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The rise of You Me At Six, as told through their most important gigs
From scrappy early shows to taking over Warped Tour, Wembley and more, You Me At Six’s Josh Franceschi talks us through 10 of the band’s most stand-out gigs.
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You Me At Six: “This is a celebration, for us, and for the fans... I’m so grateful we’re doing it our way”
This week, You Me At Six take their final bow, rounding off two decades at the top of the Britrock mountain and going out entirely on their own terms. To say goodbye, we joined the Weybridge favourites on their farewell tour to look back over a rollercoaster career, what it all means, and why they’re calling time…
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- Paul Harries
“I still don’t know. I’m trying not to think about it.” Over the past year, more than once Kerrang! has asked Josh Franceschi the same question. In various places, in various settings – as they announced that their Slam Dunk 2024 headliner would be their last festival show; in Berlin in November, in the middle of their final European run; in Newcastle, as they start on this home stretch to the end – when we enquire about how he’s feeling as the nailed-down calendar date that You Me At Six will cease to exist as an entity draws closer, the singer replies the same.
“I’m not thinking about it, because I know it’s coming, and I’ll feel it when it gets here,” he says. “What I’m trying to focus on, what we all are, is being present for every single one of these shows, and enjoying every moment. If I think about it too much, it’ll start counting down, it’ll rush past, and before I know it we’ll be there at Wembley. I want all of these shows to matter.”
When You Me At Six wake up on April 5, they’ll finally know how it feels not to be You Me At Six anymore. After 20 years, eight albums, two Number Ones, more than 20 Kerrang! covers, 2,000-odd gigs, one year-long global victory lap, and two closing shows at London’s OVO Arena Wembley, the band are calling time. When that day comes, Josh, guitarists Max Helyer and Chris Miller, bassist Matt Barnes and drummer Dan Flint will, for the first time in their adult lives, be civilians.
“We’ve all been in this band longer than we haven’t,” observes Matt. Taken in this perspective, Max adds, “That just shows how it’s too big to try to process without actually having finished it.”
More than 50,000 fans have snapped up tickets for the band’s last dash through the UK, seven weeks that have seen them touring the length and breadth of these isles, hitting neighbouring towns in a manner rarely seen these days, often returning to places they haven’t been to in over a decade. “We hadn’t played Exeter since 2008,” grins Josh. “I had no idea it had been so long. It’s fucking great.”
That’s not to say it’s been entirely smooth. In Brighton, the first night of tour, a back problem left Dan unable to play. With hours to go until showtime, his drum tech and Defects skinsman Harry Jennings had to, heroically, step up and fill in, aided that night by Royal Blood’s Ben Thatcher. “It’s classic You Me At Six,” laughs Josh, “but it just makes things even more special and in the moment. We pushed through – like we always have.”
It’s been a very international exit, as well. In October, the Weybridge wonders headed to America, hitting the road with old mates Enter Shikari. With similar apt serendipity to Max spotting the final show falling on the anniversary of their first-ever band rehearsal, and ending their festival career at Slam Dunk, the site of their first big break in 2007, Chris recalls that the St Albans quartet were the first band they ever supported, at The Boileroom in Guildford.
In Europe, this tour has seen You Me At Six doing their biggest headline shows ever. “In Paris, we’ve never pulled more than about 800 people. This time, we were at the Bataclan,” notes Dan. In an effort to “leave no stone unturned” as the drummer puts it, the 37 gigs on home soil haven’t done anything less than 1,500 people a night. And throughout the tour, the band have turned their meet and greets into a ‘wake’, featuring galleries of old photos and memorabilia, including a career’s worth of Kerrang! covers. As funerals go, they’re joyous events.
“In Paris, my cheeks hurt when we came offstage from smiling so much,” says Chris. “You can see in people’s faces how much the gig means to them, and how much your band has meant to them. It’s so humbling to know we’ve changed so many people’s lives. I’ve been smiling my arse off, and I’ve never really done that before…”
“We’ve always said: end it on a high,” agrees Max. “End it in a really good place, in a celebration of this band, instead of being miserable and depressed. There’s been a lot of gratitude, I think from the fans to us as a band, to say thank you. This is the last time round, and we’re gonna have these moments and share them with you. A lot of people do multiple shows, and they’re soaking it all up. And for us, there’s gratitude to the fans: thank you for making 20 years of our career.”
“There’s another version of this story where we’re all sitting around at [500-cap London venue] The Underworld, we all hate each other, everything’s gone wrong, we’ve been completely crushed by the industry,” ponders Dan. “This is golden, though. We’re mates, we’re doing it on our terms, and it just feels amazing.”
“We’re mates, we’re doing it on our terms, and it just feels amazing”
The end has actually been in the post for a while. Josh says that when the idea was first mooted in a pub in East London, long before the plan was ready to announce, “there was no pushback”. Better to preserve things at a really good place, was the feeling, than end up with series 34 of a show people stopped caring about years ago.
“When you think about the last album, Truth Decay, with the front cover on it with the burning VI, I think there was a sense, subconsciously, that it was the end piece of a puzzle,” says Max. “I remember Josh saying when we started writing, ‘I want it to be the best version of You Me At Six for all the decades.’ Looking back, it just felt very natural, and felt like a very good place to put a full-stop.”
“This is a celebration, for us, and for the fans,” echoes Josh. “And I’m so grateful we’re doing it our way.”
If the men of You Me At Six can’t yet fully answer the question of how they’re feeling about the imminent end, they have a lot of memories to look back on. Six months ago, Kerrang! joined the band at the Astra in Berlin. Again, the 2,000-capacity hall is the biggest venue they’ve ever played under their own steam in the German capital.
With the noise of openers The XCERTS rattling through the building – one of many bands of old mates called upon to make this final ride with them, which will also see Oli Sykes joining them onstage in Sheffield, and Heights getting back together for their first shows in over a decade for the occasion – the vibe in YMAS’ dressing room isn’t that far from their first Euro tour in 2009, opening for Paramore.
In the flush of youth and high on the rush from the success of Take Off Your Colours in the UK, Dan reminiscences that their first proper continental jaunt was spent “pretending we were on a stag-do”.
Indeed, spirits are high, even if low in supply. Max asks their tour manager for a bottle of amaretto, rebuffed with a “maybe not every night”. Even so, you feel as if you’re part of a very long party – Josh has even flown his eternally proud parents out for the evening.
You Me At Six are, in many ways, a rare band. That they’ve lasted 20 years is an achievement in itself. That, other than the very earliest, pre-Take Off Your Colours days, they’ve done so with the same line-up is another. And the fact that ending it all now was something that came up naturally, rather than having hands forced through outside pressures or failings, or internal strain and difficulties, accounts for the buoyant mood.
Upon first announcement that the band were retiring, Josh told K! that “we always said we wanted to make it last for 20 years”. Which probably seemed a universe away as teenagers in Weybridge. But even in a time where a new crop of British bands were arriving and shooting quickly upward – in 2008, when they appeared on the cover of Kerrang! for the first time, the same was also happening for Bring Me The Horizon, Enter Shikari, Bullet For My Valentine and Gallows – YMAS’ ascendency was something to behold.
Triumphs and milestones felt like inevitabilities. Headlining London’s Astoria or O2 Academy Brixton were quickly ticked off. Joining the legendary Vans Warped Tour in America in the summer of 2009 was an obvious win. Ditto coming back to headline Slam Dunk. In the review of their gig opening for Paramore at Wembley, this writer noted that it was only a matter of time before their own name appeared above the door, something they raced to in 2012. For this, it should be noted, we ran five separate covers, one for each band member, putting them in an exclusive club whose other members include My Chemical Romance, Slipknot and KISS.
“We’ve all got different points, but I think it was the Astoria show when we did Take Off Your Colours,” says Max, when asked at what point he realised this might be for the long haul. “It was the first time our families had actually come and seen us. That was when they’d seen us booking tours in summer and gone, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ to seeing 2,000 people watching us. I was like, ‘This is what we’ve been doing!’”
When America came calling, the band were warned that the work would be hard. Appearing in Chicago for their first gig on Warped, Dan remembers wondering what the worry was all about. “Loads of people came to watch. We were like, ‘This is easy! America? Completed it, mate.’ Then the next day there were three people. We were humbled very quickly…”
Max recalls walking along queues at each of the festival’s stops, headphones in hand, trying to drum up interest for You Me At Six’s set. With timings decided on the day by organiser Kevin Lyman to keep a sense of community among bands and stop people getting too big for their boots, this work was vital for everyone not already a major known quantity. It could also mean distinct discomfort for anyone not focused on the job in hand.
“England played Germany in the South African World Cup, so we were going to be up at, like, 4am watching the game,” says Josh. “We said to Kevin, ‘Can we please just play a bit later on in the day?’ We got to bed at seven in the morning, and about three hours later our tour manager woke us up going, ‘Guys, you’re on in 15 minutes – get up!’”
LOLZ aside, the graft highlights perhaps why You Me At Six have lasted so long in an industry that can destroy bands who don’t keep an eye over their shoulder.
“It’s obvious, fucking corny, cringy bullshit, but it’s undeniably true: be brave,” stresses Josh. “There’s beautiful things on the horizon, but only if you’re willing to live on your knees to get there.”
“You have to really fucking want to do it, because it’s not for the faint-hearted,” says Max. “It really isn’t. There’s lack of sleep, grinding, grafting. There is such a reward when you get to the gig and you play the shows and you’re buzzing for that hour. But people don’t see what happens before and after that – the travel side, and then there’s business stuff that adds to stress. You either love it or you hate it. And I’ll tell you what, we fucking love it.”
And to an outside eye, it’s looked that way, too. At some point, everyone in the band offers a variation on Josh’s description of You Me At Six as “a vehicle to see the world and have all these mad adventures”.
“When we recorded [2014 album] Cavalier Youth, we rented this mansion in the hills in LA to work with [Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park producer] Neal Avron,” grins Max. “Dan turned around when we got there. He was like, ‘This will be one of the best summers, if not the best summer of our lives.’ And it was!”
“We believed in our f*cking dreams... We went for it”
Stiff competition there, mind. There’s also the times recording in Thailand, or hopping through America with All Time Low, or countless visits to Australia. Or having a police escort as soon as you arrive on new ground…
“When we first arrived in Manila, we got straight into a car at the airport that had police cars in front and behind,” says Dan. “We went to this appearance in a shopping mall, and people were there just screaming at us. It was crazy. We’d flown there, just got off the plane, totally confused, like, ‘What…?’”
“If you could tell our 15-year-old selves we’d be where we are, eight albums later, two Number Ones, travelled the world, had great success in life experiences and music, we probably wouldn’t laugh,” says Max of all these memories. “No way, because we didn’t let anybody fucking stray us from our path. We believed in our fucking dreams. We stuck to one thing. We went for it.”
This tour, with its funereal meet and greet and its career-digesting setlist and celebration of 20 years of a band, is a naturally backward-looking thing. But, as with looking forward too far, it’s secondary to being in the moment and drinking it all in.
“You have these moments that are really special, like doing Reading for the first time, or headlining Brixton or Glasgow Barrowlands,” says Max. “But the magnitude of these shows, it feels like every night’s on that level of most special nights.”
In Berlin, it’s exactly that. It’s not just that these performances show off quite how many bangers You Me At Six have built up, or the breadth of sound, from early pop-punk to huge indie anthems to electro-edged moments you couldn’t have imagined that first time here with Paramore. It’s the sense of occasion. It’s knowing that, once this is over, you can’t have a second crack at it.
“It’s really nice in a way, knowing this is the end, because all that matters is right now,” nods Josh when we catch up months later in Newcastle. “We’re not trying to get to the next thing. We’re not thinking about what this will mean for festival bookings next summer or anything like that. There’s none of that pressure. It makes it so pure, because we’re only thinking about that night.”
“There’s no pressure and it makes this so pure”
As they say, each night is someone’s last time (and, in some cases, they’ve discovered, also their first). Not having to sell people anything from the gigs other than the shared moment has brought into fresh focus quite how deeply You Me At Six’s music has connected them.
A couple of weeks ago, before their show at Nottingham Rock City, Josh decided to go for a pint in the nearby Tap’n’Tumbler pub. Surprised to see the man of the hour among them, fans asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ Again, it was part of enjoying this time with the people who, ultimately, matter the most in the equation.
“It was a really good opportunity to have an open dialogue about the fact that they’re about to come watch us for the last time, and I’m about to perform for them for the last time,” the singer smiles. “That connection, and getting to do that properly with people, has been so nice.
“People often ask if I can write lyrics out for them and tell me that the music helped them, or sometimes saved them. When you hear that sort of stuff, you realise this is a part of a skin-shedding in their life. Something is over, in the same way that it’s over for us.”
When that day finally comes, Josh, Max, Chris, Matt and Dan will have an answer to that question we’ve been putting to them. Whatever’s next is a bridge to be crossed. Right now, it’s about fans, gigs, memories and one another.
“One thing I’m really proud about is that when the good times have come we’ve all celebrated, and when the bad times have come, we’ve stuck together, and we’ve ground it out, and we’ve stayed as a unit,” beams Max. “We’ve had many good times, and we’ve also had many bad times, but I wouldn’t have changed any of this now when I look back, because it’s taught us who we are as people and how we can face adversity when it comes our way. There’s been a lot of challenging things, and we all know what the music industry is like, and we’ve been part of that, and we have seen those highs and lows, but it hasn’t broken us as a unit. I think you can see in this room right now how we are a band of brothers.”
“We’re happy with what we’ve achieved,” agrees Josh. “And we’re happy with how we’re leaving it with fans. They can walk away from it with their bellies full as well, rather than going, ‘Fuck, are they still touring?’
“We want them to go: ‘You know what? They were fucking wicked.’”
Job done, You Me At Six. Cheers for the last 20 years.
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