Danny McNamara’s take on the longevity of Embrace is reflective, funny and contains an awful lot more more humility than you'll get from those “hedge fund gangsters” (and tech billionaires) that run the business he and his band have survived for 32 years. They should mark his words!
In February 2002, Danny McNamara, his brother Richard and three friends Steve Firth, Mickey Dale and Mike Heaton stepped out on stage to play a sold out show at London's prestigious Royal Albert Hall. This was a new peak for their band Embrace. The band opened that show with the track ‘Over’, probably because they thought it was. The band had just been unceremoniously dropped by their record label. On Richard’s birthday too. After a phenomenally successful debut album and two further critically acclaimed LPs, Danny McNamara wondered “This might be the last time we play somewhere this big again, it might be all over.”
In the longer term, things turned out for the better. Embrace had joined the club of rock & pop artists who’d been dropped only to go on and make one of their best - and commercially most successful, records. Something happens to bands of longevity when they are judged in that way. They are not having any of it, basically. The band’s 4th album, 2004’s Out Of Nothing, was a reset that took the band back to number one and sold as many copies as those first three albums combined.
Of course, Chris Martin famously did them a favour with his song Gravity. Danny McNamara chuckles softly when I suggest this was really just a rewrite of Embrace’s early song Fireworks. It got Embrace back in the top 10. Vindicated! It’s a familiar tale, and in the end, just one of the band’s many ups, downs and roundabouts over three decades in this godforsaken business.
Before I spoke with Danny, he’d emailed me to say how much he loved Brett Anderson’s quote - the one we’ve set out to make famous on The Art of Longevity. Not only did he recognise it as capturing the band’s career but Embrace have been through the cycle at least twice - the struggle (1990-’96), stratospheric rise (their debut The Good Will Out), the crash to the bottom (that first time dropped by their label) and enlightenment (Out Of Nothing). And then all over again.
When we talk about the band’s hiatus and return to the fray with 2014’s self-titled Embrace album, things get interesting. Consider, the band had been on a three year break from 2007-2010 and then holed up creating a new record for all of four years - setting out nobly to better their debut. Meanwhile, the music industry changed beyond all recognition. Spotify was into hyper-growth by 2014, destroying the CD and threatening to make the album concept redundant. As such, the band’s most experimental and sonically ambitious record (and my personal favourite), Embrace, was a commercial disappointment at a time when it became difficult to assess the commercial performance of any album. Still, it served a purpose, setting the band on course for a creative renaissance after they had been burnt out by album number five in 2006).
“The band was at its biggest, being asked to be in films and on game shows, but we didn’t really love the (This New Day) album. That spirit of going into battle - we’re in this together with everything to lose but everything to gain. We didn’t have it with that record, but we have with our last three albums. We try to recreate that spirit with every album we do now.”
As a recently self-diagnosed introvert and medically diagnosed as OCD, McNamara has ridden the music industry rollercoaster and done rather well to stay sane. In recent times, marriage and fatherhood have further set Danny and his bandmates on a stable course, to not only carry on making music for as long as they want to (nobody can stop them, or drop them) but to make their music. Embrace’s brand of emotionally charged and sometimes swaggering pop-rock is a humanistic joy - if you simply surrender to it. There is plenty of that material on the new album How To Be A Person Like Other People.
There’s a good collective heart within Embrace and the ambition to keep getting better still beats strongly.
“What Embrace is really special and what we should be doing with our energy is mining that, not ploughing the field wide but digging down and see what there is in the ground. Then we will be honouring what we’ve been given as a group and that way, we can get better”.
If you want to look at the blueprint for a rock band that sticks together through thick & thin to keep on keeping on, look and listen no further. As the band’s loyal fan following will attest, Embrace really are it.