The irony isn’t lost on Guy Garvey that he had to get good and drunk to write a song called “Sober.”
“Isn’t it perverse?” he says with a chuckle. The Manchester band first came up with the track’s taut, bass-driven groove shortly after Alex Reeves (The Ting Tings, Bat For Lashes) started playing drums for them in 2016. But the song wasn’t completed and released until earlier this year, partly because Garvey found it a challenge to write lyrics that went with the music.
“It was so far out for the way we sounded back then that I didn’t know what to do with it,” says Garvey, 51, in a Zoom conversation on a recent Tuesday—mid-afternoon for him in the U.K., late morning for me in America. “I couldn’t come up with anything for the tune. And so, something I’ve done a few times over the years, I went down to my writing room in Brixton in the dead of night, knowing nobody would be there, literally zero percent chance of anybody hearing me. And then I got drunk as fuck and yelled nonsense, and came back the following day and sifted through it.”
“Sober” wound up as the rousing closing track on Audio Vertigo Echo, an EP released in June. Those four songs were also appended to a deluxe edition of the band’s tenth full-length Audio Vertigo, which was first released in 2024. “There’s really nothing more satisfying than listening to the album straight into the EP,” the gregarious singer says. “Because that’s how the EP was written, as a continuation of the record.”
One song on the EP, “Dis-Graceland 463-465 Bury New Road,” is about Bryan Glancy, a friend of Garvey’s whose 2006 death inspired Elbow’s most beloved album, 2008’s The Seldom Seen Kid. “Every time I think I’ve stopped writing about Bryan, another one pops along,” he says. “I suppose Bryan’s death was the first time I felt grief, so maybe when I’m writing about him, I’m writing about that part of life. I mean, it certainly makes me really, really appreciate life.”
Audio Vertigo is the fourth Elbow album that Reeves has drummed on, but it marked his first album as an official band member and co-writer, rather than a session musician. “Bringing Al into the band is a massive thing, it’s a huge change of dynamic, and he’s just endlessly enthusiastic, and so fuckin’ talented,” Garvey says. “He’s introduced us to some great music that we didn’t really know about or hadn’t appreciated.”
Garvey has been playing with three of his bandmates, Pete Turner and brothers Craig and Mark Potter, since they were teenagers in the early ’90s, when their band was briefly known as Mr. Soft. Coming of age in Greater Manchester when the area was a musical hotbed was a powerful formative experience for Garvey and his bandmates. “I met three of the Smiths before I was 18, and Mark delivered a pizza to the Stone Roses,” Garvey says. “Doves took us on our first U.S. and U.K. tour and bigged us up. Everybody looks after everybody else, and everybody’s crew has crewed with everybody else.”
Another musical hero who’s become part of Garvey’s life is Peter Gabriel. “Love him to bits, feels like an older brother,” Garvey says. Gabriel covered the Seldom Seen Kid track “Mirrorball” on his 2010 album Scratch My Back, and its 2013 sister album And I’ll Scratch Yours featured Elbow reciprocating with a cover of Gabriel’s “Mercy Street.” “He didn’t tell me that he was covering ‘Mirrorball,’ I just got an email from him and there’s a beautifully orchestrated version of the song. I was in pieces by the end of it, it was the most flattering thing.”
Garvey was credited for guitar and vocals on Elbow’s early albums, and just vocals on more recent efforts, but he says that doesn’t really reflect a change in how he contributes to the band’s creative process. “I just stopped crediting myself with any little bits of guitar. We just decided it was kind of confusing to say I played guitar on that one, I played synthesizer on this one. It’s like, yeah, but who’s chief of synthesizer? It’s Craig,” he says. “I don’t play enough guitar, I certainly write guitar lines for Mark. Sometimes I’ll sing something at him, and that’s how the thing will get written, but he’s chief of guitars.”
In the U.K., where Audio Vertigo was Elbow’s fourth No. 1 album, the band headlines arenas. They never broke big in the U.S., however, reaching their highest Billboard 200 peak of No. 83 for 2014’s The Take Off and Landing of Everything. But Elbow still makes an occasional trek to see their American fans in decidedly more intimate venues like First Avenue in Minneapolis or the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., as they’ll do this fall. “Playin’ the smaller rooms is really healthy,” says Garvey, noting that those shows will still feature the expanded nine-piece lineup that helps bring the more elaborate brass and string arrangements of their later albums to life onstage.
The frontman hosts a weekly BBC radio show, Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour, and has other possible projects on the horizon, including some sort of stage musical he “can’t talk about too much” that bears a connection to the group’s 2021 album Flying Dream 1. While most bands that have been making albums for a quarter century tend to slow down their output, Elbow has never failed to release an album every two or three years since their 2001 debut Asleep in the Back. And Garvey expects that spending a few weeks on a bus will help spark ideas for the band’s next chapter.
“The stuff that you write on the road is magic, because years following that, you’ll be like, ‘Oh fuck, I came up with that guitar part in Georgia,’ y’know? These wonderful things, these are part of the extraordinary job we have,” he says. “What’s lovely about the boys in Elbow is they’ve mellowed into their best selves but they are more up for trying stuff than perhaps they ever have been. It’s like ‘Let’s keep going ’til the wheels fall off, and let’s have fun doing it.’”
Elbow’s North American tour kicks off on 9/26 in D.C. Visit their site for tour dates and tickets: https://elbow.co.uk.
