TELLING TRUTHS: MILLIE MANDERS TALKS ABOUT THE NEW ALBUM, WHATS COMING UP FOR THE BAND AND MUCH MORE!

Following the release of their latest double A side single earlier this month (Angry Side/Can I Get Off), Millie Manders and The Shut Up have been busy taking their ‘Angry Side‘ tour across the UK. Ahead of their Blackpool date at Bootleg Social on April 16th, we had the pleasure of chatting to Millie about the bands impending sophomore album Wake Up, Shut Up, Work , festival plans and dream collabs.

Northern Exposure (NE): So, one of my first questions was going to be about whether you had a new album coming. And then you announced a new album at the start of the tour!

Millie Manders (MM): Yes!

NE: Which is amazing news! So, obviously you’ve had a few singles out over the past year or so. Was it the plan with those singles to build towards an album, or did it just form from that?

MM: Yes, so, Rebound was the first one we’d released properly since the first album, and my intention was, first and foremost, to break the ice of not having released anything for a few years that was original. But I knew that I love the song and once the reaction to the song was there, I was like, yes, I want this on the album. But initially it was just ‘I need to have something out, I need to write something and have something that isn’t on the previous album, I need people to know that I’m back in that creative flow’. So then from there we started having writing retreats, and I think we had a total of four over a year where we’d go away for a week and just solidly write together in reams and come up with songs and decide whether or not we were going to take them or bin them or develop them or whatever. And Shut Your Mouth was one of the second or third songs, and it was like ‘This needs to be a single, doesn’t it? Let’s do that!’ (laughs)

NE: It’s a great song!

MM: So by end of the year we’d written the full album and we knew what songs were going to be on it. And that’s when we started to go ‘Okay, we need a single to come out in order to launch the album pre-order’ and we chose Angry Side. And then October hit [referencing the start of the Gaza-Israel Conflict] and I was like ‘Can I Get Off?’ has to be coming out as well. So, we then recorded those two, and released them as a double AA side, cos I was like ‘I have to have that off my chest, it has to be out in the ether’. So, now we have another album coming out in August and I’m very excited about it, all of us are really, really proud of what we’ve done. So, I’m hoping that everyone else that gets to listen to it will also rejoice with us in what we’ve created.

NE: What else can we expect from the album, is there any sort of theme to it?

MM: I’ve never really thought about doing a concept album. Maybe I will later on but it’s not something that I do. I write about stuff that makes me angry or sad or about my very terrible mental health. And that’s what comes out in my lyricism. Hence why Can I Get Off? came about! If something’s upsetting me there and then it often comes out into lyricism and song. I process a lot of things through art. Yes, occasionally I do need therapy as well, there are occasions where the art does not work. I guess that you’re going to find that there’s going to be stuff about mental health again, there’s going to be some very raw political stuff on there and there’s going to be couple of sonic surprises! There’s going to be things that hark back to the first album for sure, we’ve stayed true to our sound, there’s definitely some evolution in the way that we’ve been writing and developing songs, and there’ll be a couple of surprises.

NE: Brilliant. So, it’s been round about four years since your first album came out, and that was released in what, October 2020?

MM: Yes, October the 23^rd 2020.

NE: Which was smack-bang in the middle of the pandemic!

MM: Yes it was!

NE: Was that difficult getting out and trying to promote, because obviously you wouldn’t have been able to tour it at the time?

MM: Actually, I would say it was the easiest thing to do. Because everyone was sitting at home desperate for new-ness, desperate for something to do, desperate for something to lift them off their couches and out of there funk. And our first single was about suicidal ideation, so to be able to present that to people straight away at the beginning of the pandemic was serendipitous, actually, because I’d just been signed off for work for suicidal ideation, having written that song a year before and it was like my brain telling me that this was going to happen and me being like ‘It’s just a good song, whatever’, you know? So that came out and then we had Your Story which was like a relationship thing, about scrolling through stories and not being able to have the person you fancy. And then Bitter came out as the third single which was all about anger and things. As I say, it was serendipitous, it just happened that it worked really well. It also meant that I was sitting at home doing nothing but promoting the songs themselves. I didn’t have to be on the road, I didn’t have to be worried about promoting the tour, I was just promoting the music. And so it was this really unique situation where I was just putting out merch, putting out songs and then doing the occasional acoustic live stream. And eating cake and drinking wine (laughs)! And taking anti-depressants! So, what a pandemic! I would never take away from the horror of what happened for people and the sadness that everybody had to go through, and the grieving, because that’s still happening, that’s still there. But for us as a band, it meant that we, or I could just concentrate on delivering new tunes to people who had nothing else to do other than listen. So I’m very grateful for that opportunity.

NE: That’s good. A lot of bands were putting out albums and not able to tour them.

MM: I think a lot of bands put their albums on hold and I couldn’t understand that at all! I saw several bands going ‘we’re not going to do this now, we’re going to do it when we can tour it’ and I was like ‘You’re nuts!’ But, I guess whichever way you choose to do your art, it’s just the way isn’t it?

NE: Absolutely. So, you’ve got a few festivals coming up this year, but not as many as usual?

MM: No, we’ve got a very sparse summer this year. There’s several reasons for that. Largely, as you pointed out, we haven’t had new music for three and a half years. And festivals want to know if they book an act people are going to be desperate to come and see that act, they want to fill whichever venue it is that you’re playing in. So for us, we’ve gotten to the end of the ability to keep touring that [first] album which is why we’re so desperate to get one out. But not having a ridiculously busy summer it means I can just concentrate on promoting that album and making sure that the artwork is right and that the team is there. We want the autumn tour for the album to be really special so I’m going to be working towards making sure that we’ve got a team for that, and we’re going to be working with as many women as possible. So I’m putting together a team of sound engineers, producers, instrumentalists and all sorts of stuff that we’ll be with on the album and on the tour. So that sparse summer means that I can really make sure that all of those things are in place so that when it comes to the autumn tour and the album launch, it’s going to be amazing!

NE: And that’s it, you don’t want to be too burnt out if you’re trying to do that and trying to play live shows.

MM: Exactly!

NE: Is there any of the festivals in the summer that you’re looking forward to?

MM: Well, we always look forward to Rebellion here in Blackpool!

NE: Or course!

MM: Because, it’s like it’s the Rebellion family. And we’re going to be here for the whole weekend again, selling the new album, doing our shows and all of that sort of stuff. I’m looking forward to Teddy Rocks because they do a lot of work for children’s charity’s and things, that’s the whole reason it was set up in the first place. We’re coming back to Vale festival so that’s going to be really fun as well. We’re doing a couple of the Stone Valley festivals around the country this year, they’re always fun ones, really good punky line-ups, I think we’re on the same stage as Republica at one point! So, there’s a whole bunch of festivals that we’re doing that, even though we don’t have many of them, they’re class festivals, we’ve got good festivals that we’re playing and all of them are going to be really fun!

NE: Amazing. So, you kind of touched on it a bit there, you’re going to be on the same stage as Republica. Is there anybody that you want to share a stage with?

MM: Millions of people! God level would be supporting somebody like Pink, that would be like my ultimate dream! Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, obviously. Skunk Anansie, but she doesn’t like saxaphones! So it’s never going to happen!

NE: Oh no! But No Doubt are back together now as well!

MM: They are! Girl crush alert! (laughs) Who else? Skunk Anansie, Skindred, Enter: Shikari, VUKOVI. Scroobious Pip if he ever came back and did another tour musically I’d be like ‘please let me support you’. Rage Against The Machine. I could literally sit here and just go on. Many, many, many, many artists that I would love to be on a stage with.

NE: It’s good, they were the ones off the top of your head so are the main ones.

MM: Those are God level!

NE: Amazing. So, you’ve not really toured much outside the UK yet. Is there anywhere in the world that you particularly want to visit.

MM: Anywhere. Everywhere. Currently I don’t really want to go to the United States for obvious reasons. I would love to tour places like Portugal, Italy, all of the Iberian countries because they are warm and they have good food. So first and foremost get my priorities right (laughs). But I love being on stage and stuff, so the more the better. I was very strategic that we chose to stay in the UK for a long time and build up our following here. I occasionally reached out to promoters in other countries but I really wasn’t that fussed by it and I’m working with a really good UK promoter meaning we could build our fanbase here before moving across anywhere anyway. So, yeah, ‘get hold of me lovelies, I’m ready’ (laughs).

NE: (laughs) Obviously, you’ve been making music for quite a while now. But what inspired you to start making music and who are your biggest influences? Obviously you have mentioned it’s kind of an outlet?

MM: I’ve never not been playing music. My first instrument was when I was five years old, and that was dabbling with the piano. Everyone played the recorder back in the 80s. But when I was seven I wanted to play the clarinet. I was actually two years too young but I had long fingers so they let me have a clarinet. So, clarinet, from eleven, from the age of fourteen I played the saxophone for a couple of years, got bored of it. Brought it back, obviously, a few years ago. Vocals from the age of sixteen, for my sixteenth birthday I started getting vocal lessons because my mum was like ‘you can sing, let’s see if we can hone that skill a bit’ so I had six months of singing lessons. I was writing poetry from the age of like ten, songs about unicorns, the little girl things but I’ve always been lyrically dabbling, always been playing instruments, always been musically inclined. It’s never been something that I don’t do so I can’t imagine not doing music. Influences – all of the above that we’ve already spoken about and Aretha Franklin is also a massive vocal influence for me. In the 90s I was listening to Cypress Hill, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Prodigy and all of these breakthrough acts, my dad was buying those albums so I was listening to those but he also listened to Sex Pistols, Madness, The Specials and a plethora of rock, punk and all sorts of stuff frim the 70s. And my mum was buying the CDs from magazines like Holst, Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Bach but also the CDs with Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin and James Brown so I had all of the RnB and the classical stuff there and the contemporary stuff from my dad. So I’ve just had a whirlwind of music my entire life and it would just be weird for me to not do it and listen to it and be influenced by it.

NE: Amazing, that is a wide range there. Very eclectic.

MM: I think even if people say this is my default, in the same way that my band is kind of my default, I listen to a lot of pop punk, ska punk and stuff like that. I think if every person listened to every genre of music they would be able to find a song that they love. So we might be like funnelled into something that we really enjoy but there’s loads of other stuff that you actually like if you think about it, you’ve definitely got what you would call guilty pleasures stashed away on your Spotify playlist or whatever!

NE: Absolutely. So a lot of what you write about is quite topical, around mental health and politics and things. If there was one thing you change in the UK, or in the world, what would be top of that list?

MM: White supremacy and capitalism. It would be burnt to the ground and we would start again with socialism and equality. And along with that, let’s face it, misogyny and patriarchy would also collapse as a result because socialist egalitarian societies without white supremacy and misogyny can’t survive without either of those things.

NE: Thank you and that’s everything I had.

MM: Thank you very much.

NE: Thank you very much!