Empathy Test celebrated their tenth anniversary with a tour of Germany and then the UK. If the first years of the duo formed by Isaac Howlett and Adam Relf were thunderous, the last few have been more frustrating, especially for Howlett who released his first solo track at the beginning of the year. Empathy Test, looking for a second wind? We took advantage of the last concert of the tour, in London (live report) to extract some information from the British singer, who has been living in Austria for several years, and who surprised us with his spontaneity and generosity. There's no tongue in cheek here, as he talks, with humour and perspective, about his worries and his relationship with his homeland and social networks, with an honesty that's as refreshing as it is precious.
Once again, we'd like to thank Gary Levermore of Red Sand PR for his invaluable help in making the interview possible.
You just released your first solo song because you couldn't release any new music with Empathy Test. Does it sometimes feel like this 10 years anniversary tour could be a farewell tour?
Oh, gosh! Straight in with the difficult questions! Yeah, there's an element of that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of things going on in the background, personal and business, between myself and Adam Relf. I guess it's just the classic situation where one person, me, has kind of taken the thing and run with it and the other person has taken more of a back seat. I'm very much a "putting all of my eggs in one basket" kind of guy and I basically built my life around Empathy Test. Adam has lots and lots of different projects he's involved in. He hasn't been touring with us as well, which I think meant that the band very much became me and the people on stage with me. Adam has drifted apart a bit.
So, yes, we haven't actually worked together on any new music since the Monsters album in 2020. I wrote an album's worth of new songs and gave them to Adam. It took a very long time to get him to listen to my demos and when he finally sat down to work on them, nothing happened. He decided they weren't right for the direction he wanted to take the band next, which is quite difficult for me because those are the songs I’ve got. Do I just discard them? To save my own sanity and keep the energy going I decided to release them myself. But of course I can't use any Empathy Test money to fund the whole process of releasing new music. So I have to go one track at a time. I'm really just testing waters, seeing what happens, and in the meantime waiting to see also, what happens with Empathy Test.
Do you see yourself becoming like The Sisters of Mercy, touring for decades without releasing new albums?
Well, if there ends up being no new Empathy Test music, then I will continue touring as something like "Isaac Howlett: The Voice of Empathy Test", playing my new songs alongside classic Empathy Test ones. We're already playing House of Cards live as Empathy Test. I guess I'll just keep releasing new songs until eventually, there will be more Isaac Howlett songs in the set than Empathy Test and then we can switch the name over.
From my point of view, obviously, I've spent many, many hours and a lot of hard work, single-handedly building Empathy Test up and I don't feel I should have to lose that completely and just say it's over and then start a whole new thing from the bottom. I'm hoping to seamlessly segue into the solo thing... and the other two Empathy Test live members are happy to play music with me, whatever it is! Everything's a little bit unsure at the moment but we shall see what happens. Adam is not willing to step aside and say he's no longer part of Empathy Test. I'm happy to respect that, and also from the fans’ point of view…I don't want to release music without Adam, as Empathy Test, because that would feel like betraying Adam and betraying the fans as well.
You talk about betraying. How did it feel to make this first solo song. Do you feel like you betrayed Adam in a way or is it more a release for you?
It's definitely a release. I mean, I've been working for ten years with the same person and he is very much in tune with me musically and I have never really disliked anything he's done with my songs. He's extremely talented at what he does. So, just playing someone else my demos was quite scary because I always knew I could rely on Adam to see the potential in what I'd done.
It was also very scary releasing a song on my own because I knew that it would be judged against Empathy Test. It was a lot of pressure, hoping that people would like it as much. I think I did it. The song's done really well and people have reacted very well, it's gone down very well live as well, so I have at least a bit more confidence in what I'm doing and my ability to release music without Adam. I don't think I've betrayed him because I've given him every opportunity to work on these songs. I don't think he minds me releasing solo stuff. I think he just didn't want me releasing solo songs and calling it Empathy Test.
Doesn't working on your own songs help you to be more open to his ideas?
Yeah, maybe. He suggested he send me demos and I write songs around what he's done. Maybe that's the way the next album is going to get made. Time will tell. It was also good for me because now I'm open to more collaborations. Before I was just the voice of Empathy Test and I couldn't really do anything else. Now, there are people queuing up to get me to collaborate with them, which is really nice. I just have to be selective.
When we saw you in Paris two years ago, it was a solo tour but you seemed very at ease...
Oh no, I wasn't! That was the most nervous I've ever been about performing in a very long time. I made some jokes about it because it makes things easier!
Did this experience help you to start making music alone?
Yes I think so, because not only I was performing alone but I also remixed all the Empathy Test tracks I was playing. It was an experiment to see if I could do stuff on my own. It helped as well. With House of Cards I basically took it as far as I could myself and then had a producer make the finishing touches!
You're good friend with Aesthetic Perfection's Daniel Graves. Do you share his views on touring? He says he hates it!
Well, the difference between Daniel and myself is that I love performing. Apparently, although it seems like he's having a good time on stage, Daniel hates performing! For me, performing is really the reason why I got into songwriting. I wrote songs so I could get on stage and perform! Maybe that makes me slightly shallow, but it does mean I love touring, stressful as it is.
Daniel's right when he says it has got a lot harder. In 2019, before the pandemic, we were really having such a great time touring as Empathy test. I think in that year, if I got this right, we toured the UK with VNV Nation and then Germany with Covenant and we also did our own tour of the UK... and then we went on tour in America with Daniel. Our trajectory was just going up and up. We were earning money for shows and everything was just going very well. We had a new album ready for release... and bang!, the pandemic happened and everything got cancelled. We still released the album, although there were people telling us not to. Then it was just like... nothing.
We managed to do like, two tours in two years, but everything changed, everything got more expensive and more complicated. Venues closed down, local sound engineers got other jobs... I must admit that my personal fitness level, my performing fitness dropped a lot. I don't play sports, my exercise is performing and traveling! I got really unfit, probably for the first time in my life and getting back into it was way harder than I would have thought.
The tour we just did in Germany was great, it was another step-up. We were selling like a hundred more tickets in every city we were before. But this UK tour has been really tough and the ticket sales have been lower than before. I think the UK market has taken a double hit from not only the pandemic but Brexit as well. I imagine that tourism has dropped a lot, the number of bands coming over here has dropped, the number of bands coming from here and traveling to Europe has probably dropped... We really had less people at some key shows, like Manchester, where for some reason it was visibly down on the year before. I think that the higher you get the tougher it gets to drop down, especially as we did Germany just before, and that's the best place to tour. When we came to the UK I lowered my expectations, which helps, but it's a lot harder work.
I shouldn't be saying that, but don't come to France then...
Well, we did a small French tour, I think we did three dates and that was really tough. The distances we travelled each day were really long. But I thought it was pretty good for a first ever tour of France in terms of ticket sales, because you have to start somewhere, right ? I think in Paris it was like 120 tickets or something... I thought that was enough to get us back again, but apparently not. It was two different promoters. One of them didn't want us back and the other one was like "you can come back but I can only offer you shows where there is no payment, it's like audience donations or something"... There were people asking us to come back for the 10 year anniversary tour but we just couldn't make it work. It's always striking a balance between covering your costs and breaking new ground.
Tonight is the last concert of this tour. How does it feel when a tour ends?
Well, I'm pretty pleased. We've all started to get sick and as you can probably hear, my voice is pretty tired now. It's a relief. There's still the fact that we have to go back into Europe and then drive probably twenty hours or something, all the way across Germany to Austria. I guess it will probably be a really great show tonight because London is always the biggest show of a UK tour, we'll have lots of friends and family here and I'll probably be sad that it's over when it's over... But we haven't been home for three weeks. It feels like we've been away for a very long time and I'm looking forward to seeing my cats again!
Ah your cats! We were asking ourselves if we'd ask how are your cats!
Well, they're all fine apart from the oldest one, Xerxes, who has cancer. We discovered he has a four centimeter tumor. I really thought he was going to die while I was on tour but somehow he's still going. He's super tough! I'm glad that I'll get to see him again when I get back.
Coming back to the UK must be special for you. Do you miss living here? Or is it like visiting your parents : you enjoy the first five minutes and then you remember why you left?
Yeah, kind of. I mean... When you're in the UK, you're just used to it. Everything is dirty and broken and most of the houses are damp and dark and cold and the venues as well! It's such an ancient place where everything is old and falling apart. I was just used to that. But after living in Austria for a while... You know, they actually have trains that run on time and are clean and cheap enough to use them! Here you have to pay so much money to use trains that no one does! When we're driving around on the roads, all of the roads are completely full of cars! There's hundreds of people at every rest stop! It's kind of crazy, it does feel like there's too many people in this place!
It's weird living away from it for a while and then coming back, you see everything with fresh eyes. I live in Linz which is a small city and it's such a shock coming back to London or Manchester: I feel really stressed and claustrophobic. But I love the sense of humor here! I still believe that British humor is very special and that we have an ability to laugh at ourselves and take jokes as far as they can possibly go, until it's not even funny anymore!
You're very active on social networks. Do you always enjoy it or does it sometimes feel like a job you have to do to stay in people's daily lives so they don't forget you? How much energy does it demand?
It's probably the most demanding thing. I'm a bit overwhelmed now by how many different sites I have to have a presence on. I still really hate TikTok. Everytime I open it, I hate the way that it's constantly just throwing content at you that you never asked to see. You open it up and you're like "what's this video?". I'm still sort of trying to find my feet on this. I guess every different social media platform requires a different kind of content and a different voice. I'm still trying to find the best way to do TikTok. I had the Empathy Test ones and my personal ones and now I've gotta do more for my personal ones to push my solo music.
I'm just kind of better at Facebook but things are moving on and the audience on Facebook is a lot older. I did notice on this tour of the UK that the average age of our audience here is really quite high. We try to be inclusive and I obviously have no problem with older people coming to our shows... but this is not very sustainable! We need younger people to come to our shows. I don't know whether young people are even going to concerts! Are they just going to see YouTubers and TikTok people? I remember we did a show in America and there was this UK artist performing in the venue across the road and I've never even heard of this person and they had a queue of people around the block when we had probably 50 people maximum at our show! We really need to get into the TikTok thing...
I'm kind of addicted to social media, which is a problem because I can never really break out of it, I need to do it for my job. It's very emotionally draining, especially for someone like me who is kind of hypersensitive to people's comments. If someone says something mean and stupid, I'm like "yeah, that's mean and stupid"... and then an hour later I find myself thinking about it again. I'm thinking about how unfair it was, the injustice of it, and it keeps going round and round in my head... Why am I wasting so much energy on it? I can't help it... It's pretty difficult when you need to use something for your jobs but it also has this emotional impact on you.
How do you draw a line between what you give away on your social networks and what you keep to yourself? Sometimes you share a lot about your doubts, what makes you happy... Are you not afraid that some people might cross a line and become too friendly or too invasive?
I'm trying to keep my personal and family life separate and be open about my feelings about my music and what I'm putting in the songs. But I try to keep a certain boundary. It gets difficult when your family is also on social media, coming to your shows and making friends with your fans! It's something a little bit weird and difficult to deal with when my mother comes to the shows in London and then of course the superfans want to know her because she's an extension of me and she's happy to do that... But this feels like too much because I'm thinking about what I share but perhaps family members aren't. They don't have the same reasons to hold things back. That was a bit difficult to deal with. But the level we're at is not crazy. I can imagine it gets way way more difficult the more famous you are.
How does it feel to always get people's feedback? Is it a thing you expect or sometimes you'd like to keep some things for yourself and not always hear someone else's thoughts on what you've done?
It's basically impossible for me because I read every single comment. It's really difficult because what all of the social networks are looking for is engagement. Daniel Graves is someone who is really good at that. He's very good at creating discussion and debate and he has had to put out with a lot of negative feedback. I think he's had to grow a thick skin and so now he can drop a bomb and step away and then only dip back in... I don't know, I have to work a bit harder to get people to engage. It means replying to people. But we have pretty nice fans. I only come across negative comments now and then but they are so much louder than everything else ! You get one hundred good comments and a single bad one but that's the one you can't help but think about.
Or the one you can make a t-shirt of, like "real gothics are disgusted"!
Exactly!
Your music is a fine balance between dance and tears. When you have to sing them live, do you easily go back to the state of mind you were in when you wrote them? Are there evenings more difficult than others when you are more sad than dancey? Or are you always in a dancing mood?
I don't really relive the emotions of the songs to be honest, which probably comes as a surprise to some people because they often comment that there's so much emotion in my voice... I guess it's just a performance for me. I sing the songs in a way that captures the emotions but I'm not completely in it. I guess that's why our concerts are quite uplifting. I make jokes between the songs and I'm trying to have fun which may be kind of unexpected for people seeing us for the first time. Some may be expecting me to be really miserable or something!
I do remember very early on, after one of our first shows, someone sent me an email complaining that I talked to the audience and that I even thanked them! They wanted me to be completely removed, aloof, not engaging with the audience because they wanted me to be this tortured artist that they imagined from the songs. The more time is going on, the more fun I have with the audience so that person has probably given up on that now! I've never really had other complaints about that. I really don't like it when I go to see a band and they don't talk to the audience. You want them to engage. I think that makes a better concert. The best concerts are the ones where the audience and the artists are feeding off each other. If you don't break down the wall that separates you, the audience doesn't become involved in the show.
It's weird how we sometimes want our artists to suffer!
Yeah, and I did! I did suffer. And then I wrote a song about it. And then I went out on tour to have some fun, you know? I hope that people aren't disappointed or put off by that! Apart from that one email I don't remember anyone else complaining. Normally it's just like "I had such a good time" or "you made us laugh between the songs". I don't think Robert Smith is always this tortured artist, he's just very shy and humble!
