Don't Worry, Everything Everything Will Be Alright

The woes of the music industry have been well documented over the last decade and beyond. English indie-pop outfit Everything Everything formed ten years ago and have seen things go from bad to worse during that time. Speaking from his home in Manchester, frontman Jonathan Higgs prefers his band to take it all in their collective stride and get on with it rather than get too worried about the doom and gloom of it all.

"We entered the world of actually being paid to be a band in 2010," he says. "People were so pessimistic then, saying, 'It's all over, we're screwed,' and, yes, it's gotten considerably worse since then, but we stopped caring about it in probably 2012. Around our second record we thought, 'This just isn't a thing any more, there really isn't a music industry, it's all on borrowed time.' So we've always had that kind of feeling about it and most of the people in the industry know as well. It's not what it seems, it's not real." When asked to clarify these statements about "the industry", Higgs adds, "It's so incredibly fragile. You have to have a One Direction or an Ed Sheeran - and the amount of money that's wasted, thrown up against the wall. All the things that you expect in a business that can sustain itself, the money coming in is just nothing like what it used to be. People won't really pay for music anymore, and they won't pay for film and all the rest of it. The internet's changed everything."

Australian fans of the band can be grateful that Everything Everything have the resources to come all the way out from the UK to tour, and Higgs says his band loves to play a combination of bigger outdoor festivals as well as their own headlining club shows. "It's really good to do it that way. When you come over and play festivals, moving around like that, and then in between you can slot in more local shows. It's great to have that change of feel too. You can play for longer and play weirder tunes in your club shows, and then just play all the bangers in the festivals so it's nice to have it like that."

When asked whether he has a personal preference between performing festival and headline shows, Higgs offers, "It really depends on what we've been doing a load of. When we do loads of our own headline shows that are smaller, we'll want to do festivals. And then at the end of festival season we're like, 'Oh, I really want to play some lesser-known tunes and get the lights how you want it,' and things like that rather than just relying on the sun, and all the problems you have at festivals."

Higgs admits of his band's Australian summer tour, "I've never been out of the country around Christmas and new year, let alone all the way down there! It's going to be really weird for me, coming from Christmas, freezing cold, and then coming down there wearing shorts on New Year's Eve. It's going to be absolutely insane. On top of that, there's going to be massive jet lag so it's going to be double-crazy."

Ten years and four albums into their career, Higgs believes his band has plenty of creative and motivational juice left in their tank. "I definitely don't think anybody's thinking that we're repeating ourselves or getting lost in it or getting tired of it," he says with confidence. "I think we still feel like we're questing for something and we're trying to get better. That's what we're trying to do, anyway; it's what any band should be trying to do."