URB: How does the energy change to win over this crowd that may just be hearing of you?  Do you give it your all, or is that the mentality for every live performance?
FF: I think the only time I haven’t given it my all was maybe when we traveled the world and we had done an Australian tour and then came back to the UK, and we had absolutely no sleep and I went onstage. And I tried to get into it, but it just came to the point where if I do keep on doing this, I will actually expire, and won’t be able to carry on writing music.
FF: I think some things you can’t force. After about four songs today, I thought, “Bloody hell, you should stop giving it your all or you will die.”

URB: For those people that don’t know, how did you guys start and how have things changed between now and then?
FF: I think when we first started the band at 13 and 14, we were purely writing music as sort of a therapeutic type of process, in the sense that we were totally bored of things and wrote music to pass our time.
FF: Yeah, and also playing other people’s songs. But the thrill of playing other people’s songs was amazing. It meant a lot.
FF: Making loud noises, in general, means a lot when you are 15.
FF: Hey this guitar is actually louder than when I shout at peak volume. Let’s stick with this. [laughs]
FF: I feel like the older I got, the less blown away by music that I was. There’s an initial feeling–

URB: Yeah, sort of like juvenile optimism. But anything in excess can cause you to become bored with it.
FF: I think because we listened to a lot of music when we were growing up kind of spurred us to try to write music that was our vision of how pop music should sound, which is pop music that’s interesting and draws for more music that isn’t pop at all, but that we’d try to compress into this classic pop tractor. It took me a while [to realize] that pop music–music like Michael Jackson–is the music that’s really close to my heart. Above all these abstract, random music, what I love is really catchy, hooky, choruses and the reaction it creates in people.

URB: There’s so much pop music that is “gettable” within your first listen. How do you guys approach your pop music so that you aren’t a one-hit wonder?
FF: Do you mean in the sense where you listen to a record once and you like it; whereas, to records where you have to listen to them over and over again to finally get them?

URB: That, and also–okay, let’s say instrumentation. A lot of pop music is “gettable” in the sense that you listen to the production once, and then you are done with it–you’ve heard it before and it’s disposable to you. So where’s the balance?
FF: We want our music to have initial thrill about it and be instantly “gettable.” I don’t think we have any songs that are like Maybe that one will grow on me.
FF: But we have all these little parts and twinkly sounds to it, and when you listen back, you can hear all the stuff going on. And that’s what, to me, makes interesting pop music.
FF: And there’s also finding the balance in between what is just pure sugar and what has depth to it.

FF: Yeah, you don’t want to be this enigma code that’s impossible to crack–it’s been years and years dedicated…“Maybe I listened to it 100 times and now I finally got it.”