Circa Waves Interview

In 2023, Circa Waves frontman Kieran Shudall received a call from doctors telling him that the main artery in his heart was severely blocked. Two days later, he was on an operating table, watching a wire being inserted into his heart to fix it.

Before embarking on the Liverpool indie band’s biggest UK headline tour to date, Kieran sat down with YM to discuss his near-death experience and how it inspired him to go back to the start for their highly anticipated sixth album, Death & Love Pt.1

Words | Lawrence Saunders

What kind of music did you grow up listening to?

I have a brother who’s four years older than me. He went travelling to Australia and came back with a MiniDisc player and a stack of discs, including Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York and some Alice In Chains. So, I started listening to that kind of music. Of course, I was listening to The Beatles all the time, since, being from Liverpool, it was always playing around the house. My mum and dad were really into folk music too, so I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell and Carole King – I still love all that stuff.

At what age did you start writing your own songs?

I started writing songs when I got my first guitar – I was either 12 or 13 years old. There were lads in the guitar lessons who were learning songs and I was always like, ‘Well, I’ll just make a song up because that’s more fun!’. I don’t know why my first feeling was to want to make my own stuff – maybe my ego thinking I could write a better song than The Beatles [laughs]. As soon as I learned two chords, I was off.

How did you go from there to forming Circa Waves in 2013?

I’d been in bands with mates for about eight years – Aspen Grove and Fly With Vampires. I loved it. It was a great education in playing live. We must have played The Zanzibar around 50 times! On the side, I started learning how to produce music with Logic Pro and recorded a few tracks. I posted one of them on a couple of blogs, because blogs were still a big thing in 2013, and a girl named Jen Long picked it up and sent it to Radio 1, where she worked. Zane Lowe played the demo twice on one show. I didn’t have a band; it was just me, but I started getting calls from record labels, so I had to pretend it was a full band! I was doing work experience at Sentric Music in town, and a couple of the lads knew some other lads… so I just said, “Do you want to join this band?” I got pretty lucky, to be honest.

Circa Waves’ new album, Death & Love, Pt. 1, was heavily influenced by a major health scare you experienced in 2023. Can you share what happened?

I used to run a lot, and I started getting this mad squeezing pain in my chest, which I thought was very weird. I went to the doctors, and they diagnosed me with pericarditis – an inflammation of the heart. Despite that, I kept touring for months, but the pain just wouldn’t go away. Eventually, I went for a proper scan, and two days later, the hospital called and said, ‘You need to come in immediately – one of your arteries is fully blocked, and you could die any minute’. Within 48 hours, I was undergoing a coronary angioplasty at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital in Broadgreen. They used a balloon-eluted stent to widen the blocked artery. I think it was just 10 days after the operation that I flew to Australia to start a tour… straight back to it!

You can meander through life and think you’re invincible and that sickness is for other people. You think that young people getting ill is just something you see in the papers, then all of a sudden you’re it. You never think it’ll happen to you. But after the operation, I had a new lease of life and needed to find a new way to live. It’s about picking yourself back up and evaluating all the love that you’ve got.

 

 

Lying in a hospital bed, perhaps contemplating life and death, many musicians might have been inclined to write songs far less uplifting than most of those on Death & Love. You’ve mentioned that you wanted to create a record that captured the spirit of the music you loved as a kid and the energy of big nights out at clubs like Le Bateau and The Krazyhouse. Do you feel you’ve achieved that vision?

Absolutely, yeah, I’ve listened to it a bunch of times after we finished recording it and it takes me back to when I first started going out, and the first time I heard the likes of the Arctic Monkeys, The Walkmen and The National. Those were the bands that made me want to play guitar. I really hope that another 16-year-old listens to this album and goes ‘F**k, I wanna start a band’.

I wanted [Death & Love] to be a cathartic release – getting rid of all of that worry and heartache I had about what might have happened to me. There are lyrics on the album which are sadder, but they’re disguised in an indie dancefloor tune. Over the years, I’ve come to see Circa Waves as the festival band you want to go and see with your mates to have a good time. I don’t think we’ll be studied like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen! I’ve made my peace with that. There needs to be bands like us. You can’t have 100 Radioheads – that would be too much! I hope that people see us as that band that they can switch off to the world and let loose to.

There is one track on the album which does directly address your health scare. ‘Blue Damselfly’ reflects your fear of leaving your wife and son behind. Was it difficult to write and perform such a personal song?

I wrote that in the hospital, and yes, it was emotional. My wife and I can’t listen to it – it feels too sad. I’m not sure if we’ll play it on the tour. It chokes me up even thinking about the idea of leaving my wife and son and saying, ‘I know you’ll be alright because you’re both so strong’. It would be hard to perform the song live, but maybe one day. I was lucky enough to see Paul McCartney in Manchester recently and you could see he was getting emotional during certain songs about George and John. If he’s got the strength to sing those songs then maybe I should try and give it a go one day!

What was the recording process like? Was it slightly surreal being in the studio so soon after what had happened?

I wrote the songs quite quickly. If I’m writing good songs, then the process doesn’t take long. Death & Love is in two parts, and we’ve actually just finished the second part. This is our sixth album now and we don’t mess around – we’re quite frugal. The good thing about going through something highly emotional is that you’ve got a lot of ammunition for songs. Melody and emotion are so intertwined. When something really heavy happens to you, you can write good melodies.

I do demos that are fully finished songs. When we go into the studio, the lads record their respective parts. I’m a bit of a control freak and tend to get obsessed with things like the sound of a snare drum or a particular guitar line. I focus on every little detail, which can annoy the band sometimes, but I can’t help it!

Do you have a favourite track from the new album?

‘Hold It Steady’ is one of my favourite ones. It’s got an almost 80’s-ish guitar sound, which I like. It’s something we haven’t done so I hope it surprises people.

The tour kicks off next month and is your biggest headline UK tour to date, with stops at some iconic venues like the Barrowlands in Glasgow and Brixton Academy, before wrapping up at the Olympia here in Liverpool. Are you excited to be back on the road?

We don’t get to tour loads now, being an ‘older band’ – we do festival season then a tour every couple of years. So it’s the highlight of my year playing these gigs. We also get to play golf everyday before each show! I’m obsessed with golf, which is like the least rock and roll thing ever [laughs]. But actually a lot of musicians love the sport. I’ve been speaking to Liam from Courteeners and Tom Grennan – they both love playing. It’s like the opposite of a gig – it’s calm and you’re in a lovely field… there’s no chaos.

My release used to be going out on a weekend and getting pissed, which you don’t really get to do as much when you’ve got kids anyway, but now golf is that for me. It’s a really much better version of that release and lets your brain be free. There’s an app called GolfNow that lets you see what courses and tee times are available in whatever city you’re in. We’re on a bus, of course, so we’ve got the bags in there and we can just wake up at whatever time, play four hours of golf, go soundcheck and then play the gig… it’s boss! I can’t wait [laughs].

We’ve just had our second kid as well, it’s very busy at home right now, so the tour is a bit of a holiday! It is getting harder to leave my son, though, because he’s older and will say, ‘Daddy, please don’t go!’. Trying to keep in touch with him over FaceTime is difficult. But I’m home a lot between tours and I get to spend a lot of time with him, which is something other people who work really full-on might not get to do.

After all the heart stuff, there was a big part of me that was just like, ‘I’m made up to still be here and be able to do anything’. I’m just quite happy now, generally!

Death & Love Pt.1 is out on 31 January. Circa Waves play the Liverpool Olympia on 1 March.