During The National‘s set at Treasure Island Music Festival last October, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren Mayberry made a surprise appearance, helping the band perform a stellar rendition of I Need My Girl. Now, two months later, she has paired up with The National’s Matt Berninger again, for an interview on Live Nation TV.
The pair sat down for a nine minute discussion, exchanging tales on a number of subjects including performance nerves and their perspectives of fame. Both of them expressed fears of messing up in a live setting, with Berninger stating that “there’s no way to be totally confident up there. I don’t know how a human being would be confident elevated 15 or 20ft off the ground with everyone looking at you.”
At one point in the interview, Mayberry admitted she once took a hip-hop dance class to help aide her stage presence, to which Berninger responded with “Performing is exhilarating, but just right on the edge of completely humiliating all the time.” He then continued to recount an early experience performing at SXSW, where he jumped ahead an entire song on the setlist – leaving his band and presumably his audience bewildered. “I was screaming my head off to Available,” he recalls, “and they were playing a totally different song. I was singing those lyrics to a drum beat. We didn’t get signed.”
The interview as a whole is very, very charming. The pair discusses these topics in a way that humanises them even more so. It’s nice to realise that even large performers like Matt Berninger get stage-fright at times.
You can watch the interview below.
CHVRCHES will be hitting up Australia shortly for St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival, as well as three sideshows:
Laneway:
Sat, 6 Feb: Laneway Fest, Sydney College of the Arts, NSW
Sat, 13 Feb: Laneway Fest, Footscray Community Arts Centre, VIC
Sun, 14 Feb: Laneway Fest, Esplanade Reserve and West End, WA
Sideshows:
Thurs, 4 Feb: The Enmore Theatre, NSW
Tues, 9 Feb: The Forum, VIC
Wed, 10 Feb: The Forum, VIC