In an era dominated by playlists, TikTok, Reels and Shorts, reduced attention spans and endless content, Karnivool doubled down on the album as a complete statement - the album as the antidote. As Drew Goddard says. “In the age of content, I thought it was even more important to release an album.”

For Karnivool, the album remains more than a collection of tracks. It is a long-form quest (in this case, lasting 12 years), both for the band and the listener. “I struggle with focus,” Goddard explains, “so committing to a long-form thing was important. Something that could hold people captive for a little bit. Stop them in their tracks.”

At this point, it hits hard just how much work goes into the making of an album, especially one as epic as In Verses. With each passing year, Karnivool fans' patience was tested and their expectations, inevitably, notched upwards. 

I don’t think anyone will be disappointed, but perhaps it would help for the band to crack on towards the next album…soonish. 

Despite the long wait, the band insists they weren’t consciously responding to external pressure. “We weren’t really thinking about the stakes,” Jon Stockman says. “We were so embroiled in the process itself.” 

After 12 years, the achievement is not just the record itself. “We’re still friends,” Stockman notes. “We’re still enjoying it.” 

In a career defined by patience and precision, simply arriving together for a new album and what many may see as a career-defining tour, may be Karnivool’s greatest artistic statement yet. And that may be an understatement. 

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I gave Sean Rowley a call after writing up an article on “Unguilty Pleasures” (see Chill Gonzales episode 64) - Gonzales' campaign against music snobbery and treatise on the pleasures of Enya's music. It became clear that the story of Rowley's own creation, Guilty Pleasures, was very much a candidate for the Art of Longevity. 

Guilty Pleasures became that wonderful thing - a content brand (before we called them that) that grew octopus arms. The club nights quickly grew by word-of-mouth, expanding to multiple venues, festivals, and international events, and becoming a fixture of the UK nightlife scene. Then came a series of successful compilation CDs, at a time when compilations still did big business in music. It went on to radio, live tours, and special events (including opening for George Michael at the new Wembley Stadium), helping to popularise nostalgia-driven and feel-good music culture. In Rowley’s own words “nostalgia is a fucking wonderful thing”. Well, he did make a career out of it, so he would understand. 

For an idea to build the way it has, and to last so long, it needed to be something deeper. With Guilty Pleasures, Rowley challenged prevailing ideas of musical “taste” and helped normalise the celebration of mainstream pop, even in alternative spaces. He gave music snobbery a good clobbering and in doing so, established a legacy on DJ culture and the wider acceptance of joyful, communal music experiences. 

The evidence is everywhere: the enormously popular Despacio Disco launched by James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) and the Dewaele brothers (of Soulwax and 2ManyDJs). And then James Gunn of course, with the Guardians of The Galaxy soundtrack, which mined similar territory. The pandemic brought us Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco. Tik Tok has of course done wonders for the “genre”- famous for making Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride” a sensation, now with 500m streams on Spotify. 

And on it goes, the sprawling influence of a simple idea that is underpinned by the even simpler concept of the joy of music. 

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Emerging from Edinburgh’s music scene in the mid-1990s, Idlewild carved out their place in a British rock scene choc-a-bloc with guitar bands (the halo of Britpop) through a combination of emotional intensity and literary edge. All of this is present in the band still, right down to new song “Back Then You Found Me” name checking Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. 

Their 1998 debut album, Hope Is Important, announced them as something more than just another Scottish guitar band. Their songs were tight, but angular, and threaded with Woomble’s poetic phrasing and a strong melodic core. Did Idlewild have the boom and bust fame of Brett Anderson’s “Stations of the Cross” career curve (on which this podcast is based, I remind you)?

Of a sort, yes. Building on an acclaimed debut album (Broken Windows),  2002’s The Remote Part, Idlewild reached a classic creative x commercial peak. That album is perhaps still their most well known - a more expansive, anthemic sound without abandoning the sensibilities that had become their trademark. It contained bona fide chart hits, “You Held the World in Your Arms” and “American English” and set the band on the way to being one of the key British bands in the early 2000s.

But in a sense, the “stratospheric rise to the top” was kept well in check. Perhaps it was personnel changes (I haven’t counted but the band has had more than its fair share of bassists). They pivoted toward a warmer, more reflective style on Warnings/Promises (2005), incorporating folk influences and richer textures. It bridged the band to maturity and opened up their options but ultimately did not satisfy the major label they were signed to, Parlophone. 

An arena tour with Coldplay somewhat exposed Idlewild’s “limitations” if you want to put it that way - not musically, but in terms of performance - the will and the way to take their show to the big stages expected by major labels. 

There was no meltdown, no drama. But major label life is what it is - both back then, and in the present time. “Our label mates were Kylie Minogue, Radiohead, Coldplay and Blur. We were definitely at the bottom of that pile”.

When Parlophone didn’t want to renew a new deal after four albums, it was time for the band to re-adjust. To Woomble, it was liberating - eventually. 

“For Make Another World, we felt like we’d toured enough, we had a fan base. Then after Post Electric Blues (2009) we decided to take some time away. As a band we felt intact, but we also felt like we wanted to stay up at the level we were, not to end up just playing clubs. The music business was so strange then (2007), we ended up taking five years away and came back with a renewed sense of what we could do, creatively”. 

Their string of subsequent albums, Everything Ever Written (2015), Interview Music (2019) and now Idlewild all have something to offer, and demonstrate the band’s refusal to stagnate. The one-two punch of Woomble’s poetic lyrics and Jones’s jagged, urgent guitar work still delivers something, if not unique, then most definitely a cut above standard indie fare - more depth, more emotion. 

Few bands transition successfully from ragged punk-inflected rock to expansive indie-folk, but Idlewild managed it without alienating their audience or diluting their artistic character. In short, Idlewild’s career is a testament to thoughtful songwriting, evolution, and the enduring power of emotionally intelligent rock. Most definitely an interesting and quietly inspiring longevity story. 

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I’ve been trying to get Tim Burgess to join me on The Art of Longevity for at least 10 seasons. Ultimately, a new Charlatans album, We Are Love, seemed like the right reason to finally do it. 

I’ve said it before, but I’m genuinely amazed and thrilled about how many ‘old bands’ have put out a recent album that is up there with their very best work. Suede, The Manics, Nada Surf, Tindersticks et. al. And I’m delighted to now include The Charlatans in that club. The band’s new album, #14 no less, is wonderful. Confident, varied, suitably different but very much representative, it’s a thoughtful and entertaining record throughout, containing some of the band’s best songs for ages; notably both the lead singles, opener Kingdom Of Ours, Appetite, For The Girls, You Can’t Push The River and, Tim’s own choice - Out On Our Own. But honestly, this is another cracking end-to-end listen with none of the filler that has perhaps been there in the past on some Charlatans offerings (along with all those above mentioned bands). 

“I’m really confident that it will seep in. We’re enigmatic and thugs as well. Some of it bangs you over the head but it has an emotional impact that I think, gets there”. 

]Like many people of a certain vintage, The Charlatans have been one of those reassuring presences in my life over the years. Perhaps never the best or the biggest, The Charlatans longevity story has been to simply keep on keeping on, eventually unfolding into a slow-burning surprise journey towards British indie rock legend. You may not have predicted it back in the early days, despite a couple of genuine early hits, but when a band finds its formula and works at it, the miracles come later. 

Some early success in 1990 brought the top 5 hit “The Only One I Know”, but it wasn’t a linear rise from that point on. By album five, Telling Stories (1997) the band had a genuine classic album on their hands, including the legendary indie hit “One To Another” (which new single “Deeper And Deeper” nods to brilliantly). With that momentum, the Charlatans crossed the rubicon into longevity, establishing themselves as one of the more enduring British indie bands, with genuine peaks of popular success (three UK number one albums). 

When I asked Tim the secret to the band’s longevity, he’s pretty clear with the answer:

“The reason why people are into older bands now is that they don’t all sound the same. Now, everyone sounds the same but has to invent a persona to be different, whereas we [old bands] all are, effortlessly different”.

From the get go, the band’s instrumentation, with the late Rob Collins’s Hammond organ at its core, gave The Charlatans a distinctive fusion of indie rock, soul, psychedelia and dance music. But with due respect to the band’s sound, much of the enduring fondness for the band comes from Tim Burgess himself. His vocal style is sunny but with underlying yearning, his style as a frontman effortlessly optimistic and embracing. And while Burgess remains best known as a singer and frontman of this band, he has also pursued a range of solo, collaborative and curatorial projects that make him something of a “renaissance man” and, as I suggest in our conversation, something of a National Treasure. 

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“I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.” Those words were spoken at one time by David Bowie, and thus are gospel to us here on The Art of Longevity podcast. Fortunately, some bands still live by that same philosophy. For evidence, we revisit the world of Suede. 

Suede has refused to become boring. Somehow, this band of 40 years have gone the other way - more exciting and visceral than ever. Suede are not hanging about to become their own echo! Albums like Autofiction and now, its immediate follow-up Antidepressants are not just the proverbial ‘return to form’ type records. They are nothing short of a reinvention. Mat Osman, co-founder member with Brett Anderson and bass player, shares his views on the new Suede record:

“It feels like Autofiction on steroids. If Autofication was a TV show, Antidepressants is the film version. We took everything more widescreen with this record”. 

However, for Osman - you can forget about that old cliche of a band making music for themselves and hoping the world will agree (that’s what Rick Rubin has been telling us with The Creative Act: A Way of Being and to be fair, more than a few artists have told me it works for them. It's not for Suede. Instead, the band’s creative mission has been guided by their fans - their reactions at live shows, to the band directly, but also the band’s own interpretation of what a Suede audience really wants. 

“A band without an audience isn’t a band. It’s a hobby,” Osman declares. That emotional connection is Mat’s affirmation - fan tattoos of favourite songs, tears at gigs, and stories about Suede songs at weddings. This fan connection is Suede’s compass in the band’s 4th career phase. And so we return to a key central theme of longevity; usefulness to people. 

“As I get older, those moments where someone says, ‘That song helped me,’ mean everything,” he reflects. “That’s what I’m proud of. There’s a community feel [between the band and the fans] that becomes more and more important. 

It’s evident from this ‘Revisited’ episode, that Mat Osman and Brett Anderson have a fair degree of telepathy on many things - a shared vision that no doubt has added focus to Suede’s current run of creative form. They even agree on the most ironic thing about where Suede has arrived; that they were the least likely band to survive in the first place. 

“Longevity is not something we strived for, it just happened as a side effect of our bloody mindedness and passion for making music”.

They still have it. 

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Now well over a decade in the music industry, Tom Odell is motoring through a successful second phase as an independent artist. His recent albums have leaned into more introspective, personal material that has resonated so much that he now attracts bigger audiences to bigger shows (an arena tour is forthcoming), and continues to grow a very large base of listeners on the streaming platforms. 

Indeed, he sits comfortably (and ironically) within Spotify’s elite of Top 200 streaming artists. He is in the 0.01% of working artists, the “Billions Club”, a place he never set out to be but nevertheless, belongs. Odell broke free of the major label system (not his choice at the time but transformational as it turned out) three albums ago, to find a whole new level of creative and commercial success. Most of all, with his seventh studio album A Wonderful Life on the horizon, the singer-songwriter has found a renewed sense of purpose. 

His time touring with artists like Billie Eilish and the Lumineers has given him a first-hand glimpse of the very top tier of success in a changed industry, a secret sauce that may well rub off on him more as a result of those experiences. Odell is a hopeful soul. In a world of quantity over quality, 100,000 songs a day and AI about to increase that number ad infinitum, he has a strong idea about where a solution may lie to all the madness. “I really have faith in the listener. I believe people will find the good stuff. And when I look at what’s big right now, most of the time I go, ‘Yeah, that’s really good, that’s why it's big”. 

As A Wonderful Life gets closer to release, Odell isn’t looking to chase the numbers, or meet any industry expectations. He’s following the music. “I didn’t get into this to be big,” he says. “I got into it because I love it. And I still do.” His Spotify biog says it all. No flowery press copy, no AI generated summary, no self-penned promo, just 33 million monthly listeners and a simple keyboard smile emoji. 

One wonders how far he will go. 

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Singer-songwriter Amy MacDonald has never been one to chase trends - an impressive show of resistance for an artist whose music journey began with teenage stardom (the streaming monster hit “This Is The Life” was all over the radio when she was just 19). Macdonald could be forgiven for trying to stay in the spotlight, but she was never that bothered about industry fuss in the first place, protected as she is by a finely tuned bullshit detector, a birthright for anyone born in the vicinity of Glasgow.  

That said, as her career has developed (she is now on her sixth album), MacDonald admits to worrying more…about mostly everything. New album Is This What You’ve Been Waiting For? is a cheeky dig at years of being asked when new music was coming, yet it comes with a certain anxiety about how it will go down, about how the world sees her now. “I keep myself up at night just thinking about shite basically, it's ingrained in me - I just want it to be good for everybody involved”. Staying grounded matters to Macdonald. When asked what she’s most proud of, her answer is modest but telling: “That I’m still doing this. There were so many times I thought I was going to sack it all in. But here I am, album six, and people still seem to be interested.”

It's easy to forget how much responsibility falls on the shoulders of solo musicians. It’s as if the strength of her songwriting might not be enough. But it is. 

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In the intervening four years since Olly Knights first joined me, the band has been on something of a creative roll; two fine albums, a successful acoustic tour and something of a collective raising of the game. To my mind, this is how established bands of longevity should operate; to hell with the mainstream and gatekeepers, just do the very best work you can and keep those fans happy. 

The new Turin Brakes album Spacehopper saw the band going back to the start - recording the album at Konk, the recording studio founded by The Kinks in 1973 and where Turin Brakes recorded their classic debut The Optimist. This of course, was in contrast to the homely recording of post-pandemic Wide Eyed Nowhere, still a fine record but very different in character to Spacehopper. This time around too, the lead single from the new album, “The Message”, had some much deserved radio play on BBC Radio 2. 

But still, no hits to speak of, and the album reached the UK chart for just a fleeting moment. A hit would be nice for this band, but Ollie Knights remains more philosophical than ever:

“You take the wins where you can. Our happiness levels are less influenced by “success” in the mainstream areas. We’ve finally learned after decades of smashing up against the wall. We get over it very quickly if something is disappointing in the mainstream realm. That’s the bit you were not thinking about when you were dreaming about a career in music as a kid”. 

Indeed. For bands of Quiet Legend, still making excellent records and blowing the roof off venues live - it’s time to build your own momentum. There’s a lot to learn from Turin Brakes. 

To be contrarian for a moment though, this band may still get their moment. When you consider that those early classic hits (remember “Pain Killer” was a top five UK hit in the summer of 2003, whilst the band’s first chart single “The Underdog (Save Me)” has become an evergreen classic) are still relatively understreamed. The band’s biggest song on Spotify remains the 2016 ballad Save You with just over seven million streams. Sooner or later, that is bound to change, but until it does, the band continues to thrive organically, with or without the accolades. Their momentum is such that they are back in a place where it's still exciting after 25 years. 

“There is always something on the workbench. The chemistry between me and Gale and between the four of us - without those relationships, forget it. We look forward to getting together and playing, we’re excited about it. And when people come to see us live it's as if they want to come and watch the relationships happen”. 

Turin Brakes are the indie folk band that rocks. Good luck to them.

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Estelle is old school. With a modern twist yes, but nonetheless, if this most eclectic of artists leans in any particular direction it is towards ‘classic’. She even says it in one her own songs; "I'm not of-the-moment. I am a classic, yeah, I live at the MoMA” (The Life, opening track of her 2012 album All of Me). She is quite the proverbial eclectic artist - edgy but not (un)necessarily shocking, traditional but modern enough to make her point in the era of precision-tool song production, and forever flitting between a dozen sub-genres (across hip hop, R&B, pop, reggae and soul). 

Classify Estelle at your peril. 

New album Stay Alta has throwback quality to it that is extremely welcome in the current climate. Although it was conceived as a post-pandemic record, it works effectively as a tonic for the turbulent times we are living through right now. It channels Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder and…Melba Moore. Like records by those artists, Stay Alta is an organic listen and auto-tune is strictly off limits. But somehow, it is modern. 

Stay Alta themes include gratitude, celebration, joy and defiance but not the migraine-inducing platitudinal kind - just the straightforward take it or leave it kind. You should take it. It is album number six across a career of two decades, so Estelle does not subscribe to FOBF, the “fear of being forgotten” that is the scourge of many modern pop artists in today’s fast-flowing pop scene. Instead, she is happy to take her time. There is something to note in her approach about time, longevity, and lineage. Estelle seems acutely aware of whose shoulders she stands on. It’s not unconnected to the fact that The Estelle Show (her 5-days a week Apple Music radio show, which won an esteemed Gracie Award for Women In Media) provides a platform to put her fellow peers and new artists in context alongside legendary artists. Classics and new classics sit side by side - why can’t broadcast radio pull that off? Anyhow, credit to Estelle. It was her idea, her pitch to Apple, and now it's her show. And that is how Estelle rolls. 

At this stage, she is a serious artist living outside of the mainstream and not really in need of a hit anyhow. But yes, she is a songwriter and an artist with the potential to strike at any time. She knows where she is from and how to reach deep into that well. 

“I see credit and beauty in artists who know where they come from because you then have a well to pull from. If I know funk and I’m a new era funk artist I know where to find that bassline. If I’m a drum & bass artist I can go to that Roni Size beat and sample it or repurpose it. Nothing’s new under the sun”. 

Damn right. 

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During our live interview with Skye Edwards and Ross Godfrey of Morcheeba, I found myself at one stage scrolling through my notes to find a description of the band’s sound I’d queried using Chat GPT. I couldn’t find it at the time but here is what it said:

“Morcheeba’s signature rich, mellow music became the soundtrack of the suburban homes and chillout rooms of the late 90s and early 00s”.

That’s a composite of much that has been written about the band over some 30 years, and it doesn’t really flatter does it? “The devil’s own lounge band” is the quip that Skye Edwards recalled from an early review. The music press loves to characterise bands, but in Morcheeba’s case, it comes across somewhat dumbed down. Contained within Morcheeba’s mellow sounds are multiple layers of influence that reveal hidden depths with every listen. The interview with the band for this launch episode for The Art of Longevity (Season 12!) manages to scratch just beneath the surface at least. That said, Morcheeba know their place in making music that can be the perfect backdrop, to quote Ross Godfrey:

“We’ve always made relaxing music. You can get home from work on a Friday night, have a glass of wine or smoke a spliff or whatever and play our music”. 

On the other hand, the sheer depth of their musical influences and references can be breathtaking. Within the mix are Bacharach, Barry and Morricone of course, but also Brazilian late 60s Tropicalia, and somewhat less obviously (but most certainly in terms of always impressive guitar work) classic rock from Ross Godfrey’s childhood favourites Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix. Meanwhile, Skye’s lyrics and styles include 70s country music, along with ska and dub reggae. All of this is somehow weaved into the seamless Morcheeba sound on the new outstanding album Escape The Chaos. 

Launched in the mid-90s and quickly swept along on the British ‘trip-hop’ wave, Morcheeba outlasted most of their contemporaries including Portishead (who refused to heed to the repeated calls to re-form). Morcheeba is one of those bands you might easily have forgotten about. And yet the band has (give or take a short hiatus and shuffling of personnel sometime between 2003 and 2009) steadily worked their way to 11 albums over 30 years, most of it under the radar of music industry gatekeepers and without much love from the music press. “They hated us” was Skye Edward’s response when I brought up the subject of early press reviews. And yet, Pitchfork gave their debut album Who Can You Trust (1996) an 8.3/10, but then stopped loving them as the band’s popularity took off. Recent single We Live & Die references “in the old days of NME” which had me going on to Wayback Machine to dig out an NME review from 1998 of the breakthrough album Big Calm. It was the now legendary music critic Syvia Patterson, who wrote:

“Morcheeba you see, sounds nothing like Portishead. They sound like they like life”.

That has certainly proved a lasting observation. And Morcheeba has proved a lasting British trip hop institution. One of the few 90s bands that just seem to keep on getting better and better. 

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