Miso Extra is a Hong Kong-born, UK-based artist; Joe Mount is an English artist who fronts the band Metronomy. Miso Extra’s debut, Earcandy, will be released on Transgressive tomorrow. Metronomy features on a track from the record, “Good Kisses,” so to celebrate, Miso and Joe got on a Zoom call to catch up about touring, TikTok, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Miso Extra: Hi, Joe!
Joe Mount: Hello, Emily! How are you? Where are you?
Miso: I’m in my manager’s office at the moment, to try and be nice and professional.
Joe: You got in trouble with the boss?
Miso: [Laughs.] I thought I’d go boardroom vibes with this.
Joe: Very good.
Miso: Thanks for jumping on. How’s things?
Joe: Things are very good. The weather’s taken a rather lovely turn. It’s starting to feel quite spring-y. How are you? How’s your tour been? You’ve been out with Toro Y Moi?
Miso: I did a stop in Paris with them, and then I’m actually on tour with Kelly Lee Owens. So I kind of stepped away from that for a day to go play in Paris, and then I’m back doing Kelly Lee Owens this week. But it’s been good.
Joe: Who do you prefer?
Miso: [Laughs.] That’d be a savage thing. Very different genres. Do you know what, though? I think it’s quite nice, because this is the first time I’ve been in a splitter van, doing the tour thing.
Joe: That’s nice. I remember when we first started touring, we could all fit in a Nissan Micra. [Laughs.] There were only three of us. And then we played in Bath with the Klaxons, and I remember seeing them getting out of a splitter and just being like, Oh, my god, I can’t wait ‘til I get a splitter. That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Do people know what a splitter is? I feel like you should explain.
Miso: It’s like a big converted van, that’s got space to carry all the equipment in the back, but then the inside’s a lot comfier where it’s armchair-type seats, a table, and a little charging station.
Joe: When we first went to America, all the bands were touring in Ford Econolines. It’s just a van with, like, four benches, and then you were sitting among the equipment. If ever, god forbid, you had an accident, all of it would be on top of you. But now in America, you can get these splitters and they’re like Mercedes. They’re like big European vans with comfy seats, cup holders everywhere, DVD players. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a splitter. You see, I’ve moved up to the next level.
Miso: You’ve graduated. Well, funny what you say about the Nissan Micra — my first couple of years, I had my little Citroën C1 that I had to load a drum kit in the back of. That’s a tight squeeze.
Joe: In London, you know Addison Lee?
Miso: Yeah, yeah.
Joe: They’re like a taxi service, the precursor to Uber. But they had these big people carriers, and that’s what we used to use to get to gigs. The look on the drivers’ faces when they turn up and we’d be with all of our equipment — we’d have to say to them each time, “We know it fits in. We’ve done this before. Trust us.”
Miso: You almost need to give them a plan of how it should slot in, like a Tetris detailed plan. There’s a fine art to getting things to fit in the back. Thankfully, my set up at the moment is just me and my MD, and the sound guys, so there’s a lot less.
Joe: In a splitter?
Miso: Yeah.
Joe: Sounds like you don’t need a splitter, do you?
Miso: [Laughs.] It’s spacious, yeah. It’s great fun.
Joe: Lucky!
Miso: It’s better than hopping into my C1. I can’t wait for a tour bus, though. Sleeping on a tour bus would be, I feel like, a fun experience.
Joe: It all depends on how you sleep. I think one of the unspoken benefits of being in a touring band is that you learn how to sleep anywhere. I find it very easy to sleep anywhere, and on a tour bus, it moves, there’s a nice kind of noise. You’ve just done a gig, you might have had some booze, so it’s not hard to fall asleep. But some people I know find it like just hell, can’t deal with it.
Miso: Yeah, I’m kind of here for it. I’m a pretty deep sleeper, so I’m ready. I just think everyone’s going to have to put up with my snoring.
Joe: Well, you might need to get a few more crew before you can take a bus. [Laughs.]
Miso: [Laughs.] I wanted to ask you if you had any memories of when you started doing support tours, or what it was like doing those.
Joe: I mean, it was, and still is, such a massive part of learning how to tour. And it’s all speculative — you’re doing it to maybe get fans, or get other gigs through it. It’s the hardest part of “making it,” I suppose, for want of a better phrase. If you see an act or a band that sort of comes out of nowhere, all of the die hard, slogging musicians are like, “Oh, they never had to drive a Nissan Micra, blah blah blah.” So I feel like it’s the bit which feels like real work. And it’s kind of relentless. But ultimately, all I have is very fun and positive memories from it. It was like cutting your teeth, as they say.
Miso: Yeah, definitely. I feel like some of the load-ins can be quite challenging. Some of the venues are not made for lugging kit.
Joe: No, no. But that’s the thing as well — there’s that weird thing of when you’re setting up the stage yourself, and then you finish the gig and you walk off stage, and then you’re like, “I have to go back on now to pack up.”
Miso: Yeah, it takes the drama away from it. You’re like, “Thanks, guys! Bye!” And then you go off, and then a few minutes you’re like, “Oh, god, I need to unplug all of this stuff.”
Joe: And people are shouting at you like, “What time is the next band on?” I think occasionally, we’d tour with people, or we’d have people supporting us that would have people packing up for them. I think there’s people with their eye on the prize who know you can’t pack up your own stuff if you’re going to make it.
Miso: Is that how it works?
Joe: [Laughs.] I don’t know. I guess people have different approaches, don’t they? I think actually, probably now more than ever, it’s quite nice to walk back out on stage and talk to people.
Miso: Yeah. You do end up having nice interactions with people. Because like you’re saying, one of the points of supporting is trying to meet new people and potentially win over new audiences. So it’s a nice opportunity when you do come out to have chats with them. And that’s always quite a nice moment, because there’s nothing more daunting for me personally than when you step out on stage in front of a room of people that potentially aren’t really that…
Joe: Interested in you.
Miso: Yeah. You know, they’re just chatting. I’ve had it before where they’ve put their pints on the stage whilst I was on I was on stage, which I think is a bold move.
Joe: Yeah. I guess it’s probably a bit like the equivalent of being a comedian and going around the country just honing your craft. Because my first memory of a proper support tour was when we supported Bloc Party in Spain, and it was quite a big tour. They were playing a mixture of arenas and big theaters, and we were a three piece, very inexperienced. The set that we had was 30 minutes long, and we were told by the stage manager, “We need 45 minutes.” We were like, “OK.” So we had to sort of think on our feet and rustle up 15 minutes more of music. Also, I was like, “Well, I guess I can talk a bit more…” And of course, the first one or two nights, it’s horrible. But then you become better at it and you’re watching [the headliner], how they do it. It’s sort of a fast track way of learning how to perform.
Miso: Yeah, if you need more time, just chat more and then figure it out.
Joe: Do you chat in between your songs?
Miso: I think it depends on the audience and the style of music, because I feel like I’ve done support tours for quite a broad range of genres, and I think they require different styles of chat.
Joe: Right wing audience, very right wing chat.
Miso: [Laughs.] No. I just think the job of the support is also to rally the troops and get them warmed up and ready for the main headliner. So sometimes I think they respond well to chat, but some crowds are happy for you to just get on and keep playing music. They’re just there for the vibes, and occasionally you just check in with them.
Joe: Yeah, it never really twigged with me that that was your job, to warm up the crowd for the main band. [Laughs.] I used to occasionally shout, “Is everyone excited about —?” Whatever the band is. “Is everyone excited about Bloc Party?” But it feels like a bit of a hollow victory when they all cheer, because they’re not cheering for you. They’re cheering for the next thing that’s not you.
Miso: I think it’s nice. I do it pretty early on just to check if they’re with me. It’s more just to gain their attention, to be like, “I am here. I am on stage. Now can you listen?” It’s like a headcount, “Are we here, guys?”
Joe: [Laughs.] “Can we listen, please?”
Miso: You know what I did want to ask you, completely unrelated — because I made myself a little list of notes of, “Things I Wish to Ask Joe.”
Joe: Very organized of you.
Miso: Thank you. When you wrote “The Look,” did you know it was going to be a hit? And also, what was happening on that day? Because I always think this, when people write a song that becomes a big song — a song that is the one where you’re like, “Oh, that musician and this song.”
Joe: An albatross, yes.
Miso: Yeah, I think of that as your albatross. [Laughs.] But I don’t know if you feel that way.
Joe: The thing that I remember about the song is… Well, the whole album was recorded in Wapping, next to News International, which used to be News of the World, The Sun, all that stuff. So it was quite an interesting place. I was in my early 20s, and so my idea of recording an album was, you just do it as late as possible, you work really late. So we’re in this grotty part of London and there are all these odd goings-on outside News International very late at night, with executive looking cars turning up and handing something over to someone waiting outside — if you read between the lines. [Laughs.] Anyway, I remember recording and having a really nice time, and basically there was a day when my manager and the record label came in to listen to some stuff. I played them a few ideas, and at that point, “The Look” was pretty much as it is now. As far as my own appreciation of the song, I was like, “Oh, it’s a nice song.” I wasn’t playing it going like, “Check this out.” I just remember that their reaction was quite positive, but in a… they were sort of thinking about it.
Miso: Like, “Mm, he’s on to something.”
Joe: Yeah. And that sort of happened every time people heard it. Then there was one time we were touring, and we played at this place in Leeds, and a guy from The Guardian came and did a review of it. Afterwards, he specifically asked me, “What’s the name of that song? The one that goes…” I told him, and he was like, “That one’s really good.” But honestly, the funny thing is, in terms of what it did when it was released — it was a part of an album campaign and I think it maybe got played once or twice on the radio, but it didn’t get playlisted anywhere, as far as I remember.
Miso: Oh, really?
Joe: Yeah, it was not in the slightest bit a hit. And that’s the kind of brilliant thing about it, that it’s become what it is after a number of years. If you judge things by Spotify, for example, it gets played more and more every year. It’s having this sort of exponential [growth], and I certainly didn’t anticipate it. I wasn’t aware of it once it had been written, and I’m still really just amazed by it. And I feel completely like: I’ve got one of those songs and it feels amazing, and it just makes me wonder what it must feel like to be will.i.am or or David Guetta. [Laughs.] Like Elton John or Taylor Swift or whatever. Imagine just having these songs which are just part of music, they exist as their own thing… So yeah, I feel very lucky. Have you got any of those songs?
Miso: Me?! [Laughs.] I don’t think I’m quite there yet. I’ll let you know in a few years time. I’m hoping “Good Kisses.”
Joe: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It’s funny, I think the one thing which I do love still about the music industry is that it’s full of people who tell you all these stories about how they found such-and-such artist. But to this day, I have never met anyone who has predicted anything. I have never met anyone who was like, “When I first heard ‘Good Luck Babe’ by Chappell Roan, I knew it was going to be massive.” There is, for want of a better word, something like magic that happens, which people just are not in control of. And I quite like that.
Miso: Yeah, it is magic, isn’t it? I feel like it’s one of those ones where so many different things have to collide, and it just happens at the right moment. I feel like, often, the songs that do the best in the long run are ones that weren’t always received very well at the time of their release. They’re often the slow burns. They have a lot more longevity to them. I felt that way about the A Seat at the Table Solange album. When that first came out, I was a bit like, “I don’t really get it.” I think I maybe wasn’t quite ready for certain things, the sounds and even the topic or the story she was trying to tell. Then it grew on me, and it’s one of my all time favorites now. But there’s so many of those.
Joe: One thing that I think is quite interesting about TikTok, for example — which I’m sure was on your list of things to talk about. [Laughs.] But it’s sort of listener-run. You can pay an influencer to use your track, which is what people do. But that doesn’t stop some teenager from whoever-knows-where picking up a Pavement B-side. That is totally unpredictable, that whole world. And it’s about little moments in songs, but it does mean that the song itself becomes a hit for that person. So it does feel like a relatively egalitarian way of raising songs on pedestals.
Miso: Yeah, I don’t know. The TikTok thing, it’s brilliant in that sense. I think my only concern with it is that people then don’t know the rest of the song.
Joe: But they do! I think the weird thing is they do. That Lola Young song, Sam Austins, and I’m sure all the other viral stuff, it gets thrown on playlists. So I think people do end up hearing more of it than than you might think. But yeah, I think certain songs are just literally made of snippets which are TikTok-able. But I think the really exciting viral stuff is actually when it’s a good song from start to finish. And it does happen.
Miso: So then are you suggesting you do TikTok dances to “Good Kisses”? Is this what’s going to happen?
Joe: [Laughs.] I’m not sure how you arrived at that point… But that’s the thing, if you’re a record label — here’s me being a record label: “So, that new Miso Extra track, “Good Kisses,” is great. I’ve got an idea: How about we try and start something where people are kissing on TikTok, and we start a little trend? OK, Emily, you need to do the first video, and then you need to try and get people to join in.” That’s an example of the kind of thing that would get said and is obviously just destined to fail. You know what I mean?
Miso: Yeah, I feel like it has to come from the people.
Joe: And by people, you mean children. It has to come from the children.
Miso: Yeah.
Joe: The youth.
Miso: It has to come from the active users of TikTok. Because I think trends have to be made by the audience and not necessarily the person who puts the audio out. Once you’ve made the art and put it out, I don’t think it belongs to you anymore. To a certain extent, it becomes something else. You’ve kind of handed over that responsibility of how that song should be used. It’s up to the people, the listeners, to attach their own…
Joe: Their own dance to it.
Miso: [Laughs.] Yeah. But I do think it’s fascinating. I’m also impressed by how good some of these dances are. Some people really can dance.
Joe: Yeah, that’s true.
Miso: Well, thanks Joe!
Joe: It was a pleasure. I hope you’ve learned something. [Laughs.] And I hope the rest of your touring is fun. I hope you enjoy the splitter, and I hope to see you soon to make some more music.
