The Delgados: 'Sometimes you don't realise you miss a thing until someone asks do you want to do it again?'

The day The Yorkshire Post catches up with co-singer and guitarist Emma Pollock and bassist Stewart Henderson, the band is in the midst of a flurry of social media activity to announce a 21st anniversary reissue of their fourth album, Hate, on their own Chemikal Underground imprint.

“We didn’t put it out originally, it’s the only record that we didn’t control in the UK,” Pollock explains. “It came out on Mantra Records, which was part of the Beggars (Banquet) group. We’ve kind of got a friendly licence so it allows us to be able to put it out and sell it again, which is absolutely lovely because I don’t think it was going to be re-pressed anytime soon by Beggars because they’ve got much bigger fish to fry.”

As for what brought the group back together again after such a long hiatus, the 51-year-old singer-songwriter, who went on to develop a lauded solo career, says: “Sometimes you don’t know that you miss a thing until somebody poses the question, ‘do you want to do it again?’ and you realise it’s actually a quite serious proposition.

“For years when people had said to me at solo shows ‘Are The Delgados getting back together?’ I’d just say resolutely no because we’ve all moved on. It was a time and a place and it worked, and then it didn’t and now it doesn’t fit our lives any more. Lo and behold, never say never.”

Henderson, 51, says the band had remained “in close contact” since The Delgados called it a day in 2005. “I was running the record label and Emma and Paul were doing the studio. I was doing solo stuff and Alun (Woodward, the band’s guitarist) the same, so we were never totally estranged after the band finished, but it’s still one of those things, time goes by quickly. I think the thing for me was when they got back in touch and said they’d been to Stuart Braithwaite’s wedding and they’d been chatting and had kind of floated the idea of us getting back together again.”

In November 2019 the four met up in a pub and agreed to reunite, but then the Covid pandemic hit and, Pollock says, “we forgot about it really for a number of years and could only pick up the idea again at the beginning of 2022”.

Henderson admits he was initially apprehensive. “I was nervous about it, I hadn’t touched a bass guitar in about 18 years,” he says. “I remember after the band finished, I gave my bass guitar away to Gerry (Hart) from The Phantom Band, thinking that’s me done, I’d been in a band, I didn’t want to be in another one. I hadn’t even so much as touched a guitar in 18 years, I was nervous about the thought of having to try to remember how to play again. The thing that really appealed to me, and I think was the thing that clinched it, was the opportunity for the four of us to spend more time together again.”

Henderson had assumed they would “quietly go into the studio and write new stuff”, but he hadn’t bargained for the others’ enthusiasm to play live. At the start of this year they played a short, sold-out British tour which Pollock describes as “almost like and out-of-body experience because it was 0-60”.

She adds: “It was one of those situations where rather than when The Delgados got together we went from not exisiting to gradually growing up in public, like all bands do, and then getting to where we got to and that was lovely, it was an organic experience and everything grew at the rate that it did naturally. But when you get to a certain point as a band and you decide to call it a day then it’s a cliff edge because there’s all of that work, all of those records and creativity, and then there’s nothing, and to try and go back to that, it felt almost impossible to predict where could we play, how many people could we expect.

“It must have been quite a job for our agent to go into that situation and decide on how best to make it happen because although there is an archetype for the whole range of music now, because I think streaming has made so many things accessible for music listeners where before it wasn’t as easy to go back in time and listen to bands from (the past), it’s definitely a difficult thing to go from not existing any more to suddenly wanting to announce that you’re getting back together and realising that world is now digital where when you left it, it had been pretty much analogue. It was only in the last couple of years of the band’s life that we even had a mobile phone, and I remember that we shared one between us, it was a business phone.

“It was quite a remarkable shift and with us already running our own record label, and having run it in the interim period and seeing 20 years of dramatic change, it still flet like building something from the ground up with the band because we had no website, we had no Twitter account, we didn’t really have a presence. To be honest, Paul had started a Twitter account a couple of years before we did (re-form) and thank God he did because at least we knew there was a certain amount of interest there.”

Henderson found the gigs “surprising in a lot of ways”, having not expected them to “get ourselves sounding as good as we did”. In the past, he admits they’d enjoy a drink before going onstage, now it’s “a wholly more professional approach”. “It was never that we were absolutely wrecked when we were going onstage but it’s just a different approach to rehearsals and going up and playing the shows, it’s been good.

“The only thing for me about playing the shows is it’s been so nerve-wracking. Physically being in front of people after a long time is a strange, discombobulating experience​​​​​​. But also, particularly in the run-up to the January shows, I think we all felt a lot of pressure, we had gone so long without playing. Also, people’s recollections of how the band sound, from people who like our stuff, to have that stuff mean so much to them in terms of how much they enjoy the music, had we gone on in January and not been very good or just been all right, that was the thing that terrified me more than anything. ​​​​​​​There was a real pressure to be good and for people to think, ‘I remember them being good but I don’t remember them being that good’.

“The actual shows that we played, I would be a liar if I said I enjoyed playing them. I enjoyed the response and I’ve been happy with how they’d gone once they were over, but actually being onstage, I think I just need to play a few more shows because I don’t think I’m able to enjoy it or experience it because I’m so nervous that I don’t make any howling gaffes.”

Having their own studio, which Pollock manages and where Savage is a producer and engineer, allows the band the freedom to work on new material, which they plan to release on Chemikal Underground. “This is what makes our story unique in that we’re here and we have the ability to do everything that we’re doing, putting out these records, reissuing things, because of the work that we did in our twenties,” she says. “If it wasn’t for that it wouldn’t have been as easy for us to make the decision of going back out. It would’ve been within our power out and play live, of course, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been within our grasp to make a new record and put it out there. With the studio and the record label, these things are much more accessible for us.”

For Henderson, it’s important that any new music the band makes builds on their legacy. “I’m confident that we have a lot of good ideas, and it’s really important to us when we do pull an album of new material together that it’s something that we’re going to be happy with first and foremost, and that it will hopefully surprise and satisfy fans of the band. Especially having such a long period of time where we weren’t doing anything, you realise that the band accrued a reputation...so I’m conscious when we do put this new record together, I can guarantee that we’ll have spent as much time and effort and care into trying to get it sounding exactly as we would like it than we did with any of our earlier records.

“It’s very important for all of us and probably one of the reasons why being in The Delgados was a great experience but it was an arduous one. The four of us can love each other to bits but there’s a brother-sister thing that goes on within the band, it was tough. Writing in particular was very difficult, there’s a lot of strong personalities, a lot of arguments. All these records were forged out of a very self-critical, demanding environment. There were times of overthinking. It just happens to be a process that we put ourselves through...It produced records that we were proud of, but it was a tough spell at the coal face.”

Deer Shed festival starts on Friday July 28. The Delgados headline on Sunday July 30. https://deershedfestival.com/