Nick Hodgson returns with Everyone Says Hi

Now, though, he’s back with a new band, Everyone Says Hi, whose eponymous album is due out in January.

The 46-year-old says the impetus to make another record himself came 18 months ago after a failed writing session with another musician. Talking to The Yorkshire Post from his studio, Hodgson says: “The writing session wasn’t very good and I didn’t enjoy it and the person left, and I sat down in the next room and got this guitar and started writing a song and I just went, wait and minute, this is the solo album I was definitely not going to make.

“All the albums that I’ve ever been involved in really start with one song. I never start and go, OK, I’m going to do an album, let’s try and work on a song; it always goes oh, I’ve got a song, let’s try and make this into an album.”

The song in question was Only One, and after playing it to his friend Justin Parker, the pair formed a songwriting partnership, with Parker helping out with lyrics. Soon, the songs were flowing.

“It always comes in a big bunch when I’m writing anything good,” Hodgson notes. “If it’s good it comes along with a load of others, and if it’s not good I just wait now. I used to get really upset and stressed, now I just wait, which is part of becoming more mature. You sort of accept that this is the way it is, it’s better than trying to force it.”

The band comprise of Pete Denton on bass, Glenn Moule on drums, keyboard player Ben Gordon (ex-members of The Kooks, The Howling Bells, and Liverpool’s The Dead 60s respectively), alongside Leeds-based guitarist Tom Dawson.

The focus might now be on Hodgson as the band’s frontman, but he says that even in Kaiser Chiefs he was “always the band leader”.

“Back in the olden days it was a great place to be behind the drums because you could see everything,” he says. “And also – I’ve thought about this a lot – because the drums are big you can’t miss them.

“When you’re playing the piano or you’re playing the guitar the little places where your fingers have got to be are a lot smaller and you’ve got to concentrate, but on the drums I didn’t have to concentrate so I was able to listen very easily to the nosie that everyone was creating together, and it was quite a good place to be because you could make alterations. I can’t do that as much now.”

He says that in his home studio he has Minidiscs with “hours and hours” of Kaiser Chiefs rehearsals. “There’s about 100 hours of it and I am shocked at how I’m just telling everyone what to do all the time. A couple of people then in our band left and I’m not surprised. I was a different person, I was telling everyone what to do all the time. Now, it’s much more relaxed and calm.

“I think I was a lot more desperate back then, (thinking) this has to work, it has to work like this. I was ambitious and focused and dictatorial, which got on everyone’s nerves quite a lot. I think I calmed down when we actually made it, I was a bit more relaxed. I can remember that happening, I can remember feeling, ah, I can relax now.”

Hodgson’s band take their name from a song on David Bowie’s album Heathen. Although the late singer was not a direct influence on Everyone Says Hi’s music, Hodgson says he has listened to Bowie’s music for many years.

“I was in bands from about (the age of) 11 and I was more inspired by the film The Commitments because there you had it on the screen: how to do a band. I didn’t know how to do a band so I watched The Blues Brothers and I watched The Commitments, so our first band, me and Simon (Rix), we were called the Ex-Presidents and we did songs from The Commitments. But when you get a bit older and start to dig a bit deeper, Bowie became the obvious thing,” he says.

“My brother got into Bowie in the 90s. The first album he got into was Black Tie, White Noise, which is from ’93, so it was such a weird place to start but then he went back and he got me into (the earlier albums). Life on Mars he used to blast as loud as he could and because it was my brother and we used to fight, I’d say it was rubbish, but gradually I realised there was a lot in it. Hunky Dory was the big one for me, I got into that in 1995 and a lot changed in the way I wrote. I was only 16 or 17 and it was very inspirational.

“But to be honest, I’d never heard of the song Everyone Says Hi. I had a band name in my notes in my phone called Everyone Say Hi and I went on Spotify to check to see if it had already been taken and it hadn’t but then the Bowie song came up and I changed it to Everyone Says Hi. It’s a great song, actually, we should do a cover of it.”

Everyone Says Hi’s debut gigs earlier this year were, says Hodgson, revitalising. “It was the best I’ve felt for years, not just onstage but generally in my life,” he says. “Going onstage, coming offstage and thinking, what have I been wasting my time for in the studio? This is what I’m about, this is who I am, so we had to book so more gigs, and we’ve got these in October. I want more and more, really. I just got obsessed with them, I love it. I’ve been wasting my time until now.”

Shaping the new songs in rehearsal reminded Hodgson of the days before Kaiser Chiefs released their first album, Employment. It is, he says, quite different to the years he’s spent co-writing with others.

“Co-writing you’re always going through a filter of what the person who’s going to sing it wants, so you’re always one step back, which is why it’s good and also bad, because you don’t really represent yourself, you’re just trying all the time to please somebody, which is not a great place to be,” he says. “With this, the reason I remember saying it was like 2003​​​​​​​ was because we would play the songs in rehearsal. When I made all the demos, people from the band would come in but mainly it was (just) me; when we got into the rehearsal place ahead of going into the recording studio ​​​​​​​we were changing the songs, taking bits out, saying we don’t need this or this could be longer​​​​​​​. It really reminded me of what it was like in a band, which is something I hadn’t done for a long time.

“When I did my solo album, I recorded it all, did the demos, made the record and everything and then people just had to copy it (live), but this time we were shaping it. I’d forgotten that was a good feeling, and also when you collaborate, the reason why it’s good is people bring in their ideas and often they’re things that you would never have thought of. You’ve got your own path and your own way of thinking, somebody else has got their own way of thinking and when you’ve got a song they come along and say, ‘let’s do that’ and the younger me would’ve gone, no way, and the older me goes, Wait, Nick, I know you want to say no way but wait, let’s see what the person can offer. I’ve got that into my brain now.”

A couple of the new songs were written in Hodgson’s old flat in Leeds as he consciously tried to remind himself of the way he used to work. “I live in London but I also come up to Leeds a lot and I realised that all the songs I really love and the ones that were probably the most successful were all written in Leeds,” he says. “I’ve got a five-year-old and I said to my wife, I need to go to Leeds for a few days, I’m just going to sit in a flat and write songs. She understood, which is really good.

“I went up twice and I wrote Brain Freeze, which was the first single. When I say I wrote it, I didn’t finish it, I just came up with enough to think, this is a song, for me that’s job done, the rest is just making it work. I also wrote a song called Lucky Stars, which is going to coem out at the beginning of next year, I think, and a couple of other bits, but really those two are kind of key songs. It was interesting to just sit in a flat where you wrote Oh My God and I Predict a Riot and Modern Way and Never Miss a Beat. I can remember all those times when I sat in that flat coming up with those songs and just thinking, I’ve got to get back to that.”

Everyone Says Hi’s album is out on January 31. The band play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on Sunday October 27. https://www.everyone-says-hi.com/