Frightened Rabbit

When we speak to Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison days before his bands second record hits the shelves, he’s got the pre-release jitters. You imagine even the most cocksure of frontmen suffer from such opening week nerves. Even Ian Brown must have spent more time than usual on the shitter leading up the Roses masterpiece almost 20 years ago. Similarly though, you can tell Scott with near absolute certainty that he’s nothing to worry about for The Midnight Organ Fight is a quite special record.

More Ian McCullough than Ian Brown (intense on record/ humorous off it), the Frightened Rabbit frontman is the heart and soul of the band’s follow up to 2007’s fully released Sings The Greys. As fantastic as the accompaniment that includes Scott’s brother Grant on thundering drums is, it’s the elder Hutchison’s honest, thoughtful appraisal of relationship breakdown and pained yet hopeful delivery that drives the record. Passionate is certainly one word that comes to mind.

“That’s great to hear, I’d agree with that,” Scott tells us over the phone from the increasingly unreliable FR touring van. "Lyrically and musically, the passion was born out of a pretty emotional phase in life so I guess that definitely applies.

“It’s honest and I hope that’s another word people could apply to the record. There’s nothing really held back, except for peoples names and stuff like that. It’s blunt and the body thing really comes through and there are lots of visceral images in there. Disease and weird things like that which I think helps people associate with it.”

When we meet a couple of days later, Scott’s relieved we didn’t delve too deep into that “pretty emotional phase” in his life. He says interviewers have been quite forthright in wanting the details. But all you could ever want is there on record. Who needs names and dates when you’ve enough potent lines to kill a dozen coke addicts? With such purposeful sentiment and rich, varying imagery, he doesn’t appear to be one to ever waste a lyric.

“No I don’t like to waste words,” he agrees, “I like to get multiple layers of imagery even within one line and I always hate too much repetition and I try to change choruses a little bit every time so that the story moves forward.”

“It’s really all about trying to look back at something and not necessarily get any residual emotion out but trying at least to make sense of it and to be structuring it such a way that I can make a story out it and it can almost become a film you can watch. Then I can start to understand it when before I couldn’t.”

Taking that time to look back is perhaps what stops The Midnight Organ Fight from feeling like a depressing album. Sure it’s dark, but it’s equally contemplative and considered. And if Scott will excuse the stereotyping, it makes a change from the belief that all Scottish musicians are miserable bastards. Have Arab Strap tarred them all a little too much?

“We’re always asked what makes Scottish bands miserable,” he chuckles. “And there’s the obvious answer of the weather but I’m not miserable or I’m not miserable most of the time. OK I was definitely miserable at that time but I don’t welcome it or find it comforting so yeah, I think Arab Strap have given us a bad name!”

And while Middleton and Moffat were quite brilliant at playing out the darker, wretched aspects of romance (see Pyjamas), Frightened Rabbit give hope. It's closer ‘Floating On The Forth’ that best exemplifies this “not the end of the world” approach.

“Again that’s the thing about writing afterwards so towards the end of each song I try to put a hopeful spin on things. Melodically it’s not a terribly dark album and I don’t think it’s a depressing album. Yeah it’s a pretty hard thing to go through but it’s not that serious, it’s not life threatening. I’m not dead and that’s hopefully the conclusion you can come to at the end of the record.”

As a whole, the album is bigger and bolder than it’s predecessor. This is almost exclusively down to circumstance as Sings The Greys was initially home recorded over a number of university years but the presence of Interpol/ The National producer Peter Katis can’t be ignored. What drew him to the project?

“He just liked something about it and I think he felt like he’d been working on a certain kind of band for a while; he was becoming associated with dark material like The National and Interpol. I don’t know if it was a decision from him to do something musically and melodically different that wasn’t this kind of Joy Division-esque experience…. There’s certainly a little bit of magic he can sprinkle on things though.”

Finishing up we again assure Scott that nerves are wasted on such a staggering record and subsequent glowing reviews both sides of the Atlantic prove this to be the case. The Midnight Organ Fight is indeed a special record and without possibly meaning to, Scott let slip that he too feels the same way.

“Once I got going, I was definitely on a roll,” he said of the 3-4 week writing period. “I don’t write every day, I just go for it when I feel like there’s stuff coming out. There’s songs on that, and it sounds kind of cheesy to say, but you don’t really know where they’ve come from in the first place. When I listen back to them I’m still not sure how they came about and on some of them I’m actually impressed as to how I did them. I’m looking forward to it happening again though it’s not happened yet.”

As are we…