It's always a pleasure to catch up with the lovely boys from The Wanted, especially resident fitty Tom.
I gave him a bell ahead of the release of their second single Heart Vacancy and he seemed a little bit apprehensive about its chart performance. Despite nursing a sore throat ("We went out last night and had a few to drink... I've got to do four songs in two hours!"), Tom was eager to tell me all about the track and the noticeable change in sound from All Time Low, which went straight in at No.1 back in August.
"We were going to release Heart Vacancy as our first one, but we didn't want people to categorise us being a typical boyband, so we released All Time Low. I think when everybody heard it, they didn't expect that kind of sound to come from a boyband. We wanted to show people that we can do songs like that but we also do ballads as well," he said.
The single is out this week and will be followed seven days later by the band's self-titled debut album, which they're releasing in five different sleeves, with one for each member. Are the boys feeling competitive about that? "I think it's a dead cert that Nathan's gonna sell the most. Every single kid that we speak to is a Nathan fan. It's crazy! It could be a close contest for second though. I'm betting for second!"
When I not-so-subtly suggested that Behind Bars should be the next single, Tom was delighted. "Do you know what? That's the first song we wrote as a band. We went into the studio and came out (with that). It took us a day to write." But will they be following my advice? "(The next single's) not been decided yet. I think the record label's gonna keep people hanging for a bit. I hope it's Behind Bars. I don't know if the record company will allow a song that's completely written by us though." Who wants to start the Twitition?
Speaking of songwriting, how do they go about writing as a group? Do the boys ever feel nervous when sharing their lyrics with each other? "We've all got different backgrounds and musical influences. I think we all respect each other's ideas. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult because one person's thinking one idea and another person's thinking something completely different."
One of the album tracks that is likely to divide opinion is Let's Get Ugly, which samples the theme to The Good The Bad And The Ugly. How did they end up paying homage to such a random song? "We wrote it with Guy Chambers. Once he had permission from the guy that wrote it, he was like, 'I want you boys to have this track'. It takes it in a different direction. We were going to release that as a single. I'm not sure we're going to anymore, we might do. But we wanted to get Clint Eastwood in the video. That would be so cool."
After discussing the possibility of the boys wearing cowboy outfits when performing the track live (sounds like a goer to me!), our conversation led on to their upcoming tour. "It's at the start of March and tickets go on sale in November. There's no confirmed venues yet, we're just gonna see what the tickets do when they go on sale. If they sell a lot, maybe we'll do a couple of arenas, which would be amazing!"
Care to share any spoilers with us Tom? "We've all got certain ideas. Obviously when you watch a tour like Take That's Circus... in fact, every tour they've done since they came back has been absolutely incredible. I think they've set the level a little bit. I'm not sure what we'd do to top it, but we'll try and do something." They might need to cut back on those shandies though!
