Gia Ford - Students' Union: Access All Areas

when I read the title for the first time there might be a bit of back rooms obviously back

yeah no

you know people people crave that people want to be all the time yeah

yeah well that's actually quite insightful yeah maybe that's what I was thinking about yeah back rooms that's funny yeah

There's lots of ludic elements within the visuals of the album.

Like there is you playing chess, making a puzzle.

Where does the symbolism come from and what does it represent to you?

Well it was my girlfriend's idea really and I think it came it kind of was an accident because I had a demo called games for a long time and she was like she had all these references where she was like oh we can do we can have a giant chess board or we can have a giant this or we can whatever she had loads of game related ideas and then that didn't end up getting used but it kind of felt like it was suitable because we were piecing the album together as, as we were recording it.

So a lot of things were overlapping, like we'd recorded three already and there was still like the final three that we recorded hadn't even been written yet.

So it was all happening on top of itself.

And, um, So it felt like a puzzle kind of being pieced together.

And also, I think there's quite a lot of styles on there.

And I think it's just this maybe this metaphor for like piecing what the Gia Ford kind of thing is, you know, a bit more from the first one.

I think it's a development from the first one.

And then the other element of this puzzle thing and the trinkets, because they're all like physical things, all the single covers and stuff.

It was just to kind of manifest the idea of actual physical items as opposed to computerized items, because that was sort of the ethos in the music as well throughout the whole record.

And everything we wanted, everything to be tangible and look tangible.

um so by printing a picture of printing a picture onto a puzzle and then taking a picture of the puzzle you can see that it's like a real object you know and that it's in a real room and so I think all of those things kind of um I think they're quite subconscious but I think they um they they do build on that general world I think well for the overall thing

having to piece everything together.

What was the moment when everything just fell in place?

I didn't feel like that at all, actually, until it was done.

But I think, I suppose, the second time... we went into the studio, I think it started to come together at that point.

We did, it was quite disjointed and we went back and forth from the studio a lot, which was a gift, but also a bit of a curse because it was disjointed.

But I think maybe the second or third time we went in, it started to feel like a, a good album.

And I felt, I started to feel confident that it would be good in the end.