Hard hitting UK pop-rockers You Me At Six hail from the county of Surrey. For those who aren’t in the know, Surrey is also the home of Harry Potter. You mightn’t ordinarily draw parallels between You Me At Six’s melodic post-hardcore and everyone’s favourite boy wizard. However, there’s one aspect of the band’s career that echoes the fate of J.K. Rowling’s book series.
Namely, much like the Harry Potter novels, You Me At Six have not only achieved consistent success over a period of several years, but they’ve managed to grab more fans with each successive release.
“The most important thing for us is longevity,” says drummer Dan Flint. “We want to just do this for as long as we can. It’s not about having a monster hit album all over the world and everyone’s singing your song, but then the next year no-one cares about you. That’s our worst nightmare. We really enjoy doing what we do; we get to travel around the world, we get to play music and we get to hang out with our friends. Our goal is to just make that last as long as possible, not to make as much money as possible.”
The band’s longstanding commitment to gradually building its following is now paying tremendous dividends. Upon its release in January last year, You Me At Six’s fourth LP Cavalier Youth reached number one in the UK charts. “We had an inkling in the UK that Cavalier Youth might be quite successful,” says Flint, “but the fact that we got to number one was absolutely crazy.”
Getting to the top of the album charts is an epochal achievement for any musician, but it’s not the realisation of an end goal. Just as it wouldn’t have made sense for the Potter series to get cut short once Rowling became a bestselling author, You Me At Six still have plenty to offer.
“Cavalier Youth has led us into another great set-up for another album,” Flint says. “We’ll be able to leave this on a high and come back in the future with some new music. That’s what we always aim to do – leave it on a high, gradually take a couple more steps up in terms of world domination and try again with another album.”
On the subject of world domination, now they’ve got a UK number one under their belts, You Me At Six are gaining broader exposure in markets beyond their homeland. “We were able to go to America and Australia and places in Europe and Asia and just say, ‘We’ve had a number one album, can we come and play some shows?’ and everyone’s so much more accepting,” Flint explains. “All the previous albums have been successful in their own right as well, they were perfect for what they were, but having that number one album kick-started everything else across the rest of the world for us.”
In actual fact, You Me At Six have had the attention of Australian listeners for several years now, which led to not one but two Australian visits in 2014. Such is the fervour of the band’s Aussie fan base that You Me At Six are back in the country for Groovin The Moo and sideshows. It’s 15 months since Cavalier Youth came out and even Flint is impressed by the record’s lingering impact.
“We had about a six-to-eight-month plan, then the rest of it we thought, ‘Let’s see how it’s going,’” he says. “If there’s demand somewhere we’ll keep going back, and if there’s not then we won’t do it. We’d set up the album quite well, but it was more about riding that wave and seeing how long we could make the album cycle last.
“For us the band has always been a way of travelling and seeing the world,” he adds. “So the fact that we get to come back to Australia again, and we get to play Groovin The Moo, it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun. We’re seeing some new places as well.”
Indeed, while You Me At Six have been frequent Australian tourists over the past five years, the forthcoming tour marks the first time they’ll venture beyond the capital cities.
“We’re thinking to ourselves, ‘Awesome, let’s go see a part of Australia that we’ve never seen before.’ We’ll have quite a few days off as well so we’ll really get to explore the country. Me and my sister were looking the other day at all the places we’re heading to on the festival and we were just thinking, ‘Christ.’ I don’t even know how we’re going to get to these places and there’s going to be a hell of a lot of travelling around. But we’re excited we get to do something different and see a few new faces.
“Whenever someone says, ‘Do you want to go back to Australia?’ our immediate answer is always, ‘Yes. When can we go?’ There might be a couple of people out there in the smaller cities that really want to see us play but have never had the chance to go to one of the major cities. Hopefully there’s going to be a lot of excited people going bananas because they just never get this usually. I can just imagine it’s going to be absolute pandemonium. We’re so excited to do it.”
You Me At Six play Groovin The Moo at Maitland Showground on Saturday May 9. They’ll headline a sideshow at the Metro Theatre on Wednesday May 6.
