The Delgados brought the cold. That the Glasgow quartet played a warm, churning and intimate set at Lee’s Palace last week during the last vicious cold snap of the year was, like their music, an uneasily beautiful coexistence of opposites.
Discussing the band’s multi-layered musical universe before the show, Emma Pollock says, “Our music is quite often pretty, [but] with fairly dark lyrics, so we can end up presenting a magical feel.” Hate, the eleven-year-old band’s most recent album, is “lyrically quite sombre, quite dark in places, and musically it’s very, very sweet and cheerful,” agrees Alun Woodward, who shares vocalist and guitarist duties with Pollock. It’s “in the same bent as fairy tales, [which] are often very dark, but presented as palatable for children.”
The ambiguity seems to suit them. Doing a rare tour as a four-piece, unaided by their usual complement of orchestral strings, The Delgados played the sophisticated bar band, cracking jokes about Canadian beer and Scottish sex. But during the songs, the players seemed lost in their driving, bass-heavy arrangements, isolated, emotional fragments wrapped in sound.
“You really get propelled along by the music” onstage, Pollock notes. Woodward adds, “The lyrics are intensely personal. It does feel a bit confessional… The first time I tell anybody what I think about something is sometimes in a song.” Pollock and Woodward write lyrics separately, each trying “to encapsulate a moment, and to express it absolutely” without sharing ideas. The end result can be a revelation, even for the writer: “I don’t let lyrics go until they’re ready,” explains Woodward, and that can mean writing something that “[I] read back and think, ‘that’s quite good, I couldn’t possibly have written that!'” he quips.
The end result is a strangely diffused emotional intensity, sincere but free-floating. Even if he’s played a song “a hundred times, [sometimes] you just kind of get lost in the show,” says Woodward. Playing becomes “about feeling the atmosphere, feeling the song, and suddenly you’re singing the lyrics and thinking ‘thank god’ [that] you’re able to do it!” chimes in Pollock.
The Delgados’ push/pull between throwing themselves into intensity and running to take refuge from the world extends off-stage as well. Starting their own label, Chemikal Underground, was “a lot more work than I’d ever imagined,” says Woodward. But it was also “a putting off of real life, in a way… in the back of your head, you always have this idea that at some point you have to grow up and get a job, like my parents had, or something. When I look back at it, it seems kind of closed-minded of me-the thoughts of a young mind that hadn’t seen much of the world, [but I] always thought that you have to grow up and do things that you don’t want to do. But it hasn’t happened.”
Which isn’t to say that other, equally tragic things haven’t happened. Although The Delgados are full of indeterminate pronouns, oblique and imprecise, they allude in their lyrics and in conversation to having grown through trauma. “As the years have gone by and more things have happened in all our lives, [and] there’s been a lot happening, quite serious issues… life just takes on a very different sheen, and something just shifts. The lyrics reflect a different stage in our lives, and I’m a lot more likely to write about these topics,” Pollock explains.
For their last album, ‘hate’ (“an overused word and an underused reality”) was the focus. “People say all the time that they hate something-‘Oh, I hate broccoli’, you know. But we do hate things every day of our lives that we don’t always acknowledge. But we all like to think that we don’t hate, that it’s a base emotion and that we’re capable of rising above it, instead of seeing it as a complex, necessary emotion,” says Woodward. “I really don’t believe that sheep hate; I believe they just hang about. An extreme physical emotion… is what drives you to develop” even as it wreaks violence, he suggests.
Near and far, cold and warm, achingly pretty and suffocatingly angry; The Delgados exist in the balance of violent opposites. It’s “a very, very difficult thing, really,” muses Pollock. “I will go through the day and I will feel a million different emotions at different times… and really the difficulty [is] in realizing that there are other people in the world and you should acknowledge their wants and desires as well as your own, and at the same time you want to live a happy life. And that’s the balance you have to work at.”
