Overnight Sensation

In recent years, I Am Kloot have evolved into critical darlings. The Manchester indie-rock outfit began in relative obscurity in 2000 but, since 2010's Sky At Night, have been increasingly lauded as one of their country's most reliable outfits. The band's fifth album was nominated for a Mercury Prize. Since then, their four records prior – particularly 2001's Natural History debut – have been re-designated as classics.

It's a dreary day when John Bramwell calls Time Off. It's raining. It's 8am and Bramwell has only just woken up in his hotel room. He's currently negotiating tour schedules and PR campaigns for the band's latest album Let It All In – the follow-up to Sky At Night, released late last month. His tone is rambling, apologetic and punctuated by violent bursts of laughter. Still, when confronted with the standard Sky At Night narrative, he's lucid.

“See, I actually think that's just a perception. Certainly, I think Sky At Night managed to reach a wider audience than anything we'd done previously – but for us it didn't really feel like that. None of us were exactly spring chickens when we formed the band,” he explains. “We'd gone through all of the standard trials and travails. I think we all felt like we'd been banging our head against the wall for years, trying to make something with music.

“After our first rehearsal, though, we were all very excited. It was the first time I'd felt a band had really brought my songs to life. I didn't need to tell them to slow down or speed up or give me space or whatever. They just got it on an intuitive level. And, since the first bit of money we received from our first album Natural History, not one of us has worked a day of their life. We've just been touring and making records.

“So, the notion of, 'Oh, wow, suddenly it's all happening' is such bullshit. Utter bullshit. For thirteen years, we've been doing exactly what we've always wanted to do,” the frontman laughs. “And, even though the media may not have known about us, music lovers always have. Sky At Night certainly reached a wider audience for us but we've never been exactly sitting on our arses waiting for stardom.”

I Am Kloot are that kind of band. They tend to surprise. While there is a certain classicist sensibility to Bramwell's songwriting, his band have long tended toward the unpredictable. This can in so small part be attributed to their experiences. Far from a group of twenty-somethings who struck it big, I Am Kloot is a band of hardened veterans. Bramwell has been playing in bands since the early-'80s.

They have different priorities. Different perspectives. They aren't striking for ubiquity or greatness. Theirs is a more personal approach. It's about sound and aesthetic. At age 47, Bramwell's ambitions as a musician have not diminished in the slightest. However, they have changed direction. He writes strange, personal, poetic songs and he seeks to make room in the world for sympathetic spirits.

“It is quite weird. I think the ambition was always to get quite poetic songs into a prominent place – rather than getting the band into a prominent place. There are certainly leaps in business and music we could have taken that would have gotten the band to a prominent place much earlier,” he figures. “But that was never really the ambition, as such. It was about the songs.

“When I was five years old, my ambition was to write a song. As I got older, my ambition was to play a gig. It changes with every passing year. I think we're actually a much more ambitious band than people would think. It just manifests in different ways. I remember, when I was five years old, my family was always playing The White Album and, because the songs were so different and I didn't know what a band was, I didn't quite get it.

“See, I thought The Beatles were a place,” the frontman laughs. “When I picked up my sister's guitar at age seven and started writing songs, I was just trying to get to that place, you know? Even now, though, I think, as musicians, we're all just in the magic. You know, we're sitting by a stream, fishing, and the songs are in the water. If you have a healthy respect for it, I don't think music needs to be competitive or professionally ambitious at all.”

Nowhere is this unpredictability more evident than on the band's latest album Let It All In. The follow-up to Sky At Night, Let It All In is the polar opposite record to its predecessor. Where Sky At Night was I Am Kloot's most expansive and audacious album to date, Let It All In is an album defined by subtraction; by space. The songs are small, daintily arranged figures of precision and dynamics.

Yet, even in that respect, the band prove confounding. Let It All In sounds like a meticulous record. Bramwell's songs are sparse and measured. The production – courtesy of Elbow's Craig Potter and Guy Garvey – is rich and polished. The actual construction of the album, by contrast, was shambolic and spontaneous almost to a fault. Bramwell would just turn up at the studio and blast out a song whenever he felt it hit him.

“We didn't talk about it, to be honest. Whenever I'd have a song three-quarters finished, I'd ring the guy who owns the studio – who's a good friend of mine – and see when he had some time free. Whenever he'd have time free, I'd meet up with the rest of the guys the evening beforehand for four hours and we'd just try out the song,” the frontman explains. “You know, just go with our first impressions and ideas.

“That evening, we'd record straight off the bass, drums, guitar, vocals – and then improvise that. That's how we recorded the album. We didn't have that block of recording for studio. Whenever I had a song, we'd rehearse it and then record it that evening. Once we built up enough of those recordings over a couple of months – though it probably only added up to about ten days of actual work – we went and saw Guy and Craig to finish it off.

“So, there was no real discussion, to be honest,” the frontman reflects. “I think, subconsciously, we all knew we didn't want to make Sky At Night 2. Sky At Night was really made because we stopped gigging. We gigged for years and years and years and ultimately just had to take a break to spend some time just enjoying making music. Let It All In was a very different process.”

Let It All In is out now.