ELBOW are on their most extensive tour since 2008 and set to play the BIC, Bournemouth on Wednesday March 8.

The final tour of previous album ' The Take Off and Landing of Everything' in 2015 saw the band play their longest ever theatre residencies.The decision to repeat this and then visit as many places as possible came from the feedback of fans who loved those shows as much as the band did.

The tour accompanies the latest album Little Fictions which, despite everything, is a hugely hopeful, upbeat record. The time-frame in which it was written is crucial, a time during which front man Guy Garvey was married and visited India for the first time, but also grew fearful before and after the vote to leave the European Union.

Guy said: “The album takes in lots of different things about what worries me in the current age. That in itself got me thinking about worrying in general; now Elbow are 40-plus, is worrying just a natural thing? Did our parents worry when they got to an age, or is this new? Have things gone to hell in a handcart, as it feels it has done?”

The answer to those questions isn’t what actually matters, he says, rather it’s the unsettled feeling needed to find a place in the band’s songs.

“I would be suspicious of a record made in 2016 by anyone in the Western world that didn’t contain some element of dismay or disgruntlement, or just plain tub-thumping,” adds Guy.

The album’s K2 is the most obvious in its allusions to Brexit, with lyrics about Britain’s island status, the hatred being drummed up and the media’s role in it all, but above all, how love will conquer all. A trite sentiment in lesser hands, but in Elbow’s, you come away from hearing Little Fictions believing them.

“I think kindness is going to find its way back into the world. TV and films pride themselves on being inky and dark, but there’s only so much I can take. Do I really need to see another throat slitting on television?

“And in the face of all that happened last year, I feel very hopeful. These words came tumbling out, they weren’t hard to write. What do you want from an Elbow record? Notes of hope, I think, as well as a bit despair.”

Magnificent, the album’s lead single, sums up this feeling best of all – it’s inspired directly by Garvey’s new wife, the actor Rachael Stirling, and the sound of children playing on the beach near their hotel while honeymooning in Sardinia.

“The idea behind it is that the little girl in the song, playing in the sand, is based on my wife when she was a kid, with her whole life ahead of her. That got me thinking about how we should reconnect with the trust we’re born with. Babies are trusters and sharers, naturally, and that leaves us. A childish trust towards the world is discouraged on account of danger, but we can go too far.”

Garvey has always been a bit of a romantic. Underneath that bear-like exterior lies the soul of a poet, but it seems marriage has made him even more soppy.

“I suppose it has,” he says, bursting out laughing. “I guess it tends to. It makes you notice things you didn’t before, and that’s certainly not a bad place to be for a songwriter, laid bare by devastating, heart-swelling love.

“It also counteracts impatience that comes with getting older. I am approaching the grumpy old man era, but new love is saving me from myself.”

Elbow will be at the BIC on Wednesday March 8. Visit elbow.co.uk for more information

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