When I spoke to iLiKETRAiNS it was in advance of the launch of their debut album Elegies to Lessons Learnt at the end of September last year. They built up their reputation in parts, with a couple of excellent singles, their 2006 EP Progress Reform and an entirely deserved reputation for phenomenal live shows. Elegies, however, is their first full album.

Guy Bannister, who plays guitar for the band, described it thus: “It’s almost like exam results. You spend all this time working on something, night and day putting your body and soul into it and then there’s this massive gap where you finish, you hand it off and it goes to manufacture, and then it’s just waiting for reviews to come in and reaction from people. And people might hate it and that’s it, your career’s over, or people might love it and it might open more doors.”

There weren’t actually all that many reviews for Progress Reform, but those there were were very positive, and generally the word built very slowly until, as the new album approached, it turned out that an awful lot of people were looking forward to it a great deal. So despite the barely noticed growth in their popularity they had clearly built quite a substantial and quite a devoted following.

Once again, acclaim for the album was quiet but by and large consistently positive. Scottish webzine Is This Music? named the album in their top ten for the year. It is, as you would expect from these lads, a slow-building affair that seeps in incrementally over a number of listens. In fact, a fan in Aberdeen recently came up to them after a show and told them that he’d booked two days off work for when it was released, just to sit and listen and absorb it all.

One of the main reasons for this is that any iLiKETRAiNS work is not just music, it’s an entire intellectual project. The songs themselves are all inspired by historical events and they actually included a book of essays in the pre-order CD explaining the background to each track. The videos, the video backdrops for their gigs and all the sleeve artwork all tie together to deliver something that is much more than just music.

This can make it hard to actually compare their work to other bands. You can compare the music itself, but how do you factor in the other aspects when almost no other group addresses such things.

I really should have known better, under these circumstances, than to make the mistake of thinking that the artwork for Progress Reform is abstract. Of course it isn’t. All the group’s visual work, from their superb stop-motion videos to the album art to the gig visuals are done by cornet player Ashley Dean, and his explanation of the cover design is characteristic of how the group seem to approach everything.

“A label in France wanted us to put an EP together so I started looking at how to represent that, and the links between France and Britain, and obviously the Channel Tunnel. And, as happens with the songs, I started researching it historically and found out that they tried to build a tunnel between the two countries in about eighteen-something. They got quite a long way, they got a mile or so beneath the Channel – they had amazing engineers back than. And the British Army decided it wouldn’t be a good idea because it would be really easy for the French to invade, so they cancelled the project and just left it.

“And when they started building the tunnel a hundred years later they unearthed all of it, all the old work. Some people went down and took these amazing photographs and that’s what I was thinking of using, just one of those photos, but in the end I thought it would be more personal to the band to do an oil painting of it.”

This is the reason that when you open the cover to recent single The Deception and see nothing but three names and dates printed on the inside that your first thought is to go scurrying to Google. This seems to be pretty much what Ashley is aiming for with his work:

“Hopefully that’s what people will do because I think it’s really important to know the back story. With the artwork to Spencer Perceval there’s two lines on there, the timelines of the two characters.”

The two characters in the case of Spencer Perceval would be the man himself, the only British Prime Minister ever to have been assassinated, and John Bellingham, the man who shot him. There are two songs on the single, telling the story from either side.

The Deception is based on more recent events. In 1969 the first ever single-handed round the world yacht race was held and Donald Crowhurst, the first name on the sleeve, was one of the favourites. He encountered problems almost immediately he left Britain but instead of accepting his fate he continued to report false, and dubiously advanced positions, despite spending the majority of the race holed up in Argentina. In chasing this bogus position another of the contestants, Nigel Tetley, pushed so hard that his boat the Victress broke up and sank beneath him. Another contestant, Bernard Moitessier, skippering the Joshua, abandoned his own quest for glory to rescue him, and these are the three names on the inside of the cover.

Crowhurst’s deception appears to have driven him to madness by the time he embarked on what would have been his victorious journey home, and it seems he committed suicide. His boat was found abandoned at sea ten days after the completion of the race. The other two songs on the single are called Victress and Joshua. There is a tragic fall of this nature in many iLiKETRAiNS songs.

“For The Deception the really sad thing is that if he’s remembered at all he’s remembered as the guy who cheated in the first single-handed round the world yacht race and I think taking that simplistic view isn’t really what the song is about, it’s more of a character study into what drove him to do it. And that’s the fascinating thing in all these.”

It demonstrates a pretty unusual level of historical knowledge to be able to do this though. Quite apart from the musical skills, it amazes me a little that these guys might actually have such an understanding of history as to be able to conceive of these songs in the first place. Compared to my peers I know really quite a lot of history, but I have never even heard of half the events they use as the inspiration for their songs.

“Well most people don’t know” says David “and we didn’t know these individual stories. We’ve just stumbled across them at various stages. Being in the band has opened our eyes to the possibility of writing the songs, and that they’ve got real stories in them, things that aren’t more publicized, and just amazing stories that have a legacy, so to speak, that deserves it.”

That may be so, but the other striking thing about the subject matter addressed by iLiKETRAiNS is the fact that very few of these are the sort of bastions of high school history class; they tend to focus on the smaller, more idiosyncratic events.

Guy explains that there’s not quite as much intent in it as all that. “A lot of these stories just basically come to us. We’re not, I wouldn’t say, particularly knowledgeable at all. A lot of the stories on the album are things that we’ve chanced upon or things that we’ve noticed, or someone’s told us about. So a lot of it is just down to which stories catch our attention from reading about them.”

Slightly shamed by my own ignorance, I have to admit to having abandoned history at age thirteen due to having a monumentally dull teacher in third year. “None of us studied history as such.” Says David, “It’s something that’s coming to us since our formal education ended. I think the real shame is that people do leave history behind and ignore its importance because when it’s taught at school it’s so dry, it’s dates and figures and that’s it and people maybe don’t realize that these people actually existed and experienced genuine feelings and were human beings, you know?”

It’s not just about the feelings entirely either. There is a definite preoccupation with legacy in the often tragic narratives.In the words of Robert Falcon Scott’s harrowing lament towards the end of Terra Nova: “And more’s the shame/ You will remember my name.” This, whatever else he may have achieved, is what he will be remembered for.

“We’re very interested because we’ve got the benefit of hindsight for these characters, so a lot of what we write about is their legacies or trying to put right their legacies or, if they were alive today, how they would think their legacy looks.”

This may go some way to explaining the kind of epic scope of the actual musical content of their songs.

“I think we’re trying to focus on the emotion in the song – they’re all written in the first person. We’re almost trying to project our own personalities onto these stories, to a certain extent. If we were in these situations, we’re exploring how we’d feel, so it’s no different in that respect. It just comes very naturally.”

So given this approach, the way the singles are assembled starts to become almost obvious. If you are going to look at these old and oft-neglected tales from a personal as much as a historical point of view, then it is almost inevitable that you will have to approach the cold historical picture with a little more sympathy. And once you’ve started to do that there is, inevitably, more than one side to any story. As Ashley describes it: “Once you’ve got the single and you know what it’s going to be it’s really easy to write the songs from the other perspective. We take some of the musical motifs from the a-side and throw it together.”

It also makes the single a more complete project than the usual DJ remix and two crap live versions. In David’s words: “Doing this it gives more important to the b-sides because otherwise they’d be forgotten. And there always is another perspective on these stories.”

That is, of course, all very well for a single. The three tracks on The Deception, and the two that make up Spencer Perceval, give a very complete and concise picture of a single, discreet historical event. But an album is ten tracks long or more. So how on Earth do you make something on that sort of scale hang together as neatly as is possible with a single?

“Well it’s our first go at making a record that does hang together. Progress Reform had a few things that ran though it, but at the end of the day it was just our singles that we had to date and a few new songs or b-sides that was put together and re-packaged. It was never supposed to flow as a piece, whereas the new one does. It has various things running through it, and I’m pleased we did it, but the only thing we’re, if anything, worried about is where to go next after that.You just say that you’ve made a piece that I think is pretty coherent… you’ve got to go on and progress and that’s for us to worry about once we’ve done promoting this and touring.”

Another thing they will find themselves having to progress is their sound. Tim at The Daily Growl noted that Come Over, from Elegies to Lessons Learnt, offered a glimpse at how they might evolve in the future. It is a slow, erie lament, brought to life with some truly brilliant cornet – mournful and lovely – and at distinct odds to how most of the rest of their songs are constructed.

For all I love iLiKETRAiNS, even I would concede that most of their songs are, in some fundamental way, similar. They tend to start off all dark and menacing and then build slowly over the course of the song, until they either back off slightly or end up going full throttle for a thunderous climax that is all the more fearsome when performed live.

This isn’t a suggestion the group are all that happy with. David has obviously heard this accusation levelled before:

“Well I think that comes from the fact that we’re telling stories and a story will generally have a climax. And it kind of rubs people up the wrong way sometimes because they don’t hear the nuances. We’ve never really dissected it. It’s a very organic process and that’s happened and it’s something we need to challenge ourselves on the next record.”

Personally, I am a fan, so I don’t really care; I like what I hear. But it does strike me as slightly odd that a group so considered and scholarly in their approach to the subjects of their songs are so instinctive in the writing of the music that goes with them. Then again, once you see them live, it makes a little more sense. This studious approach goes clean out the window and the band absolutely let rip. I am not sure I could name a more emotional, more euphoric or more ear-dissolving live experience. They were such a nice group of guys to interview, polite and helpful, considered and thoughtful, that I can barely imagine where that all comes from, especially when you think how intellectual their material is and that basically they are telling other people’s stories, not even their own.

“Well the magnitude of these stories, they shaped history,” says David. “They far outstrip anything that any of us have ever been through. A lot of people write about their own experiences and get caught up in their kitchen sink melodramas, but I think the dynamics of our songs and the drama we try and put into our music tries to reflect the scale of these events, these global events that shaped history.”

Guy puts it in slightly different terms: “When we’re recording it’s more contemplative, whereas live it’s just pure adrenaline.”

iLiKETRAiNS – The Beeching Report
iLiKETRAiNS – I Am Murdered
iLiKETRAiNS – Come Over

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