Credit: Jayne Duncan

Glasgow’s Aereogramme are dashing about a wind-battered London on a promotional jaunt as the worst storms for seventeen years wreak havoc everywhere. I catch frontman Craig B in a moment of calm before the band is due to board a bumpy flight back to Glasgow.

Aereogramme’s first album in four years is due on Chemikal Underground on 28^th, January. The delay is put down to familiar record company changes and, more dramatically, to the fact that Craig B lost his singing voice for six whole months. Waiting patiently for a lunch on the hoof, he explains, “We didn’t know if it was going to continue so everybody went their separate ways waiting for my voice to come back. I went to see a throat doctor and he told me to eat yoghurt which I did and it did absolutely nothing. The only thing that made any difference was time ‘cause I’d spent the previous couple of years screaming every single night and whisky and smoking and that was just a horrible combination. I think my body just said stop.”

The beleaguered singer went to see a vocal coach, stopped smoking and came to a stark realisation.  “I wont be able to scream as much as I used to do. I used to just bellow!” he recalls with a smile. “There is that heavy metal teacher that teaches you how to scream but it’s a very trained and horrible sound. There’s nothing like a good, guttural, frustrated, angsty scream! But it also damages your voice.”

In the downtime while waiting for his voice to recover, Craig B wrote the beginnings of the new album; ‘My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go’ on his computer. Understandably it veers away from their signature quiet-loud-quiet-scream-quiet dynamic. The screeches clearly had to go. 

“It still has an epic feel to it,” says Craig B, “but it was only when the band was coming together that we realised because there weren’t the usual tricks we could do the same ideas with the orchestra, [use] different ways of doing the same dynamics.” The additional string arrangements, keyboards and percussion and taken of by their new member Martin Doherty.