Andy interviewed Boys Like Girls’ guitarist, Paul DiGiovanni before their Wembley Arena show with Fall Out Boy last week.
PT: How are you today Paul?
Paul DiGiovanni: Very good, and you?
PT: I’m excellent. You’ve been over here with Fallout Boy playing some massive arena shows. How have they been for you guys so far?
PD: They’ve been great, we’ve had two so far, this is our third and final one. We’ve been over here a few times but we’ve never played places close to as big as this. It’s really good for us to be able to get loads of new kids to hear us. Everyone I’ve told back home that we’re playing Wembley has been freaking out, it’s awesome.
PT: How different is it playing arena shows like this compared to more intimate ones?
PD: Every show’s different once we get up there. Normally we’re on like a two month tour, and by the middle we’re in a routine, doing pretty much the same thing every night, but with these huge shows, there’s only a couple of them. There’s a whole load of emotions going on, especially as we’re going home tomorrow. It’s weird though, the past two shows we’ve gone out there and all looked at each other and just started laughing at how many kids were there watching!
PT: Your self-titled album came out quite a while ago now, over two years ago. Have you got plans in store for a follow-up and if so, what can you tell me about it?
PD: It’s funny you say that actually, because this is one of our last shows for this record tonight. After we get home we’re taking the next three or four months off to write and record the new record, hopefully we’ll have it out by early spring or as soon as we can. We’ve done a ton of writing so far, we’ve got a ton of ideas, now we need to sit down in a studio all together and make the final decisions that need to be made.
PT: Despite your self-titled album having been on the shelves for a while, it’s only recently that we’ve heard much about you over here in the UK. How important is it for you guys to build up a fanbase over here?
PD: Every time we come here, it’s important. We love our fans here, and we want to come back to the UK as much as we can. Once we get the new record out we’ll be right back playing more shows for you!
PT: When you’re over here do you have much of a chance to explore the cities you’re playing in?
PD: The first couple of times we didn’t. We didn’t really understand what it was like in the UK, we were all on bad sleeping schedules and it was raining, but this time around we’ve had a lot more free time. A few days ago we had a day off and we got to walk around London for like five hours, it was awesome. One of our old drivers took us around for a tour of the city, so we got to see a lot of places we wouldn’t usually.
PT: You spent the summer on the road with your ‘Soundtrack of the summer’ tour. What has been the soundtrack to YOR summer in 2008?
PD: Ha, that’s a tough one. I just got the new Copeland record that came out and I really like that. Every time we tour, we tend to listen to the bands we’re on the road with. For example we’ve all been loving the Metro Station CD ever since the Good Charlotte tour.
PT: Ok finally, you’ve got a new DVD coming out at the beginning of November. What can you tell me about it?
PD: A lot of bands come up with just live DVDs and they’re pretty cool, but we wanted to do a little more than that. It’s a bout an hour and a half long, half of it is a live show, half of it is behind the scenes stuff. We had a video guy come out for a little over two weeks on the last tour, so we’ve got all kinds of footage from that. I’ve also been recording stuff since we started as a band, gave him everything and was like ‘do whatever you want with this!’ It’s cool, it starts with us in the beginning, and just follows us to where we are now. What we wanted to do was let everyone know who we are personally, and how we work together. If you come and see our shows you never really get a feeling of who we are as people, so this will hopefully change that. The live show as well is the biggest show from our hometown that we’re really proud of, and really happy to include that in there as well/
I hear you’re doing a movie-style premiere for it’s release, how did that idea come about?
PD: Yeah, back home in Massachusetts there’s a brand new Cineplex opening. We thought it’d be cool and once we heard about the new movie theatre being built, we thought, ‘Let’s try and get that’, and we did. It should be a lot of fun, we’ll be talking to all the fans who come along and people can buy the DVD before it’s out and everything so it should be a lot of fun!