Musichub: In Conversation With The Bluetones
"This album doesn’t belong to us anymore" : Mark Morriss on 30 years of The Bluetones’ No. 1 album, Expecting to Fly
By Olivia Farnworth, FreshAir's MusicHub
There’s a particular kind of full-circle moment that makes being a music journalist feel almost too good to be true: sitting down to interview someone whose music has soundtracked so much of your own life.
For me, Expecting to Fly, the Bluetones’ 1996 debut, has been a constant presence. I first pulled it from my dad’s CD collection as a tween, drawn in, as any self-respecting eleven-year-old might be, by the album cover alone. Since then, it’s soundtracked everything from my late teens to moving to Edinburgh, even finding its way into my FreshAir demo. Somewhere along the way, a record I’d stumbled across as a kid became one of those albums that feels woven into the fabric of my own life and musical identity.
So when I heard that the Bluetones were taking Expecting to Fly back on the road for its 30th anniversary, playing the record in full, I was delighted. The irony of being 20 years old and getting excited about an album’s 30th anniversary wasn’t lost on me, but perhaps that’s part of what makes the record so special: it has truly outlived the moment that made it, finding its way to listeners who weren’t even born when it first reached number one.
Then Mark Morriss, the band’s frontman, replied to my interview request with a simple “let’s do it”.
Predictably, I was giddy. Fresh off a four-hour train journey, I found myself in the smoking area of Edinburgh’s Liquid Room, sitting down with Morriss to talk about the album, the band’s journey, the legacy of Britpop, and what it means to revisit a record that has been out in the world for three decades.
There’s obviously something very special about returning to music you made in your early twenties. The songs might remain as you left them, but the people playing them have grown older, the world around them has changed, and the audience has made the music their own. For the Bluetones, revisiting Expecting to Fly is about more than recreating a moment in 1996. It’s an opportunity to reconnect with the record that started it all - and to reckon with the life it has lived since.
For Mark Morriss, frontman of The Bluetones, revisiting Expecting to Fly on it’s 30th anniversary tour, has meant reconnecting with a record and a time that has taken on a life of its own. Released in ’96, the band’s aptly named debut ‘flew’ to number one in the UK charts and famously knocked Oasis’ legendary What’s the Story off the top spot. Now, as The Bluetones come together once more to take it back on the road, Morriss finds himself looking at the record from a perspective he could have hardly imagined when the band first made it.
“We’ve spent a lot of time listening and preparing and rehearsing,”, he explains.
It’s clear that the band wanted to be as faithful as possible to the original recordings, despite the years of playing and performing that have inevitably changed them as musicians and men.
The reason goes beyond getting the arrangements right.
“This isn’t our album anymore. It belongs to the audience, so we’ve gotta get it right”, Mark exclaims.
It’s a striking and refreshing acknowledgement from an artist revisiting the defining record of his career; the idea that an album might reflect a particular moment in a band’s life, but once its released, it’s meaning belongs to the fans.
Rediscovering their younger selves
As we chat, Mark paints the picture of 1995’s summer. The band had been playing together for around four years, they’d spent considerable time developing their sound and honing the songs, but were relatively short on material. Once they had recorded their single, Bluetonic and its B-sides, there were only so many songs left to draw on.
As a listener it always amazed me how self-assured and formed the record sounds considering how young and new the band were at the time. When asked if it felt like a confident album then, Mark laughs slightly at the thought.
“We liked it when we finished it. We were pleased with it. But we had no idea it was gonna have the success it did”
Returning to ETF has offered a chance to appreciate the work with the benefit of experience. The band have grown as musicians, but Morriss believes they have retained the same underlying swing. More than anything, revisiting the album seems to have reminded them of their younger ambition that drove them in the first place.
“Climbing back inside our 24 year old heads”, he says, describing the experience of working through the arrangements again. “We’re kind of impressed with our younger selves. There was definitely some ambition there!”
Morriss suggests that art, in any capacity, can become strangely distant from the person making it. Once a song has been recorded and released, attention naturally shifts towards whatever comes next.
“You put it to one side and think about what’s in front of you”
Thirty years on, the tour has interrupted that process, requiring the band to examine songs they otherwise have left behind. In doing so, a new appreciation is found for a record that has continued to resonate long after they finished making it.
An album enduring
The question of what makes an album, especially a debut, endure is difficult to answer. Morriss admits that he doesn’t recognise those qualities in his own work, but he spots them in records he has returned to over the years.
For him, longevity cannot be explained by nostalgia alone. “There’s something else, isn’t there? More than sentimentality”
A song might remain meaningful because you’ve identified with it lyrically or, in Mark’s words, “it just still bloody grooves!”.
Whatever it is, he makes clear that he’s reluctant to put a shelf life on music. “There’s no sell by date” he proclaims, questioning the assumption that a record must lose its relevance as time inevitably passes.
“You change, the art stays the same”
His conviction here is especially salient to an anniversary tour. Playing an album start to finish can easily become an exercise in recreating a moment, a flash in the pan of 90s Britpop, that no longer exists. But he reassures me, “We love this time, it’s gone really well”.
When I asked about the audiences the tour has drawn out, Mark himself recalls being in his early twenties and seeking out music from decades prior. He and his friends were often in London clubs dramatically younger than the other people there (something I experienced myself that night at the gig) but it doesn’t make the music any less meaningful.
Asked how it feels to know that twenty-somethings, like myself, still rank Expecting to Fly among their favourites, he responds humbly, “It warms me. I feel very lucky and it’s also reassuring to know that there are young people out their with good taste!’ – he jokes cheekily.
The comment carries an obvious humour, but beneath it I find something more significant. The album no longer needs to belong to a specific generation. Its continued legacy depends on people discovering and connecting with something in it for themselves, regardless of it they were there for the 1995 release.
More than Britpop
For all the album’s enduring appeal, The Bluetones’ place in British music history is often understood through the label of Britpop. It’s an association that Mark has never found entirely comfortable.
Speaking about whether the movement felt exciting from within or whether the band felt grouped into a scene not reflecting them, Morriss is clear on his preference.
“I think everyone wants individual consideration, don’t they, rather than being lumped in?”
His objection is not simply to a convenient genre label, but to the assumptions that can accompany it. As Mark sees it, being grouped in with a particular musical moment can lead listeners to believe they already know what a band sounds like before giving its music a chance.
He also challenges the tendency to look back at this period of British guitar-led music as defined by laddish excess. The rise of lad culture and its connotations, he suggests, did not represent the entire music scene.
“We tried to distance ourselves from that culture.”
Morriss maintains that The Bluetones followed their own path, approaching each album as a separate piece of work – an philosophy that has followed them throughout their career and beyond the period with which they are most readily affiliated with.
A band that still feels like a band
One of the more revealing notes on my conversation with Mark is how little he speaks about Expecting to Fly as an isolated achievement. Throughout our chat, he proudly ties the album and its success to the relationships that made it possible.
He looks back fondly on the early years of the band, describing the experience of touring together as something between “a ride and a holiday”.
“We still like each other. We still have fun. We still hangout”.
There’s not a whisper of the tension defining other (unnamed) bands of the era!
Still, the balance of new and old is key for Mark, even when touring ETF. The past may be what brings a generation together for this particular series of shows, but Morriss remains enthusiastic about playing newer songs and continuing to write. The band are prepared and well-accustomed to giving fans what they have come to hear, while trusting that there will be opportunities to introduce more recent work.
“We just be patient”, he says
When asked whether he would change anything about the making of Expecting to Fly, Mark’s answer is entirely unequivocal.
“No I wouldn’t. No. I think we did it just right.”
There is one small exception: a technical adjustment to the bass levels during mastering. It’s an amusingly precise qualification to an otherwise wholehearted endorsement of the experience. The process, the people around them, and the bond formed in the studio are all, rightly so, things he would leave untouched.
Nearly thirty years on, Expecting to Fly is both a record of who The Bluetones were and a living part of who they are. Its significance is no longer confined to the four lads who made it, or the audience who took it to number one.
For The Bluetones, perhaps that is the real achievement of a record that continues to find new listeners. The songs have survived the moment that produced them, the labels bestowed upon them, and crucially - the passage of time.
And if the album now belongs to its audience, the band’s responsibility is to honour what it has become.
Having seen them live, I can say The Bluetones do just that.
You can listen to the full MusicHub interview below.
Tune in Friday 2-4 for more!
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