Everything Everything return to Australia this month for their 5th time touring the country.  This tour sees them revisit Get To Heaven in full to celebrate its 10th anniversary, taking the album coast to coast with 5 dates in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

Image of bang Everything Everything against a blue background.

I sat down with lead singer Jonathan Higgs to find out a bit more about touring, what made this album special and an accidental detour into the world of AI.

I’m always curious about artists feelings about touring so far from home. Emigrating halfway around the world I think has made me more attuned to this, especially when it’s bands like Everything Everything who I’ve followed for such a long time. (I think the first time I saw them was at Academy 3 in Manchester in either 2009 or 2010. There were four bands on the bill, tickets were probably like £20, and I probably got drunk with one of the bands after the set in a nearby pub.)

When I now see those bands performing here in Australia, especially playing songs from their earliest releases, I always find myself taking pause at how much has changed. And I wondered if it felt the same as an artist.

“You have moments of clarity and you have moments of complete hypnotism, I suppose, is a way to describe it when you’re performing, particularly things you’ve performed for 15 years, like Photoshop”. Jon admits.

“It’s like the crowd is nearly always in darkness or in a red light or coloured light. It’s just a blur.” he continues before concluding its “almost like a dream like state”. 

It’s the first time the band have embarked on a tour such as this where they revisit a past work and play it in full. I asked how it felt to be touring something older vs presenting a work to the audience for the first time:

“I mean you’ve got to make sure you get it right, but this sound is 10 years old and people love it and they’ve come to hear it. So that’s kind of a big weight off your shoulders.”

“Every other tour we’ve ever done is to promote a new record. Quite often people haven’t heard it or they’ve heard it once or twice and you’re always thinking, they would just want to hear X, Y, Z. But this is like, we are playing Get to Heaven. No extras, no bullshit. You know these songs. You’ve come to hear them. It’s very freeing. You can just enjoy the show without those usual anxieties.”

I was keen to know more about the process of revisiting a whole album on a live tour. Many of the songs off the deluxe version of the album such as Yuppie Supper or Hapsburg Lippp are getting their first live airing on this tour.

I’m also of the age where quite a lot of bands I like are doing this sort of thing, touring a 10 or 15 year old album, and they seem to take one of two paths – they either play the album start to finish as it’s recorded or they build a set list from the songs. Everything Everything have chosen the latter. Jon clarifies why:

“The flow of an album doesn’t necessarily work as well as the flow of a set, and we play a lot of sets.  We’d have a pretty good idea of the shape for one, what we want the energy to do. With an album, you decide the order of an album before anyone’s heard it. So, we can’t recalibrate that after it’s done.” 

He half jokingly suggests as an example that people would go home after Distant Past if they played the album songs in order (track two on Get To Heaven). After I reassured him they wouldn’t he settled on “The energy would just be all over the place”.

Later we chatted about the desire to reshape a song from an old album when you’re revisiting this, possibly changing the arrangements or cleaning up bits you didn’t like anymore. Jon was quite adamant he wouldn’t do that, clear he’s no wiser than that guy 10 years ago and that he’s only interested in what the version of himself at that time wanted to create. In a way, I guess this rebuilding of the album into a set list is a more gentle way of refining a work. It allows you to honour the album and the person you were at that time, yet still mould the collection of songs into something new. To allow people to experience them in a different way. Anyway, I wish I’d asked about this…

As we get deeper into talking about Get To Heaven it’s interesting to hear Jon’s approach and his attitude to himself as a frontman underscore the conversation. I actually remember a fair bit about how Everything Everything started out and when they first started making the style of music they do it was pretty experimental and out there. It was described as “listening to a dream” with the lyrics being regarded as largely nonsensical and the music style not really fitting into either the indie or the electronic music boxes of the time. A lot of people didn’t get it, and a lot of bands who you could almost feel treading a somewhat similar path (MGMT, The XX, maybe even Metronomy) ultimately jumped in one direction or another as they solidified their sound. But Everything Everything  stuck with it. I always assumed that was bravado, but Jon strikes me as a deep thinker and while I still believe a lot of their success has to be credited to the courage of pursuing their vision when I suspect a lot of people were telling them to choose a lane, I now feel there was something more profound in what they believed could be communicated in this way, and certainly an intent that was a lot more outward facing than I might have once believed. Looking through this lens It’s easy to see why Get to Heaven stuck with the band more deeply than their other albums.  I described it as foreboding and fortunately Jon agreed because my biggest fear is an artist telling me I don’t get what they tried to create. 

I asked about how it felt to revisit the album after 10 years:

“I haven’t really left that headspace, and I don’t think the world has changed from roughly 2016. It’s just carried on in the same sort of descent, and this record felt like a warning. A sort of shock in the air like, everything’s about to go terribly wrong If you do X, Y, and Z, if things continue in the way they’re going. And they did and it did. 

So the record just feels more true than ever.” 

Jon’s very open about the fact that Get To Heaven is special to the band (almost more so than the fans). There was no impetus to do an anniversary tour of Man Alive or Arc but there was something about Get To Heaven’s prophetical nature, and the state of the world today, that made him feel as though this is an album people would want to hear, and their extensive run of European dates last year show this is the definitely the case.

We then end up on a tangent talking about AI. Jon reveals the band were one of the first to use AI on their 2022 release Raw Data Feel. (Something I either didn’t know or forgot I knew):

“I just wrote about 10 lines of lyrics. This was before anyone could do it. And this was one of the first times, then I scattered them amongst the album, amongst my real lyrics, and I was like, you don’t know the difference, do you? And it was, like, that was like, one of the selling points of the records that we used AI. We use AI for the front cover as well.

I’m pretty sure we’re the 1st band ever to do an AI generated cover. And at the time, we were like, Oh, yeah, it’s really, really good. And then, literally, within 6 months, it was everywhere, and everyone would do it, and it wasn’t special anymore.” While this vastly oversimplified the months long process, it’s an accurate picture of their end result, again a product of Higg’s curiosity and overthinking about this, at the time ‘new’ technology.

Asked how he feels about it now and how we manage this in the industry his response is (probably predictably) foreboding…

“I’m not afraid of it, because I’ve already made my name in this world, and people, I hope, will always want to know what I produce, for as long as they’re interested in me. But if I was starting out, and all of my competitors were AI, and they were literally billions of them at the push of a button. that I might look at a different career.”

I want to take this and spin it into a light and fluffy ending, but I won’t. I think the tone here fits with Get To Heaven and what this tour is all about. I don’t think it’s about trying to get people to stand up and listen like it possibly was on the album’s initial release, but it’s about sitting in that sense of unease together.  Whether it’s the notions of AI or the state of the world as predicted in Get To Heaven, these aren’t things people are unaware of anymore, and this tour is a chance to revisit some great tunes together in a community of people and recognise you’re not insane, the world is.

Tour information

The upcoming Australian tour marks the band’s fifth visit to Australia, and will see them play ‘Get To Heaven’ in full. The band will bring their dazzling live show to audiences across the country once again, beginning in Perth on Sunday 12th April at Magnet House before visiting The Gov in Adelaide on Tuesday 14th April, The Forum in Melbourne on Thursday 16th April, Princess Theatre in Brisbane on Friday 17th April and concluding at Metro Theatre in Sydney on Saturday 18th April.

Tickets available via Destroy All Lines here. 

Everything Everything Get To Heaven Australian Tour Poster