making it happen

Tom Thorogood: Especially because we were moving on to bigger and better-known venues, it became our objective to up ourselves with every concert. For me, that meant letting myself go a little, being less of a 'trained musician' and more of a 'drummer in a band'. For Lane, that meant improving her technique, making sure she was always really locked into the rhythm. For Alan, that meant coming up with even more witty things to say and of course getting his harmonies right. And Emma...well you know Emma. For Emma, upping herself just meant being more outrageous. It meant wearing bigger and brighter colored dresses. It meant releasing balloons from the stage, or pouring glitter on the audience, or once bringing her little dog on to run around the stage and bark at people. We weren't allowed to throw paint anymore, because Emily pointed out that some of the people here spent more money on their outfits than we'd made from all our concerts total.

Emily Alexander: The thing was, though, that even as the band was purposely being more and more extravagant, they were also becoming more professional. We were working on putting together an image. The band members all started planning what they would wear. We came up with this idea where Lane, Alan, and Tom dressed in a lot of white and beige and brown and black, where Lane had this very earthy, natural style, and Alan would wear sort of poetic, 'artsy' things—hipster things, to be completely honest with you—and Tom would be very clean cut, a little military. They would all have little glam touches though, bits of eyeshadow or a scarf or something. And Emma would wear mostly pink dresses, and lots of glitter, because it made her stand out, it made her the one that you wanted to look at onstage, which really worked out because she was the only one who wanted to be watched all the time.

There were also a lot of decisions about music, of course. We picked out the best songs and made sure to evenly disperse them throughout the set, and we decided when it was appropriate to throw in covers. Unfortunately it meant the band had to stop letting the audience shout out requests except for every once in a blue moon, but we started to be much more organized and as it happens, people started to notice.

Spencer Harris (executive, Fury Records): I will tell you why we won the bid for Knave of Hearts originally. The reason why is because I was madly in love with that band. Not in the sense that I wanted to fuck 'em, I mean in the sense that they were just constantly blowing my mind. I framed their manifesto and put it over my desk. When I met them I was able to quote their lines. And I did say I didn't want to fuck them, but I didn't mind when they sat in my lap and picked bits of fluff off my jacket—they didn't do that the day I met them, but they did in the future, of course. It was because I was a fan. We signed a contract for a full-length and at least three singles, and Emily Alexander baked a chocolate cake.

Emily Alexander: It was really sweet, the little party Spencer threw in his office after signing Knave. Pete's wife Marianna, lovely woman that she is, baked a black forest cake and told me to bring it in, and Spencer cracked open some ice cream, and of course a small amount of cheap red was consumed.

Emma Marx-Hall: We negotiated some concert dates and then we were shuffled into a studio to lay down some recordings. It was so different from the way we'd done it at the studio at Goldsmiths where the main objective was just to get it done as fast as possible. Now we were concentrating really hard on having a solid musical base, whereas before it was about the message so to speak. We did a million takes of everything, and we got to play around with effects. It was lovely! I was having the time of my life.

Alan Léonin: Making the first record with Fury was awful. I had never been under so much pressure, or had so little ability to actually do anything. I don't even play the guitar on that record, Tom does. I was so shit at it. I sing backing vocals on three songs. Three, out of ten. That's all. The rest of the time I would just watch, and give my opinion on whether I felt the song sounded nice as recorded, even though in all honesty I had so little control over it that it didn't really matter what I said. But still the pressure was on me because somehow, even though Emma was the one who was given all the lovely sparkles and dresses, Spencer felt that I was 'the soul' of the band.

I'm not saying I don't like Spencer Harris. I do like Spencer, I just think he wasn't quite clear on who we were, even though he knew well what we were. And what we were—that is to say, our message, our urging that people think more critically about their society and their social interactions—well, Spencer was very excited about that, and for that reason things did end up sounding and looking the way I wanted them to. But what Spencer was wrong about is that it's not that way because I wanted it to be that way, it's that way because we have always worked as a team.

Tom Thorogood: I mean, what Spencer did become to us was a friend and collaborator. He gave us the chance not only to work in a real studio, but also to intermingle with some of the other denizens of the music industry. There were a lot of great bands, a lot of punk and hard rock bands and actually one sort of almost twee pop group that we loved because they played a harp, a proper big one, and we got to hear from them and their approach to recording and performing music.

I have a lot of photos from that time when, even though we'd be at each others throats all day in the studio, we'd go out for pizza in the evening and Spencer would have spoken to everyone and mediated conflicts between us about recording and marketing, and so in these photos we'd just all be laughing and hugging and making ridiculous faces.

Lane Kennedy: I think it looks from an outsider's perspective that it was all fun at that time, when we were recording the Knave of Hearts album in London with Fury and Spencer Harris. It was not all fun, but it was the excitement of discovery. And that made it all right when we had fights in the studio.

Emma Marx-Hall: All right, yes, we did fight sometimes. It started because—okay, it didn't start because of any one of us. Tom would argue with Spencer and with Egon, the studio engineer, because he'd had all this musical training and now Spencer and Egon were at odds over shit that I don't even understand like levels in the master track and compression and track echo. And then Lane would get very tightly wound about the recording schedule and her own schedule of coursework, so she would try to pry them apart but it sounded to Egon like she was just trying to get us out of the studio, which made him upset because our studio time was what was buying his food and clothing of course. And Alan was complaining to Spencer behind people's backs, which I suppose worked out because Spencer was always a good mediator, but it still bothered us, especially me and Tom, that Alan wasn't just making his criticisms to our faces.

Mostly I stayed out of it. I wanted it to be a fun experience for me. I wanted to capture Emily's idea of being a band that had fun making music. But there was one time when things got so awful that I just shouted at everyone for about ten straight minutes, and then burst into tears.

But you see, that's part of the process. It doesn't mean that there were 'internal conflicts threatening to tear apart the foundations of the band as early as the first album's recording session'. That's from an article in the NME, by the way. This damn journalist kept coming to our recording sessions so she could do a writeup for us, and then she got hired by the NME and wrote some guns-blazing piece about THE FALL OF KNAVE OF HEARTS, all caps. Awful, nasty business.

Antonia Sharpe (journalist): Occasionally I was allowed to sit in on the recording sessions, so that I could do a writeup on Knave of Hearts for the publication I was working for at the time, and I found it amazingly prophetic. I had to include it when I was asked to write about them for the NME later. It seemed to me that everything that had been brewing at the time of the Knave of Hearts album sessions came to a head much later.

Emma Marx-Hall: Don't listen to journalists.

ºAlan Léonin (recorded in interview, June 2008): But don't listen to us.

Spencer Harris: The band's first single was called "Madam Molly" and it was released in September of 2007. Bit of a working class rant, which we at the label thought was a bit of a laugh coming from a not particularly working class band, but there you are. It was accompanied by a music video, which got picked up by a few local television stations around Great Britain, one of which did an interview with the band where they discussed their beliefs and aims. Cleverly we made sure that it mirrored the video, which had the band running about in the streets of East London spray painting quotes on walls. Of course we had them do it with chalk—there's this technique where you mix up chalk and water, just sidewalk chalk, children's stuff, and spray it in stencils so you can tag something and not break the law. Of course we also got a permit and consulted with the police on whether we could film that day and where we could be allowed to tag walls and whether we would have to scrub it off afterward. They said they weren't sure but we cleaned up anyway. How very punk rock of us.

Eileen Richardson (postgraduate student): My introduction to Knave was seeing the Madam Molly video—the original one, for Fury, not the live video. I saw it on Indie Sunday. I thought, oh bloody hell, another video with bloody quotations! But you had to love them, you know. They were adorable.

It's a gorgeous video if you haven't seen it, in a really sweet way. They somehow managed to find a beautiful day to film, which I think is so funny because if they were trying to capture something about London, they utterly failed.

Lane Kennedy: The sun was in the sky, and though the day started off chilly, it got much warmer, so the video takes this wonderful journey from us starting off the day in our coats—and of course Emma's got this big Manic Street Preachers white leopard coat, and she's wearing a tiara, it's wonderful, it's almost magical—and then at the end we're all exhausted and it's warm and we've stripped off layers of clothing. The end of the video has us standing in a roundabout for a long time, and the camera moves around us as we look very pleased with ourselves. I think the day contributed something to the video that made it...more than what it was, originally. Enhanced it. Gave it—you know, that je ne sais quoi.

But don't ask me. (giggle) I only directed it.

Alan Léonin (in background): And here we see that there is actually one topic that gets Lane talking! HA ha. (laugh)

Emily Alexander: And then we were like, oh my God, we have a single out. Everyone who's seen that little interview snippet has no idea that it took like ten takes because the band kept hugging each other and laughing. We were deliriously happy. Actually, there's still a shot in there at the end where it zooms in on the Union Jack on the wall, and then it zooms out and whoooooorrrrr there's Emma and Tom with their arms around each other giving the camera perfect kid-like grins.

ºEmma Marx-Hall (from personal collection, recorded September 2007): Rule, Britannia, our single rules the waves...Britons never, never, never shall be slaves! (laugh)