Audion: the great escape

Mathew Dear is not at all how you’d imagine him to be if you caught him playing the aloof and faintly troubled frontman at one of his live band shows. He’s handsome enough to pass as a Hollywood actor, so is there an element of acting when he performs live? He looks mildly affronted. “That’s me, man! I never wanted to force an ego on stage. I knew that if I tried to be somebody I wasn’t, I would fall flat on my face. But by allowing myself to find out who I wanted to be on stage… over time I became that person.” Ah, so there is a transformation that takes place? He smiles enigmatically. “When you’re in a dark room and you have the power of a microphone, the adrenaline’s flowing and the music’s loud, then… things happen.”

What about some of the darker lyrics on ‘Beams’? “I feel hollow as the grave I have to dig every day”; “How could you trust someone as suspicious as me?” These don’t sound like the kind of things that the everyday Matthew Dear would say. “I think I live on a surface layer of existence and there’s a lot that happens subconsciously,” he says. “Music becomes an outlet. It allows you to say things that you wouldn’t say in normal conversation. But I don’t always know what it means. Mostly it’s just about the rhythm and the pattern of the words and the way they fit into the music.”

Recently he visited Simian Mobile Disco at their studio in Kent and wrote four songs in four days, giving full rein to his subconscious while Jas and James tweaked the drums. He’s not sure yet what those lyrics will to reveal about him, but he’s content to leave that to the amateur psychiatrists among us. All he will say is that he’s hoping to put out a new Matthew Dear album early next year.

But he’s not going to abandon his fruitful Audion sideline and the chance to make a dark room full of ravers go haywire. “I’ve been doing this for a long time and it still makes me smile, still energises me,” he says, emerging onto the Brighton promenade at 2.30am as hungry revellers shield their chips from dive-bombing seagulls. “I like seeing people lose their shit.”

Audion's 'Alpha' is out now on !K7