregarious singer Jimi Goodwin – lean forward clutching imaginary pints, tossing in questions or barking incredulous interjections. 2020’s returning alt-rock godheads, back from a 10-year hiatus with their fifth album The Universal Want, are the only band capable of making an online meeting app feel like the virtual pub lock-in we were promised, and instantly set about putting an upturned world to rights.

A post-pandemic cashless society. The folly of America, according to some conspiracists, unleashing a virus on China that it was so ill-prepared for back home. The Covid hotspot in nearby Hale (“lock the f***ers in!”). They line up and knock back topics like cheeky chasers, often surreptitiously trying to sneak in lyric quotes as an affectionate in-joke. Before long they’re reminiscing fondly over their initial early Nineties incarnation as dance act Sub Sub, famed for 1993’s “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)”, the Top 3 success of which funded their five-year transition period into indie rock to the tune of £75 a week. They recall “seriously hedonistic” Scottish tours (Andy: “That was our peak, just going for it”), the 18 months of “pure freedom” at the Hacienda in 1988-89 before gang violence and drug wars turned the Manchester club scene “very ugly”, and the inferno which burnt down their studio in Ancoats in 1996, prompting their slow shift guitar-ward.

“The last tune we did before the fire was with Tricky, on a track called ‘Smoking Beagles’. We always thought he must’ve left a joint on the back of the couch and set the whole studio on fire,” Jez jokes, and chases his train of thought into Manchester gentrification. “You couldn’t leave your car outside or it’d get torched. Now it’s one of the top five places to live in the UK, according to The Guardian.”

“My girlfriend’s car got torched by the local pyromaniac twice,” says Goodwin, “but it was an electrical fire that in essence burnt the studio down,” Jez butts in. “Tricky’s joint!” Goodwin guffaws. “The amount of weed I was smoking with him, blazing up like a f***in’ good ’un…”

‘Everyone had issues going on’ (Jon Shard)

To hear them blather and cajole like the Three Manc Amigos, you’re amazed that Doves might ever have wanted a decade’s break from each other. It wasn’t as though their career needed a reboot either. While the arrival of The Strokes in 2001 annihilated many of indie rock’s Britpop dinosaurs, Doves toured America with the East Village upstarts and coasted above the ensuing guitar-pop maelstrom throughout the 2000s, hitting No 1 with 2002’s The Last Broadcast and 2005’s Some Cities, and elevating turn-of-the-century guitar music with mesmeric classics like “The Cedar Room”, “There Goes the Fear” and “Pounding”. By the end of the decade, alongside Elbow, they’d carved a place as sophisticated elder statesmen holding court in the atmospheric leftfield. “You try to have a self-conscious ‘where do we fit in all of this?’ [moment] and look at all the fashion,” says Jez, “but it’s a waste of time doing that because we never fitted in.”

2009’s Kingdom Of Rust saw no corrosion in their fortunes, making No 2 in the charts. Yet at the last show of its tour at the Manchester Warehouse Project in October 2010, Doves broke up onstage, to the surprise of most of the band. “Jez went ‘this is our last gig! Thanks everyone!’” Goodwin laughs. “It was our last gig in the campaign. Me and Andy just grinned at each other and went ‘what the f*** is he on about? He’s trying to split us up, is he?’”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jez argues. “There was no phone call on the Monday, was there? Going ‘are we going in then?’”

“It was an unsaid thing,” Goodwin adds. “I think we all knew there was gonna be a break in it.”

Doves cite creative and business stresses, family issues (“life gives you a big whack now and then, dunnit,” Goodwin says) and the wearying album-tour treadmill as root causes of the strained four-year birth of Kingdom Of Rust, which necessitated the hiatus. “We didn’t argue enough,” says Goodwin. Their underlying issues “came out in bickering, if it came out. It never came out full-blown clearing the air.”

“Everyone had issues going on,” adds Andy, while Jez claims that “the process was way too long and painful. There was a very difficult writer’s block, we just went through it all at that point.”

Including, according to Goodwin, a certain amount of addiction. “Drinking’s been an issue from time to time,” he says. “I did a lot of drinking on tour, let’s put it that way. There’ve been times where we’ve rolled the boat out, that’s for sure, just to get through it. Nervousness, little bit of imposter syndrome now and again.”

On stage in 2019 (Getty)

“We’ve been a band since we were 18 or 19,” Jez adds. “Every day on the tour bus for two years [at a time]. There was a bit where we didn’t stop touring. We worked out we spent three-quarters of a year once in America. So when you have that every day and you’ve got the rider every day and there’s nobody there to tell you… it just got out of hand. It’s not a healthy lifestyle, being on tour. I think it’ll be different now but certainly in our thirties, it was really unhealthy. Wouldn’t swap it for the world, but no self-control.”

Doves are keen to stress how grateful they are for the touring life they’ve been granted but their separate projects during the break reminded them of how easy they had it then. Goodwin released a plush solo album, Odludek, featuring Elbow’s Guy Garvey, in 2014, while Jez and Andy formed Black Rivers. In some ways, it was back to square one. “We were all back in a transit van packing gear after the gigs, like early on,” says Jez. “We did a year of that and thought ‘f*** that’. You have to be your own roadie, 2am load-in, you get back home at half four in the morning because you can’t afford hotels. Meanwhile you’re over 40, so it didn’t work. I loved it, don’t get me wrong. But [how long] can you keep going? About a year?”

“Putting out my own record, these days you have to give them everything, that’s what I learnt,” says Goodwin. “Sleeve, free videos, all paid for by yours truly. I was in charge of every decision, it was back to nuts and bolts album-making and I’ve got no one else to blame. Out of your comfort zone. It’s f***ing hard out there, man.” It’s what new artists coming through have to do these days, and Doves got a shock. “It’s really tough for new bands,” says Andy. “The odds are so stacked against you. We were lucky, we caught the tail end of an industry.”

The band’s reunion was a clandestine affair. With their parent label EMI’s having changed ownership several times since 2011, “we didn’t even know who we were signed to”, so they told no one of their secret sessions at a variety of locations in the Peak District, the Cotswolds and Manchester, beginning in 2017. With no pressure to write singles or please anyone other than themselves, they concocted a comeback that pays dues to their entire career, from acid house touches to anthemic choruses worthy of their 2000 debut Lost Souls, while also absorbing modernist flavours: glitchtronica, psych, amorphous synthetic tones. Comeback single “Carousels”, inspired by childhood trips to the fairgrounds of North Wales, is a dizzying array of sonic light trails, psychedelic steel drums and broken rollercoaster clatter, all the better to evoke life’s waltzer whirl. “We felt this was us trying to push ourselves,” Andy says.

Elsewhere they transport summery folk music into the ghost dimension (“I Will Not Hide”), find something darkly sublime within “dancing in the moonlight” (“Broken Eyes”) and tracks like “For Tomorrow”, “Mother Silverlake” and the celestial reggae of “Cathedrals Of The Mind” glisten with what Jez calls “this strange Seventies filmic quality”. The Gallic pop “Prisoners”, ostensibly one of several rocky relationship songs, was even prescient enough to predict the pandemic: “In dusty halls/ To the hollow shopping malls … We’re just prisoners of these times”.

They decided to release their latest track “Forest House” only as sheet music, obliging fans to play it if they want to hear it and prompting a flurry of versions in wildly differing styles. Was that an attempt to bypass the casual consumer and force people to engage? “I’d be a liar if I said that the idea came from the band,” Goodwin chuckles. “I’ve heard a couple that are alright. One of them sounds a bit like Teletext. I’ve not heard the panpipe one. [Jazz voice] Pan Pipe Moods with Doves.”

“Yeah, we knew it was coming, man!” Jez laughs. “It seems very relevant, but there is a line in it that says ‘but it won’t be for long’.”

The cover art for new album ‘The Universal Want’ (Maria Lax)

More foreboding, arguably, is the title track, a stirring condemnation of consumerism, greed and stalking horse capitalism. “You’re encouraged to consume,” says Goodwin; “You think you want something,” Jez adds, “it’s like you’ve been programmed. There’s a certain amount of consumer programming going on, like ‘I’ve got to have that’. But do you actually f***ing need it? Isn’t there a direct correlation between that and plastic pollution in the seas? It’s gonna end up in an ocean somewhere. It’s pretty f***ed. Something big has to change.”

And with that they’re off, back in the virtual snug, reeling righteously around the woes of the world, your salt-of-the-earth rock royalty. They’re terrified of Trump (Goodwin: “He needs to be stopped. I don’t know much about Biden, he’s not as bad as Trump though.” Jez: “You’re living in a fantasy world. A different colour of tie, that’s the only difference”). They despair of Bezos (Goodwin: “Didn’t he fart the other week and earn 4 billion?”). They’re sceptical of the Corbyn antisemitism accusations (Andy: “I thought he had a lot of integrity… The right-wing media totally got rid of him, didn’t they?”).

Talk turns to Brexit and the rise of British isolationism. “The country’s run by buffoons isn’t it, and we’re seriously divided,” Andy argues. “‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was No 1 on Spotify last week,” Goodwin snarls. “I despair at the f***ing jingoistic… it’s a sickness. Disease. Look at photos of Farage sat on the white cliffs of Dover looking for f***ing migrant boats. It’s f***ing abhorrent.”

Will the pandemic bring our scrabbling civilisation crashing down? Voraciously, Jez returns to his theme. “Small to medium businesses are gonna be gone, it’s just gonna be big corporations that are already getting bailed out. What I don’t get is, Covid seems to be an excuse for just closing people down, closing businesses down. I think it’s bang out of order. Given the facts of the death rates, it doesn’t correlate. It does not correlate. Half the businesses, gone. I just think it’s outrageous. Given the scientific facts, it’s totally disproportionate.”

“Us three are definitely the lucky ones,” Andy adds. “A lot of our friends are really struggling. We’re aged 50 and making a living in music. If you get to the age of 50 and you’ve not had a proper job, you’re winning.”

And Doves will drink, moderately, to that.

The Universal Want is out today via EMI/Virgin