Henry Wyeth of indie trio Amber Run on a new album, being more sensible on tour and breaking the release cycle

Off the back of their fourth studio album, indie-rock three-piece Amber Run (@amberrun) have been doing it for a decade. A US platinum single, more than 50,000 headline show tickets sold and more than 800 million streams from an international fanbase, yeah, yeah, they really have been doing it.

2023 is something of a milestone for the band, with the culmination of two years’ work and their three EPs forming new album How To Be Human. It is also almost 10 years since they burst on to the scene with their debut record 5AM via RCA. More than that, the group comprising frontman/guitarist Joe Keogh, bassist Tomas Sperring and Faversham-raised keyboard player Henry Wyeth have finally got back out on tour for the first time in two years. Henry gave us his thoughts on the past, the present and the future…

ON THE START OF AMBER RUN…

I met the rest of the guys at the University of Nottingham. They went to school together and Tom was my next- door neighbour in halls and then he introduced me to Joe. We became best mates and hung around all the time. And, I know it’s cliché, but the rest is history. We all loved making music and playing music, so it just made sense. Joe was doing his own independent project and we started sort of playing his songs and things like that. I think Tom did a couple of gigs playing bass for Joe and then we were, like, ‘Well, this is much more fun to play together. So let’s just do it together’.

ON THE FIRST STEPS…

It was summer of 2013. We had just put out one single and we were playing Reading and Leeds. And we were being courted by, you know, all sorts of major labels in the UK.

It was through BBC Introducing, which is a big, big deal in Nottingham. I can’t remember what the percentage was, but it was like a third of all BBC Introducing artists were coming through Nottingham. And it’s down to the work of this absolute legend called Dean Jackson, who sits there and he just loves music and is so passionate about it. And we owe him so much as a group. And then through that we went to BBC Introducing and Radio One and then on to the Introducing Stage.

ON WHAT CAME NEXT…

The rest was a blur. I think we released our first track in March and then in October we were signed. So those few months, bearing in mind the single it took a while to get traction, were silly. We were meant to be going back for our third year of university and it was like ‘I can’t study anymore because this is actually a job now. This is my career now, you know?’.

And so turning around to Mum and Dad and saying ‘Yeah, I’m dropping out of uni!’.

I think my mum said ‘What did we do wrong?’. No, they’ve always been very supportive. And I was quite lucky that I managed to go back and finish my degree a few years later.

ON RELEASING RECORDS…

As hard as it is to do nowadays, we want to be a record band. And we do definitely release vinyl because vinyl is absolutely popping off.

But we have changed the way we do it, certainly for this album. With our third record Philophobia, we released three or four singles as you would in a standard album campaign and then released the record. But because of the way that music is consumed now, people only listen to those four tracks and when we released the album as a whole there was no incentive for any of the songs to be playlisted. So the songs that we spent all that sort of time, energy and love creating weren’t given the attention they deserved.

So what we did with this record was split it up into three EPs with four or five tracks on each. So that was The Search, The Start and then The Hurt. And now comes the album, so almost every track on the record has been given its sort of moment in the spotlight.

ON BREAKING THE CYCLE...

This album is sort of the greatest hits of the last two or three years. The recording process or album cycle is usually like a two-year thing - you write and then you record and then you promote, and then you release and then tour. Like that it’s two years between when you’re sort of sitting down recording before doing it again. And we found that you kind of get out of the habit of it and it felt very disjointed. We wanted to break that cycle by doing it this way, where we were constantly in the studio, and it was much more pleasing for us as artists.

ON GETTING BACK TO PLAYING LIVE….

We’ve got a lot of new tracks to put in the set, so we’re very excited about getting out on the road again. I think the last tour we did might have been October 2020, so we’re gagging to get back out there. I mean, it’s the best thing about being in a band, touring.

ON PARTYING ON TOUR…

We certainly used to - well, we still do, but we certainly used to go harder than we should. We’ve toned it down a fair amount. When we first started the band, we were very young and so if you give a 19-year-old a fridge full of booze and you tell them they’re a rock star, like, fine, ‘I’m going to do it then’. Not that it affected our performances. But I think as we got older, we realised that getting sort of drunk before you’re on stage, you’re no longer in the moment. At the end of 2019, we did a European tour, a UK tour and then a US tour within about two and a half months. And you just can’t do that - you can’t do that to your body or your mind day in, day out. I think we’ve approached that aspect of playing live with a little bit more pragmatism.

ON RETURNING TO KENT…

Not as much as my family would like! I try to go down to Faversham whenever I can. It’s lovely to go down and see them and don’t really have an excuse why I don’t go and see them more. Sorry, Mum! But it is lovely when I do go down to see them all.