Here’s the other half of the You Me At Six interview. Next time, maybe we’ll take shorter interviews, or maybe we can take videos and post them instead. Let us know what you’d all prefer!

Is there a standard writing process that you all go through?

DAN: Well, there’s a few, I guess. Sometimes someone will come up with just a tiny, tiny idea for something, or someone will come with a full song idea, or Josh will write a melody for a chorus or a verse and chorus. We all then get together as a group at our practice studio and sort of bash heads together from there. The songs sort of come out that way.

JOSH: Pretty much!

How is the music scene in the UK different from the one in America?

JOSH: It’s quite different. It’s not as big since it’s a far smaller country. I feel it’s a lot more varied in the UK. I feel in America a lot of the bands, without being disrespectful, sound maybe the same or quite similar. Where as, in the UK, that there is one band per genre that does well, you know? There’s lots more. It’s growing. I think it’s cool that a band like us, Bring Me The Horizon, and Enter Shikari could go on this tour. We are sort of opening the door for other UK bands to potentially come on the Warped Tour. So, it’s cool.

Was there any one person who motivated you to want to be in a band?

DAN: Well, I guess the reason why I got into rock music was most people just grow up listening to the radio. The radio in the UK is just pop nonstop. So, I guess it was my dad, because he used to play me old songs by Led Zeppelin and bands like that. When I joined this school, you could learn how to play an instrument, and my mom thought that I should learn to play the drums. I loved it. That’s how I got into music. When I went to college, I always wanted to be in a band. I then joined this one, and here we are.

JOSH: Yep. Mine’s very similar; just through family members. My sister is a budding pianist, singer, songwriter kind of thing. I used to play video games on the play station in the back room, and she’d be practicing away. My mom told me to go learn an instrument, because she thought I might find it useful. So, I played guitar, and here I am, I suppose.

What’s your favorite song to perform live?

JOSH: You know, I really like playing “Trophy Eyes” for some reason. Basically, all of the songs from Hold Me Down. I love playing the songs from Hold Me Down. I feel like we’re kind of over playing songs from Take Off Your Colours now since we’ve been doing it for like 3 years, but we primarily only play it because there are people who’d like to hear the songs off of that CD. I guess that happens with all bands, though. Once you’ve written a new CD or a new set of songs, you want to play them rather than playing old songs.

Do you have any specific goals for your band this year?

DAN: Well, to me, we’ve already achieved our goals just by travelling the world. That’s always been sort of a big thing for our band. It doesn’t matter how big we get, it’s how long we can make it last and how long we can keep doing this for. The fact that we get to travel the world with our best friends, that’s just great. If along the way, we become a successful band then that would be the icing on the top really. Is that the saying: icing on the cake? Yeah. Why did I say “on the top”?

What bands inspire your music?
JOSH: The Ghost Inside.
DAN: We love The Ghost Inside.
JOSH: We love The Ghost Inside.It’s funny, actually, we’ve – for the last year or so, we’ve been into this band called The Ghost Inside. And we were introduced to their singer, Vigil, when we were out doing some shows before Warped. And I asked, “Can you do a song with us?” and it was just really cool! It’s really strange cause like… I love this guy’s band, and I’m singing a song with him! They’re really cool dudes.
DAN: Other bands like… We’re big fans of Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Thrice… That kind of stuff.
JOSH: It’s always been strange to me. We’ve toured quite a lot with Paramore – a lot overseas and in Australia. We’ve basically toured with Paramore everywhere but America. And I always felt really strange, because I was one of a very select few who first heard of Paramore in the UK. So when they came over five or six years ago, I remember me and my friend Liv, we went and saw them – and she was from the very few people who knew who they were. So I’ve listened to them for years, and to tour with them, I’ve always found it very strange because I’m like… “God, I love this band.”
DAN: An uber fan.
JOSH: Uber fan! Being able to tour is awesome, cause now I’m just like, “Oh God! Not another Paramore song coming on!” but in a good way, because I’ve heard them all so many times! But it’s cool, though. They definitely – not to say their music so much, but the way they are as a band, what they’ve achieved, definitely inspires me to want to, potentially, one day do some of the things they do.
DAN: Especially since they are one of the biggest bands in the world right now, and they were over in the UK like last month. We were doing this festival together and they’re just normal people like everyone else, you know? They come into our dressing room and we play –
JOSH: They took our sign off our door for no reason.
DAN: Yeah, they pranked us. They’re just normal people. They’re not (uses air quotes) “rock stars” at all. So, yeah… that’s good.

How were you discovered?
DAN: Well, we weren’t really discovered.
JOSH: We weren’t, no.
DAN: It was kind of like…
JOSH: We weren’t discovered until very very recently. I think that’s the main reason there’s very few decent major label deals going on with bands, especially going on at the moment. When Virgin signed us, we’d already sold fifty-thousand CDs. We were headlining venues with fifty-thousand count across our country. They came to us and said, “We have to sign your band.” We didn’t want to sign to a major label, ever. But then it was just like…he knew so much about the band. He was obviously a genuine fan of the band. Since that day, he’s been pretty supportive behind a lot of decisions, so I guess it’s kind of how our management has a lot of power since it is one of the biggest management companies in the world, you know? Like they do Iron Maiden, for Christ’s sake. Bring Me the Horizon’s kind of stuff. So I think they’ve definitely helped us, because they’ve worked with a lot of heavy music in the past, and here they were working with a rock/pop band with melodies and shit. And they were just kind of like, “Oh, we can do so much with this band that we’ve never been able to do with another band before.” So, I guess it’s us being discovered, in a sense, being those two occasions.
DAN: Yeah, I guess in the very beginning, we used to tour so much in the UK that our fan base just grew and grew so organically. So it was all just us and our MySpace, really, and stuff. So that was really cool.

So MySpace was your main…?
DAN: Definitely, like three years ago, it was the reason why we could travel around the country and book shows and stuff; whereas, now, you can’t rely on MySpace.
JOSH: There was a time when bands like From First To Last were massive, on Warped or something, because of MySpace. The bands, I think, on MySpace were big everywhere, you know? And I don’t think that really happens anymore. You know what I mean? We’re really big in the UK, but no one knows about us in America, you know? But you think “We’ve got quite a few fans on MySpace.” That hasn’t really, totally transcended to America. That kind of thing. So, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Oh well!
DAN: MySpace seems to be dying out a little bit.
JOSH: Tom [Anderson] made his stupid amount of billions of money and… brought the world together, so he’s done his job, then.
DAN: Yeah, I’m sure he’s doing fine!

Do you have any last words?
DAN: Check out our new album. It’s called Hold Me Down.Came out…what, Monday, I think it came out? Seems like a long time ago.
Seems like a long time ago… I don’t know.
DAN: Yeah… shh. Oh! It came out digitally a while ago –
JOSH: Oh! Yeah, it came out digitally a few months ago, but it’s physically out now.
DAN:  – and the actually CD is physically in the shops now. Yeah, so go check that out! Thank you!

Speaking of MySpace, check them out here! Also, if you liked the pictures in this photoset, check out the rest here. We hope that you enjoyed this two part interview, and hopefully you read it all!

-Megan