THE SUBWAYS BILLY LUNN ON LOSS, LOVE AND LONG-LASTING LEGACIES
The Subways (Laura Lewis)
INTERVIEW WITH BILLY LUNN | THE SUBWAYS by Morgan Hermiston
On the 17th October this year, The Subways released their most recent record, “When I’m With You“. The album serves as a testament to a music career that has spanned over 20 years. I spoke with Billy Lunn, The Subways’ lead vocalist and guitarist, to find out more about this anniversary accolade and the evolution of a brilliant band.
This is. by far, the longest interview I’ve ever done, but it is 100% my favourite. Billy is incredibly humble, and I honestly could’ve chatted with him all day. Read on, you can find out what we have in common, how their manager actually took them on, and how Billy became invested in the music world.
“When I’m With You”
I first asked him how creating the album came about. Billy started by saying, “I think the 20th anniversary thing all came about when I started referencing the fact that we were doing this thing for nearly 20 years, whilst we were on stage. It was sort of like a moment of realisation where we’d look around and go ‘Wow, we’ve been doing this a really long time’“. Continuing, he added, “People after the gigs would be like ‘don’t mention that, it makes me feel really old’, we found that really funny“.
Reflecting on his two-decade-long career, Billy said, “It’s uncanny to think about sometimes because, when we first made ‘Young Fraternity’, or even when we first started demoing, we’d only really just turned 19. 20 years old. Looking back, I’m just like wow, we really did a lot early in our lives”. Billy went on to say, “We still feel so lucky that we get to do this every single day. I think more than anything, when I did mention it, yeah, it made us feel old, yeah, it made our audiences reflect a little bit. It was something to celebrate!”
He linked this realisation to the record by saying that it “Engineered a reflective period where we would look over our corpus of material“, and “There’s enough here to maybe consolidate all of that stuff onto one record and, sort of, draw a line and just go ‘ok, that’s the first 20 years’“. Billy also explained that, “The way we wanted to frame it was kind of like a setlist in a way, because that’s where we first came up with the idea. That’s where we first referred to the fact that we’ve been doing this for 20 years“.
Delving further into this set list in the form of a record, “I’d put down about 30 songs, and our manager was like ‘this isn’t going to work, it’s going to be a bit shorter’. So what we’ve done is, we’ve created a track list of songs that we really enjoy playing live that our fans, over the course of the years, have maybe requested that we put into our sets“. Billy mentioned that fans have frequently messaged over social media saying things like, “Next time you play here, can you play this song?“
We discussed what some of these were, he said, “There have been songs that have cemented themselves into our set list that can feel like ‘classics’, but I think we also wanted to introduce some new tracks onto the record”. He continued, “There are two new songs. One is called ‘I Need To Feel You Closer’, and one’s called ‘Passenger’s Side‘. So we’re looking back over the last 20 years, but we’re also like, ok, that’s not everything. You know, we’re still alive, we’re still making music, and we want to continue that for as long as we can. So here’s to the next 20!“
Fan Favourites and Going Hell For Leather
Billy and I further discussed the songs fans were eager to hear more of. I asked him if there were any that surprised him or the band, and if there were any tracks that became bigger than they thought.
“That’s a really good question, because yeah, there are songs, over the years, that we’d tentatively leave out of the set and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know what the reaction is going to be’. Then people go, ‘can you not do that again please?’.” This included “some songs like ‘Mary‘ or ‘With You‘ off our first record [which also feature on “When I’m With You”]”.
Billy reminisced on one particular Aberdeen gig, “I was feeling not too great that evening. I go hell for leather during a song called ‘Girls & Boys‘, which is the first single off our second record. I was like, ‘I don’t think anyone’s really going to miss it, I think we’ll be okay. ‘ I played the gig, crawled off stage, crawled back into my bunk on the bus and tried to sleep it off. I woke up to a message from somebody saying ‘I was at the Aberdeen gig last night, and I really wanted you to play it [Girls & Boys], and I’m so disappointed that you didn’t play it'”. Billy said he’d replied, “I was ill and I couldn’t quite muster the energy for it, but I promise next time we’re in Aberdeen, we’ll keep it in the setlist“.
“There’s also a song off our fourth album, which is about a minute, forty seconds long. It’s called ‘Just Like Jude‘. It is requested a lot, and it’s surprising because it was never a single or anything like that,” He said that people promised to go crazy, “So that’s one we’ve actually included on the track listing. It’s not a single, it’s not a song that we’re well known for or anything…so we’ve put it on the track listing. It was a surprise because, for me, it was a very personal song, and now it’s part of the set list“.
Evolving, Enduring, and Everlasting Love
With many bands never making it more than a few years, I wanted to know if there was anything Billy or The Subways have done individually or collectively that has afforded them a long-lasting career.
“That’s another great question. I’ve never been asked that before,” Billy started, “I would say a core essence of this band is that we are a group of people that love each other“. He added, “However we’re feeling, wherever we are in our lives, that comes first. We can do the songs, and we can do the tour, and we can do whatever we need to do secondary to that. As a principle, we focus on each other, we love each other, we care for each other“.
He said, “That’s remained at the very core of this band by virtue of the fact that our previous drummer, Josh [Morgan], is my brother. And Charlotte [Cooper] and I used to date, and were madly in love. After we broke up, we remained a songwriting partnership, and we are the very best of friends“. Billy continued with a piece of advice for those looking to start a band, or maintain the group they’re in, “find people that you love and you trust. and you could be honest with“.
After Josh left the band for personal reasons, Camille [Phillips] became their drummer. “We knew that Camille was the drummer that we wanted to work with because we felt an energy about her that we knew we could come to love and appreciate, and we do“. On the subject of Josh, Billy said, “a core member of the band, who went off to do something that was very important to him, which was to look after himself and move into academia. He suffers from high levels of anxiety because of his Asperger’s and his bipolar disorder. He’d reached a point where he was like ‘I can’t physically and mentally go back out on stage anymore’“.
“We were very lucky to have waited and looked around…and then found somebody like Camille Phillips. [She’s] not just an absolutely astonishing musician, drummer, technician, someone who puts her passion into her compositions and her performances, but she’s also just this diamond of a human being that we love spending all of our time with“. Billy continued, “I think there’s a degree of humility that you have to have when you go into something like music. At the end of the day, you’re writing something that’s very personal to you, and you’re presenting it to people that you care about, you have to feel comfortable opening yourself up to them“.
Sounding Boards, Adoring Alliteration, and Meeting Their Manager
Billy and I both have a love for alliteration, as you’ve probably seen. We both also show a lot of our work to our mums before we publish it, as they usually seem to know best. We discussed these similarities further, and he also explained how their manager signed them.
He said, “I know if a song is really working, if I play it to my mum and she pumps the air with her fist and says ‘this is a rocker’. And I trust her when she says it’s not quite ready“. “Having a sounding board is really important“, he continued, “I know that because I’m writing a fiction novel as well, and sometimes I write poetry, but you never really fully come to terms with what needs changing, or whether something’s working unless you verbalise it“. Billy added that, “Verbalising is a really great way of exploring, adapting and evolving whatever it is that you’re writing“.
Discussing alliteration (as boring as that may sound), “I love alliteration too. I think I love alliteration as much as I love puns. I love, I think more than anything, a really bad pun. But alliteration has something that’s so beautiful, and it’s so specific in that it is really verbal. You only really get a proper sense of alliteration when you actually say it and those consonants are hitting each other, and bouncing off each other“.
“We’ve got a manager“, he further added, “Who has been with us pretty much since day one. We were 16 or 17, and we started playing our first London gigs. He put us on our first London show at the Buffalo Bar in Highbury, Islington…he did the sound engineering. Every time we’d play there, there’d be like three or four people, then there were 10 or 20“. During the Third gig we played down there, three songs in, he ran up to the front, pulled the microphone away from me and just went ‘Can I please manage your band?’ and we were like ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ He’s been with us ever since“.
The Rolling Stones
Not only do we show our work to our mums and add alliteration in everything, but Billy and I also share a love for the Rolling Stones. We were discussing how musical influences change over time, and both quickly came to the realisation that we share a deep admiration for the Stones.
“When you get older, you can fully appreciate songs differently because if you can understand what it is they’re talking about, you’re sort of like ‘Oh, I have a different connection with this band now'”. Bill added that, “I think the great thing about the Rolling Stones is that their recording history is so rich. I remember watching this biopic of a model who dated Keith Richards for a period of time. While she was dating Keith Richards, Mick Jagger fell in love with her. A huge portion of this movie was when they were recording, I think it might have been ‘Exile on Main St’“.
“And one of the great things about the Rolling Stones, and about The Beatles as well, is that a lot of their inspiration lies in the Motown scene. And anyone who talks about Motown, I’m there for it…it’s quite universal, I suppose. A lot of the pop that came out of America and Great Britain has, over the course of the 20th century, played this incredible game of musical tennis where they’d inspire us and then we’d inspire them“.
Matchmaking and Memories
“These aren’t just songs that say things and project melody. They are these abstract artefacts that we associate with whatever it is we’re going through. I have very specific memories tied to a lot of my favourite Oasis records and my favourite Nirvana records. I’ve been playing ‘The Less I Know The Better‘ by Tame Impala over and over recently, and I don’t know why it is. I think it’s because of this very specific thing that I’m being reminded of at the moment that I’m kind of coming to terms with. By listening to that song, I’m unconsciously acknowledging what happened, recovering from it before I move on…Music has this incredible way of doing that“.
Billy also mentioned that The Subways’ own tunes have had a similar impact. “People will come up to us“, he said, “and say, ‘this song, my girlfriend at the time, she and I would listen to that song. We first heard it when you played this gig, 20-odd years ago. We went away to university, and then we got on with our lives, and then we met up again. We started dating again, and we’re getting married, and this song is really integral to our relationship over a number of those years“.
“It’s a totem for their relationship“, he continued. “I feel so unworthy of that. You know, I can’t believe something that I’ve created has such a level of importance in someone else’s life or other people’s lives in that fashion“. Billy added, “The music still affects me in the way that it did when I first got into it. Like when I first heard Smokey Robinson, The Miracles, Tracks of My Tears, I was four or five years old. I remember turning to my mum and going, ‘What is this? Who is this?’ and she would say, ‘That’s Smokey Robinson’. I realise now that was the moment when I fell in love with music. I was like, if music can make me feel this good, this is something I want to partake in every single day in any way that I can. I also realised that it was the day I truly became interested in the idea of love. If something that’s called love can make somebody feel this way, and feel like they have to express themselves in this way, it must be really important“.
As The Subways celebrate two decades with ‘When I’m With You,’ Billy’s reflections remind us that great music isn’t just about the notes, it’s about the connections it fosters, from fan requests to lifelong friendships. With new tracks pointing to the future, the band shows no signs of slowing down.
The Subways are currently on tour across Europe with tickets available here.
