Granted: The British are already a strange bunch - for 24 years now and ten albums they have been sounding out all areas of cultivated, well-tempered pop music, rejecting the common commercial thinking of the music industry and changing their line-up just as often as their record companies - namely after almost every album/tour cycle. While at the beginning of this decade they had been exclusively concerned with instrumental soundtracks and commissioned works for museums, they are now presenting a new recording called "The Waiting Room", the history of which mastermind Stuart Staples comments as follows: "It was important to try out a few new things. But if we also had ideas for the band, then we also worked on it. It's like, "Let's sound this out. At the end of 2014 we had a bunch of semi-finished songs that we found interesting. So we said to ourselves: 'Maybe we should summarize them on one album'."
Un-excited, sober, objective - Staples is peace and serenity in person. A large, brawny mustache and hat wearer who has just turned fifty, lives with his family in the rural Massif Central in France and proves to be a mixture of bon vivant, romantic and idealist. Someone who follows world events with an irritated shake of his head, who feels discreetly out of place in the here and now and sees his music as a kind of refuge. This also applies to the new pieces, in which he indulges in love, nostalgia and noble ideals and at the same time makes a naively charming declaration of war against terror and violence with "We Are Dreamers! "As an artist, you have to leverage reality," he philosophises without batting an eyelid. "So everything that's happened around us in the last few months. Because creativity should be fun and an adventure. If this is not available, then logically no exciting music can be made. That's why you have to hide everything else - and turn your fears and worries into something positive."
