Artist Spotlight: Meet Giant Killers
How does 'Songs for the Small Places' reflect your musical journey and growth as a band?
Michael Brown (bass, keys, brass, vocals): We should acknowledge that this album was originally crafted in the mid-’90s. This collection is finally seeing the light of day after an epic journey of nearly 3 decades, part of which was a struggle to get the rights back to our material.
Jamie Wortley (guitar, keys, lead vocals): Which means this album is actually the backdrop to our growth as people, and not just as a band, or as musicians. It’s lived with us for a long time.
M: I think our story is unique - we spent the entirety of our late teens and throughout our twenties in the back of a van, on the road, in studios and on stages – we started our own label, then went on to have not just one but two major record and publishing deals in that period.
J: Ultimately, though, we got dumped out of the business for not selling enough music. This was in an era with an unrecognisably different business model to that which exists today – back then, the expectation for any artist on a major label was to sell 100s of 000s of physical products in their first releases.
M: This whipping away of the carpet beneath our dreams triggered a period of re-evaluation, and inevitably disillusion. We changed our dreams, had lives outside of those narrow ambitions of success in pop music. In one sense we forgot about those old songs. It was after a friend asked us to reunite Giant Killers for a birthday gig in Leeds that we were reminded of the power of our songs when we played them live again. That was when we thought, hmmm… maybe it’s time to do something about this.
J: Which brings us to where we are now. And we’re very excited to see how the work will be received. But as we say in one of the tracks on the album, we’re older and wiser now, so we’re managing our expectations.
Can you talk about any specific themes or motifs that run throughout the album?
M: ‘Songs for the Small Places’ is a celebration of how the places you come from shape your outlook – who you are, your opinions and personality – for good and for bad.
J: It’s also about loving who you are and where you’re from, but also to not be held back or be confined by those things. It’s about growing up and out, as people.
M: Which is a journey that’s universal to everyone - our message is hopefully, just as relevant whatever you do or wherever you’re from, whether that’s Grimsby, our original home-town – or Sheffield, Glasgow, New York, Rio, or Beijing. ‘Songs for the Small Places’ contains a lot about the passage to adulthood and really importantly for both of us, how failure is more likely than success.
Can you talk about any standout tracks on the album and what makes them special to you?
M: I reckon it’s the same for both of us.
J: “When This Time is Over?”
M: Correct!
J: This song had a lot of firsts for us, it was the first one we wrote together to establish ourselves, in our minds, to give us confidence as a song-writing duo. With our first major label recording contract we were musicians and performers only – we didn’t write.
M: When we got dropped from that recording contract, it was a huge blow, but we weren’t going to hit the canvas without even throwing a few punches - we decided we should give it another go – but this time as writers – to have complete artistic control for the first time.
J: This song has extra levels of meaning too - we wrote it using a guitar that Butch Vig had played. He was a legend to us as he produced Nevermind. Maybe the spirit of “When This Time is Over” contains a little bit of Nirvana.
M: Actually, the guitar in question belonged to our mate Simon Gunning - an artist manager who looked after Butch Vig’s later incarnation as Garbage. He shared an office with our ex-manager, and he kept the guitar in a corner. We knocked around the place after office hours and used that guitar to write a few of the tunes on ‘Songs for the Small Places.’ Because we’d seen Butch playing it a couple of times while visiting Simon on business, we definitely hoped a little of his magic would rub off from his fingers and onto our artistic endeavours!
Can you share an instance where you felt a strong connection with the crowd during a show?
J: For me, it's got to be Blur on Cleethorpes Pier – we opened on their Country House tour – at least I think it was called that – it took in all the classic UK seaside towns and their piers.
This gig wasn’t so much about a crowd connection, as much as what it stood for. We knew we would get a great reception because it was a hometown gig and we were returning to the town as local heroes. Anyone familiar with the area will know that Cleethorpes and Grimsby are inseparable – they’re joined together to such an extent that you can’t see the join. What I remember most though is that Blur nicked our keyboard player after that gig - Diana Gutkind, a very talented pianist who went on to tour the world with Damen and Co.
M: Mines a little sadder. The last show we did as Giant Killers was at a festival on Plymouth Hoe. We were on with the Real People – another band who should have gone on to greatness. It was a combination of the balmy mid-summer evening, it was still light when we played, the stage looked out over the English Channel - it seemed to imbue the crowd in front with this deep blue tinge. Mid-set, I just got an instinct it would be our last gig, I can’t explain it, it may have been the blueness, but it just came over me. I was overcome with a sense of melancholy while looking at a sea of faces who were loving us. To me it felt like they knew it was our last gig too – that it would be their last chance to see us, so they were going to enjoy it. In that moment I understood that phrase, bitter-sweet. And so it transpired – we got dropped by our label soon after.
What inspired you to pursue a career in music?
M: That’s easy, we were working-class dream chasers with no academic qualifications and only a brief career in glass to fall back on…
J: That’s right, Mike worked in a Grimsby double glazing factory while I cleaned the town’s windows. In one sense we were destined to be together. We didn’t have that much else going for us…
M: That, and the fact our formative years were in the Thatcher era, in a town which keenly felt the decimation of its key industries by those policies. Music seemed to suggest a potential road to glory – it was the only thing we were good at.
