Phil Campbell Takes The Temperance Movement To New Sonic & Artistic Levels (INTERVIEW)

The last time we met up with The Temperance Movement, they were fresh off an opening gig for the Rolling Stones and prepping a new record, the follow-up to their 2013 self-titled debut. “The first album was made when we were just friends doing a gig in a local bar in London once a month,” drummer Damon Wilson explained to Glide last year. “There was no agenda whatsoever. Didn’t want to please anyone. Had no idea what we really were doing apart from recording music.” But with White Bear, “There’s a completely different expectation and we wanted to bring it a little bit more up to date so we pushed ourselves a bit more.” Officially coming out on July 15th in the States, it’s already been floating on the airwaves across the pond, and the band is more than ready to promote it to their American fans. “Show me where the stage is!” vocalist Phil Campbell said enthusiastically last week. “That’s the good stuff.”

With a heavier sound and deeper lyrics, The Temperance Movement have matured quite nicely; at the same time, not losing any of the spirit and energy they are known for. They’re just better and White Bear is the proof in the pudding. With songs like “Get Yourself Free,” “Battle Lines” and “Modern Massacre,” you’re in for a good ride through rock & roll from one of the best younger bands out there making music today. “There is definitely an element of what we’ve been up to in the last two years,” stated Wilson. One of those elements being the exit of guitar player Luke Potashnick, a founding member of the band. “We thought it would be quite easy to find somebody else to join and it wasn’t,” Campbell told me about the predicament they ended up in when Potashnick informed them he was leaving. “So we had to kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit.”

But everything has worked out and The Temperance Movement, now with guitar player Matt White on board, are primed for some road time, beginning with a US tour starting in July. Glide spoke with the band’s singer/songwriter Phil Campbell last week about the new record, writing songs and growing up in Scotland. When he learned I had Scottish ancestors, he noted how many others have told him the same thing. “Lots and lots of Scots immigrated to America cause they read in letters from people over there how much better life was than it was here. It had much more sunshine and how much more work there was, so they fled over there. So I’m not at all surprised that you have Scottish ancestors.”

Do you think it was any different growing up there as opposed to anywhere else?

I think it’s a big difference growing up on the west coast of Scotland, in Glasgow, than if I was to grow up in say San Francisco. I think I would have been two very different people. Two different people with two very different experiences and two different sets of opportunities. That’s two different hands of cards. It’s all a bit of what you make of what you’ve got and music is something in Glasgow a lot of people turned their heads towards because it’s a sociable thing, it’s a creative pursuit. You’re indoors most of the time, out of the sort of ominous cloud-filled skies of the west coast of Scotland. But it’s a place of escape, music is a place to escape to. It’s a place where you can express yourself and Scotland is not. I can express myself quite well and have learned to. But Scotland isn’t known for that and I think a lot of people get into music, that’s where they do it. They find their release in the music whether it be singing or playing the guitar or beating on the drums.

My experience of growing up here was I had a great loving family. I went to school the same as everybody else and for me I had parents that could both play the piano and I took to the piano quite naturally. I grew up in a house where that was normal. Some other people in life at my age I went to school with didn’t have those opportunities. But I did have a piano in the house and I played it. There was music in the house and it was something that was encouraged, it was something that was valued and not laughed at or frowned upon. It was something I naturally got into. I knew very early on that I was going to do something with music but at the same time I knew that I couldn’t really do it till I was older. I didn’t really learn much at school. I’ve always just thought, I’m going to be a musician, I’m going to be a singer, I’m going to be a star (laughs).

The other thing though is that life doesn’t always work out the way you think. You know, I always thought I was going to be a big star at twenty-one years old. It wasn’t to be. I had the opportunity to but it didn’t work. I had another opportunity in my twenties when I was living in London and it didn’t work. It took until I was thirty-six years old when I got a phone call from Luke Potashnick from The Temperance Movement that that was where I was really going to get a chance to really do what I do, what I didn’t even know that I did well, which was to sing and to write songs with other guys.

Did the folk songs and the traditional music of Scotland have any influence over your earliest songwriting, since you did have a piano in the house?

I wouldn’t say that the sort of marching style, dancing, sort of bagpipes type of music had much of an influence but I would say that Celtic melody, the melancholy of the Celtic ballad, very much had an influence on me. It’s something which was taken into the churches and was used to write hymns with and the melody and harmony and the sadness and the weight of those songs, that could be a tremendous influence on me. I love a really sad song, right. I’m very, very happy that The Temperance Movement does not really sing sad songs but for me personally, that’s one of the great things about me that marks me as who I am. I have a love for a very, very sad, lamenting song. Over in America you have Leonard Cohen, you have that sort of New York sadness, and you have Tom Waits and the sort of mourning for America that no longer exists. And then you have Bruce Springsteen. And to me it connects with a Celtic melody and a Celtic story of loss and heartache and defeat and pride. You know, these kinds of things are very much in the language of Scottish music and very much in my heart.

How do you see the new record being different than the first one?

I think that both the music for the songs, the backing music for the songs, and the lyrics took on much more of our personality than the first album. The first album was written and was the best that we could do. We took it out on the road, we took three years, and by the time it came to record White Bear, talking for myself, I have developed a character onstage that has a lot of energy and humor and sort of excitement. I basically took a lot of that character that I had developed and sang with it on the second album. The band had become much tighter and much more of a force onstage just from having played and played and played and had started to form a personality of it’s own. So we wrote in soundchecks when we were on tour in Europe. We recorded them. The guys would jam without me in the rehearsal room in London and send it up to me and I would write something on top of it. We were trying to, in a sense, do the music completely the opposite of how we did the first one. The first one was written across a table, three people, and then we went into the studio and recorded it and just did it all live, did live takes. But the second album we were trying to think of it a little bit more and it was done a little bit more separately.

What had been on your mind that shows up in these songs?

“Modern Massacre” is about the brutal sort of violent attacks around the globe currently. It’s about how angry it makes me, and completely helpless it makes us all feel, you know. I think “3 Bulleits” is about the conflict, about wars that never end, about peace that is never reached, about politics and hatred, religious hatred; the kind of thing that keeps an argument going forever and ever and people dying forever and ever. “Get Yourself Free” is a little bit about trying to raise your mind up above that instead of trying to stay out of it. Remember that there’s more to life than the shit that is happening to you. To get free yourself and put that positivity back into life somehow and try to readjust the balance. Somebody said to me a few years ago, “Oh, I want to change the world. I still think the world can change.” And I said, “That’s bullshit. The world ain’t ever going to change. That’s just the way it is.” But you know, she’s right. It just takes people to do that. It just takes everybody to believe that. You’ve got to at least start believing that yourself.

There’s darker moments on the thing. There’s “I Hope I’m Not Losing My Mind,” which is about touring and missing our loved ones. “White Bear” is about addiction, those kind of clichéd acts that rock & roll people adopt to, about the pitfalls that we all can sort of get into and the darkness and trying to free yourself from it. There are a lot of different issues that we write about.

What about “The Sun & The Moon Roll Around Too Soon”?

I actually don’t know really (laughs). It was something Paul Sayer [guitar player] came up with and he had one line, “The sun and moon roll around too soon.” I think it’s about enjoying every moment that you have, in the context of something being over sooner than you wanted it to be. I think it’s about that, about time and we only have so much of it.

Which song would you say changed the most from it’s original composition to it’s final recorded version?

“Oh Lorraine.” When we played that at first it sounded like the Doobie Brothers when we played it. It was jingly-jangly, it was very Americana. Something about it was great but it was just a bit difficult cause we sang it a bit yee-haw and when you’re British rockers there’s only so much, so far, you can go before you’re wearing a cowboy hat. There was something good about it and Luke Potashnick, he really believed in the song and kept saying, “We need to do this, we need to do this.” But we ditched it. We played it once or twice but it was like the Eagles, it was like the Doobie Brothers. But when we demoed it we put sort of a heavy backbeat just for the hell of it to just sort of see what that would sound like. Like the Beastie Boys, that sort of backbeat underneath it and that heavy bassline and I redid some of the lyrics and made it shift along a little bit more and made it a bit more concise. You know, it was a bit of a production job and it sounded like nothing else on the record and it sounded nothing like the song had originally sounded when it was first written. So that is definitely the song.

What about in terms of the lyrics? Was there a song that was the hardest to nail down, to get right?

There were a few songs that were difficult. A lot of the songs were partially written and then added a few lyrics here and there. I think one of the hardest ones was probably “White Bear,” to be honest. We recorded the song without a lyric on it and it was six months later that I actually put a lyric on it. So it took a while for me to experience what I needed to experience in order to write the thing. That song was about getting to a point that I had to change my behavior or else I was going to lose, you know. So until you get to that point, that was when I was able to write that lyric.

Was any of this the cause of the band pulling out of Voodoo Fest in New Orleans last fall?

One of our guys left the band and it kind of stumped us. We thought it would be quite easy to find somebody else to join and it wasn’t. So we had to kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit. The guy was leaving, he had to do it. We could see that he was a little bit unhappy and he didn’t like touring that much and he backed out and said, “Well, I’ve got to go now and I’m going to go before you start doing the White Bear campaign.” So we were like, alright, okay. But it did mean we had to cancel a few things, which is unfortunate, but it was just basically we had to meet Matt White and as I said, it was a bit like going back to the beginning with somebody but it was all in good time. There was the frustration that meant the release of the album was delayed and all that and stuff but we’re on track now.

What do you have planned for the rest of the year?

We’ve got festivals, we’ve got America in July, we’ve got some European festivals through August, we’ve got America again in September and October. We take November off, in December we go to Germany, in January we go to France. Beyond that, I don’t know. So there’s two trips to America and a lot of Europe then too. We’ll probably do a UK tour in February.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

That would have been Ricky Ross, who was the lead singer from my favorite band when I was a kid called Deacon Blue. They were a Glasgow band and I loved them. I met him outside a rehearsal room one time and to me he was just the greatest thing in the world. He’s a great songwriter. Perhaps not world famous but he was to me.

What can you tell us about being a songwriter yourself?

I think writing songs is about telling the truth. Writing a lyric is hard when you don’t know what it is you’re trying to say. But it’s always much simpler than you think it is. It’s always easier because trying to put across a whole scenario or a huge complexity of feelings into just sort of a five word lyric, it may seem difficult but then when you get the right lyric you realize that it’s just about keeping things very simple. What inspires me to write music, as other artists do, you have to put your soul and your heart into the songs. Humanity itself is what really drives me. I love it when I can see the strings, when I can see the person. I love it when I hear this struggle in the music. I love it when I hear what a song is about when it was written, if it was written during a divorce or when someone was far from home or in a struggle. I identify with that cause I identify with the humanity of it or the weakness of it. You take that weakness in your life and if you write a song with it then it becomes a strength to so many other people. You know, people tell us that they love our songs, that they have our songs played at their wedding or at funerals of people that they loved that passed, and it’s because music, once you’ve written it and it’s out there, it’s spiritual rather than physical.

With lyrics being so important to people, are you getting more and more conscious of what you’re writing about?

Yeah, I think that the more people that are listening to your music, the more you become aware of that so you stop writing quite so personally. And by that I mean, there are certain things you know everybody if they listen to your song they understand. In a way you have to write a song so that everybody can understand it no matter who they are. I mean, okay, so I speak mainly to English-speaking people because we sing in English. So there are huge audiences in the world that don’t give a fuck about what I’m singing (laughs). But for the English-speaking audience, I think that the older I get and the more people that are interested in my music, I try to hone it down so it’s not difficult to understand what I’m trying to say so you don’t need an explanation of what I’m trying to say. And that’s a very, very difficult thing because you can’t always do that. Sometimes you fill a space with a lyric that just fills a space but it doesn’t relate to the other lyrics on top. Then six months later you’ll see that it makes complete sense. It’s weird. It’s a weird thing writing a song. And then people have all sorts of meanings for what they think it’s about as well. So if I think it’s about something, somebody will tell me it’s not (laughs).

Do you remember one of the first songs you heard where the lyrics really hit home with you or blew your mind?

I always listened to lyrics, you know. I always listened to the words. Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” was like the first song I can remember really loving cause the imagery of the song and the guy driving away from home and being alone and calling in on the radio to whoever is there and reminiscing about someone he loves and someone he will always love forever but they’re apart. Then you see the road and the whole sort of image of this sort of highway. That’s when I can remember really sort of loving a song and loving a lyric. I was about five or six years old listening to that song.

Do you think that people today have the patience for longer songs?

It depends. I don’t really think it’s necessary for a song to be any longer than four or five minutes at most. I mean, there’s something wonderful about trying to say everything in three minutes. There’s something wonderful about that. When you’re writing at a certain pace, there’s only so much you can say in four bars. There’s only so many things you can repeat yourself in terms of structure in the song. We’re not experimental that way. We’re not Frank Zappa, right. We’re not Captain Beefheart. We’re not going to take it in some kind of weird direction. It’s quite obvious where we’re coming from. The length of a song, I mean, it’s great if it’s going to capture me but I’ll get bored, to be honest.

As a band, what song on the new record do you think really highlights the guys behind you as musicians?

I would say “Get Yourself Free” because the chorus, you hear me singing at the top of my voice on the chorus, but underneath you hear the band moving around the chorus melody in a very, very cool blues rock way. It’s one of the best moments, one of my favorite moments on the record, the chorus of that song.

Do you feel like you’re a success now?

Yes I do. I mean, I know that we’re not a massive success, like we’re not the Foo Fighters or anything. But I feel in my heart what a person ought to feel when they’ve done their best and they feel as if they’re being recognized for that. I feel satisfied that I’m on the right path in life. That was one thing that was never secure before The Temperance Movement. I was always filled with doubt and always trying to change my plan and try to adapt myself, cause for some reason there was someone whispering in my ear, “Music, music, music. That’s your thing, keep doing it, keep doing it.” But it wasn’t right until I met the right people.

Group photo by Rob Blackham