Red Riders went from strength to strength quite early, earning support slots with Jet and Franz Ferdinand before their debut album had been released, and while Griggs looks back on that time with plenty of nostalgia, Palms is not his break-up band. “I feel great about all this actually,” he says. “I would never wanna talk down Red Riders, it just felt like it had completely ran its course and right in the wake of that ending I had a massive creative burst. I felt really inspired again and energized by the change … It really felt like, well I guess by the end of nearly ten years of Red Riders you start to feel trapped by what other people think Red Riders was and also by myself and my own view. We started that band when we were 20 and we were growing and changing and working out what music we really liked and what music we wanted to make that whole time. For it to end and to have a better awareness of my own tastes and the kind of music I wanted to be making felt really good. The funny thing about Palms is that everyone keeps saying it sounds more like me that anything I’ve ever done in the past.”
The creative burst was nothing new to Griggs, his writing style has always had a stream-of-consciousness approach – but Palms afforded him the ability to do that with a musically mature mind. “For me anyway, writing songs is a pretty subconscious thing,” he says. “I never consciously think about what I’m about to do and I never really feel like I get a say in what comes out. There are songs that come out and I think ‘Cool that’s a song’, but I put it away and never play it again but others, the ones that I find come back into my mind constantly, they’re the ones that I keep focusing on. I don’t wanna sound flippant but I don’t put a lot of thought or time into a song.”
So is there an intangible, perhaps even spiritual element to the process? “Definitely,” he says before giving it some thought. “I don’t think they’re gifts from God or anything – I really hope God is writing much better songs than I am.” The moment is broken by rapturous laughter by Griggs and an otherwise silent audience in the background of our chat. He has to win the Best Quote Of The Year Award for that one.
“I do think it comes from somewhere else though and that’s what I like about it; it’s a mystery to me,” he says after eventually recovering. “I’m not even that good of a guitar player or anything, I just play and then something piques my interest.”
The band that he has surrounded himself with has also been integral to the relaxed vibe of Palms. “I feel like people do really good stuff when they have the right people around them. On paper I could’ve done Palms on my own but I need someone to say ‘Yeah man that’s good’ or also to challenge me when I need to go a bit harder,” he says.
Taking that uninhibited creative process into the studio was a breeze for Palms. They recorded with Owen Penglis (Royal Headache, Straight Arrows) in his kitchen on a budget of food. “He recorded it in his kitchen and it took us three days but three days spaced out across eight months,” he says. “We paid him in food, he totally did a favour for us, and he’s, not impatient, but his pace and his attitude kept it all really alive. We didn’t jam the songs for months and even now we just practice if we have a show. I’ve done that in bands before where you play something to death and when you end up playing it live you’ve just played the life out of it.”
That attitude is Grigg’s new mantra – not just for Palms but for his life in music. “After Red Riders kinda become frustrating we decided that with this we just wanted to do what was fun to do,” he says. “No matter what success Red Riders had, our day to day lives were exactly the same. We weren’t suddenly on yachts or eating caviar so if we still have to work to get by then let’s not bother with the whole game, let’s just make the videos we want to and play the music we want to and not be pressured by anyone.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
