“We’ll just prepare our recording devices,” one guy said as we all put our phones on recording mode and placed them down on the coffee table before the band.
“It’s quite a collection,” Lauren said, gesturing to all the smartphones lying in front of them. “I know!” says Martin. And then Iain cuts in: “the money you can make on Ebay for all these,” sending everyone into laughter.
This is how the press conference for Chvrches Live in Manila kicked off last night, November 25, at Seda Hotel in Bonifacio Global City. The Scottish trio arrived, first Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, and then Lauren Mayberry looking very pretty, as expected, in her elephant-printed jumpsuit. We all sat in an intimate circle—the band, and us members of the media—as they answered our questions with such interest.
Below are some of the band’s most interesting responses during the conference, in which fans of Chvrches will perhaps find reasons to love them even more than they already do.
Chvrches Live in Manila Presscon
On social media and its role in their rise to fame:
“The social networks are important to us as a tool for communication,” Lauren says. But she also points out that they don’t allow social networks and public opinion to have an effect on what they write. She adds, “once you open yourself to that many opinions, you’ll never gonna be able to create something that has any kind of effect.”
On the pressures of writing a second album:
“None at all,” Iain says. “What people will write and what they are saying about the band often touch high regard in the first place, but sure, it’s important that the critics write what they think about your record to an extent, but we don’t take them on board because it changes the course of your creativity one way or another if you’re influenced by or take what people say to heart.”
And then Lauren adds, “When we are writing we’re not really thinking about what the critical response is gonna be because you can’t really know. We are just focusing on writing things that we are happy with.”
On writing love songs:
For the past months, a statement made by Lauren at Lollapalooza kept circulating the internet. She said “We don’t have any love songs, ‘cause you can only write about what you know.” I asked her about this during the Chvrches Live in Manila press conference, and this is what she had to say:
“In my mind a love song can be a lot broader than specifically a song about how much you love a person, and I guess I kinda feel like a pre-encumbered romantic and non-romantic relationship could talk about the good aspect, the bad aspect. And yeah, I think it should be a lot broader than that. So in that concept, we do write love songs, but I’ve never been able to sit back and write the ‘oh my god baby so amazing’ kind of song. I don’t know if I have it in me. But, we’ll see.”
On working on “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1” soundtrack with Lorde:
Chvrches is part of the soundtrack for Mockingjay, one of the biggest movies of this year, which Grammy-award winning artist Lorde curated.
Iain shares: “Ella (Lorde) asked us to do it, and I told her that we got plenty of time; we could totally do it. But we had like 2-3 days together in the same country where we basically had to try our best, and if it didn’t work, then it didn’t work. The writing process, it was like, write the song day one, record the vocals day two, polish it day 3. And we were really happy about it.”
Lauren, on the other hand, gushed about working with Lorde. “It was nice, in a way. Ella, she gave us a general outline of what she wanted. And she was very hands on with how she would do it, but she wasn’t pushy. It was a good partnership. What more do you want?”
Catch Chvrches Live in Manila tonight, November 26, on their first ever Philippine show at Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premier. Special thanks to Laneway and Vybe Productions.
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