Portugal. The Man interview: 'We're all in a f***ing bubble'

US band on their eighth album Woodstock, ‘Feel It Still’, and beating their fans to the punch

On the stump: the US group have managed to get people dancing to political music again

“I think the last tour had the best show that we’ve ever played. Manchester, that was the best show. Small punk-rock club, no barriers.”

Portugal. The Man don’t really do barriers, they prefer to knock them down.

That’s why, to everyone’s surprise – the band’s included – they found themselves sat alongside Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift in the pop charts with their massive hit “Feel It Still”, with the expectation being that it would perform well in the alternatives.

“If you’re trying to get on those charts, you never will,” guitarist Eric Howk says.

“It’s a universal melody, the one on that song,” Kyle O’Quin [synth, guitar, backing vocals] adds. “We paid for it, we recognised that we physically took that melody.

“It’s the right song with the right feel at the right time. I think it has some of that old-spy-movie bounce. I hadn’t heard anything on the radio for a long time. It sounds fresh.”

“Even the way it’s sung, it sounds really intimate. It sounds like he’s just a guy singing to me,” Howk says.

“Well, it sounds like it’s just a girl singing,” O’Quin jokes of his bandmate John Gourley’s falsetto.

Their latest album, Woodstock, was released earlier this year and sees the band reference a time when rock was more reflective of the social and political scene.

“That’s what Kendrick Lamar does really well,” O’Quin says. “And rock is f***ing dying. It’s kind of a bummer, so it was good to capture some of that hip-hop spirit on the album. Our singer grew up in Alaska and he talks a lot about growing up on Wu-Tang Clan, stuff like that. So you’re hearing these great samples, there’s this tone coming through.”

Fans quickly spotted the interpolation of the 1961 track “Mr Postman” by The Marvelettes on “Feel It Still”, a move that coincided with the more widely discussed interpolation of “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred on Taylor Swift’s single “Look What You Made Me Do”. Suddenly, all anyone seemed to be talking about was interpolating.

“I learned how to roller-skate to ‘I’m Too Sexy’,” Howk says fondly. “Shirtless, of course.”

“I think Taylor’s whole thing is to not take risks. Alternative rock used to be too weird for radio so it had to become its own thing. Now it’s got its own division at every label: it’s two guitars, bass and drums, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus out. It’s so safe. It became a mouthpiece for songs about girls.

“I don’t know what ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay is about but it’s probably not political dissent,” he adds, prompting a guffaw from O’Quin. “If it is, then that’s really subversive and kudos to Chris Martin, but I don’t think it’s saying much.

“That’s what alternative’s been doing, it’s not taking risks in terms of the labels that are signing alternative artists. We’re going into the mainstream, we’re in our thirties, half of us are from Alaska, I’m out of shape… and we’re in the pop charts.”

In the video for “Feel It Still”, one of many striking images is a Sikh man burning a newspaper version of Infowars. The band found out after that Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist that runs the Infowars website and hosts a radio show, has a “pretty fervent following”.

“We got death threats. He did a five-minute segment on us on his show, two days before we started a tour in Boise, Idaho,” Howk says. “That is a gun-slinging, conservative red state. It’s one of the reddest cities. You kept your eyes open a little bit more out there. But I’m not giving any power to some jagoff [stupid person] on the internet.

“Some of them were like, ‘This is a great song but I would choke that singer to death if I saw him on the street’,” he grins. “My favourite one was ‘die’ but spelt ‘d-y-e’.”

“I got one that said, ‘I hate you and anyone who looks like you’,” O’Quin says chuckling.

On YouTube there’s an interactive version of the video that suggests links – to social issues, charities for clean drinking water and equal pay – for viewers to check out : “Things that shouldn’t be political, but here we are,” Howk says. “I don’t like anyone pushing their beliefs in your f***ng face, so we suggested things. We don’t tell people [who] to vote for but we’ll say go f***ing vote.”

The band say they don’t actually want to be famous

There’s something wonderful about the thought of people dancing to a song so politicised.

“I feel happy and proud that we could actually say something on the radio,” O’Quin says. “I look at all those songs and it’s a lot of bulls***. Nobody’s really saying anything.”

“I know a lot of people – as a counterpoint to Kyle – I feel completely free to talk about where I stand on things, just based on the fact that I know I travel so much more than any sitting politician in Washington,” Howk says.

“I’m in a different country every day, we were just in Germany with the Chancellor... we were in London when the Manchester Arena attack happened. We’re playing the Bataclan. And the narratives, the conversations you have with people who were there…

“I’m not going to sit on that information, go home and not talk about what I saw while I was out there. If I can get that real story and go back home and talk about it, I’ll do it all day long. I never shut up. It’s a bubble. Politicians can manufacture disagreements on key issues but none of them are in the thick of it.”

“We’re all in a f***ing bubble,” O’Quin says. On Facebook, that’s not the f***ing news. I go online and it’s piano ads and Portugal fans. This is not the whole world – people don’t know who we are. Last night in Manchester… more and more people will say ‘I don’t know your other songs’. ‘Feel It Still’ is the only song they know. And that’s cool, we get it. Some people are like ‘I knew them first’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, you f***ing suck’. It’s a weird thing.”

As a band they’re incredibly self-aware. They were selling T-shirts that said “I liked Portugal. The Man before they sold out”, pre-empting the comments that followed their proper, certified success.

“If you beat them to it, it pisses them off so bad,” Howk beams. “I read the comments. I know you’re not supposed to, but I am active on the Reddit community for this band. John [Gourley, Portugal. The Man’s frontman] and I both are. We send each other links. It’s like watching the tape as a sports team.

“We’re still integrating those songs into our set. We’re not going to pull a George Lucas, go back and change the records. Those records stand on their own. How boring would it be to typecast yourself?”

I ask them what their idea of a “sellout” is, because the literal of selling records and bigger venues surely seems like a positive thing.

“I don’t know,” O’Quin shrugs. “I don’t even have a car.”

“I think it’s an integrity thing, using your art as a means of commercial gain,” Howk suggests.

Yet their lyrics are as political as they’ve ever been. “We’re still pissing people off,” Howk nods. “Was ‘Fight For Your Right To Party’ a sellout track?”

“People are always gonna have f***ing opinions, and I don’t f***ing care,” O’Quin announces. “We’re all different. I don’t go on Reddit. Our singer’s really aware. He listens to a lot of different music. We all cover each other’s bases.”

“For a long time when ‘Feel It Still’ was coming out, we were playing it twice in a set. Song three and song nine. It’s a book-ending thing that Pink Floyd used to do,” Howk continues.

“Reddit was pissed. There were certain people that were furious we were doing that, saying we’d totally sold out – they thought the label was pressuring us to plug the single… ‘these guys are influenced by the Illuminati...’ and I’m like, ‘Well, why am I still eating potato chips for dinner?’”

‘There were certain people that were furious we were playing the same song twice in one set, saying we’d totally sold out’

Woodstock was born from a ticket stub to the 18 August 1969 event found in Gourley’s father’s jacket pocket.

“John’s dad lived in upstate New York, went to Woodstock and quote, unquote ‘met Jesus down by the river’,” Howk explains. “From there he got rid all of his possessions, moved to the middle of nowhere in Alaska. Not to a town, they went off the grid. Took everything they had with them, sourced without power, hunted every night. So it clearly had an impact on him. And that trickled down and impacted our buddy John Gourley quite a bit.”

“His dad is a f***ing Alaskan,“ O’Quin says admiringly. “See my little hands? These are Seattle hands. You look at his hands and go, ‘How many f***ing houses have you built?’”

“I was just starting to learn guitar when the 25th anniversary of Woodstock came around,” Howk says. “Where I lived, I got two and a half channels of TV, sometimes three. But the one that came in clearest was the public broadcast, and they had just remastered Woodstock, the film, for the 25th anniversary. So I’m figuring out how to play a G chord and I turn on the TV and Jimi Hendrix is on stage, just like... sawing a guitar in half. And his voice... he’s bleeding. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”

“And you still can’t play a G chord,” O’Quin says.

We turn onto the subject of releasing music by an artist posthumously – thinking of Hendrix, Prince, Michael Jackson, Bowie – and the pair recount the time they travelled on a plane that almost crashed.

“The f***ing engine blew up,” O’Quin says. “It’s going down, flames out the window, people screaming, on their phones, flight attendants telling you how to brace for a landing. And John is on the phone to our manager, telling him to get this to our producer, this and this needs to go out... Those moments come and you snap together. So I guess that’s how we’d feel about that.”

They’re not about to turn into pop divas, despite their success in the charts. They laugh at the idea of their success being “overnight”, too – not on their eighth album.

“You know what’s funny, is that we don’t want to be famous,” O’Quin says. “People don’t realise that anonymity is where it’s f***ing at.”

“I like to call this a ‘get rich slow’ scheme,” Howk says. “A really, really, really, really long overnight success.”

“In a way this is like a rebirthing,” O’Quin says. “Now we can graduate, start our job. We’re going to keep putting out records.”

“I actually just hit the 20th anniversary of being handed a cheque for my first gig,” Howk recalls. “I probably cashed it for Pringles and rented a movie at Blockbuster. They say there’s a rule of 10,000 hours to master a craft. I think we hit that 10 years ago. But you don’t plateau – you want to keep getting better.”

“As long as we’re not getting worse,” O’Quin says.

‘Woodstock’, the latest album from Portugal. The Man, is out now