INTERVIEW: The Futureheads

Image by Amelia Read

For the first time all the singles by Sunderland indie icons The Futureheads have been brought together in one newly mastered release. The album, released via via Cherry Red Records on 29th November, is called Decent Days & Nights: The Singles and features all the big hits from two decades, including The Beginning of the Twist, Decent Days and Nights, Struck Dumb, Radio Heart and their cover of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. It contains new sleevenotes and unseen photographs and is available in CD and 2LP formats.

To celebrate the release the band go out on tour in February/March 2025 and will stop off at Boiler Shop, Newcastle on Sun 2nd March.

We catch up with guitarist/vocalist Ross Millard to find out more…

To refresh our memories, how did the band get together?

The band got together at the tail end of the year 2000. We were pretty much the last ones left at the end of the Sunderland Detached Youth Project that we’d been part of at the Bunker as kids. We initially rehearsed as The Futureheads in Barry‘s garage and had Peter Brewis from Field Music on drums but later changed to Dave Hyde when we got offered a European tour of squats and youth centres with Milky Wimpshake in summer 2002.

When was it you realised that the band was going to become the success it became?

I think we realised that the band was going somewhere when the gigs we started playing were selling out and getting busy. We resisted having management and agents, etc for quite a while but when organising things ourselves started getting too much we thought we’d give it all a try. The first album came out in summer 2004, but it wasn’t really until early 2005 that stuff really started to lift off for the band. Touring in America and Japan and having actual fans waiting outside of venues or in hotel lobbies proved to us that something was definitely happening. It was quite mad at that time.

Had the band not formed, what do you reckon you’d be doing instead?

I managed to finish my University degree in English at Newcastle in the summer that the band signed our first proper deal, and I’d always liked the idea of newspaper/magazine journalism, so perhaps if it hadn’t been for the band I think something along those lines would’ve been what I’d have tried to get into .

What are some of your fondest The Futureheads memories?

It’s hard to pick standalone memories from over 20 years of playing in the band but I suppose some of the larger festival gigs stand out such as Glastonbury, Fuji Rock festival, Coachella, and any time we visit a country for the first time. I think we all enjoy that buzz of not quite knowing what’s coming next.

Whose idea was the greatest hits compilation? Are you hoping it will encourage new fans to listen to your work?

The singles compilation really came about because Cherry Red records have licensed our first two albums from Warner Bros. They got in touch with us to say they were planning on doing some re-issues and gauge our interest in a compilation release. I think for us, it’s a nice way to celebrate 20 years of playing in the band together, and the tour we’re doing in February will mean that we’re performing some songs that we haven’t played in a really long time. I think these sort of releases can be quite a useful portal into the world of a band, especially for younger fans, but I also think it’s a nice artefact for anyone to have who’s followed the band for a long time. I spent a long time going through hundreds of old photos that I’ve taken from various tours/studio sessions etc, so I think the sleeve notes etc have come together really nicely. 

What are some of your favourite greatest hits albums?

I think hits albums work best with bands that have strong singles. I think two that stand out to me are the Blur one and REM’s single collection. The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds one is great as well. In some cases you see a different side to a band through only the singles and I think that’s what we’re hoping with the release of ours. It’ll show our more direct, melodic side!

What was it like revisiting your past work now that you are seasoned musicians and accomplished songwriters? What are some of your personal favourites?

Listening to the new masters of the forthcoming album was quite a strange experience actually! I hadn’t heard quite a few of those songs in a really long time and when it came to sequencing the record we thought it actually played better to mix up the eras rather than ordering it all chronologically. I suppose the singles collection serves as a potted history of the band and it’s hard to listen to it without being taken back to those different periods of making those albums in different studios, in different cities, in different situations.

In your opinion, how did the band’s music evolve over the years?

I think we’ve always been a band that tried to straddle the line between unorthodox but melodic pop music and more intricate musicality. Some of our material I suppose is quite sweet sounding, but it’s always been offset with more challenging and aggressive sounds. The four-part harmony arrangements are really crucial to our DNA and if anything I think that as the years went by, more formal song-structures started to appeal to us.

If you had the opportunity to rewrite and rerecord any song, which one would it be and is there anything you would do differently?

We have been asked previously to re-record a lot of our early material for rights issues, but it’s something that’s never appealed to us. Once the records are pressed at their time of release that’s them frozen in time. I think we look at each release as a diary of the time – to rewrite or re-record any of that material would just feel wrong.

Tell us about some of the shows on your UK tour in February 2025. Do any of the venues or cities have any significance to the band?

We’re doing a short tour in February to support the record release. It’s a six day run and it happens to taking in some of our favourite English cities. We’re hoping for more dates towards summer 2025 and beyond, and we’re planning on getting up to Scotland and ideally across to Ireland before the end of next year. I think Newcastle and London are the two cities on the run that stand out because they’re both such important places for the band over the years. We played Boiler Shop last year at Christmas and it was excellent, so I think we’re all pleased to be heading back there on 2nd March.

What do you think the next 20 years hold for The Futureheads?

Well, I think we’ve proved to each other that we can keep quite a lot of plates spinning in our lives and that the band is as important to us as anything, so for the foreseeable future I predict more touring and some new music with a bit of luck.

The Futureheads’ Decent Days & Nights: The Singles is out on 29th November via Cherry Red Records. The band play The Boiler Shop, Newcastle on Sunday 2nd March