Who are Turbowolf?
Turbowolf are four dudes from Bristol and we sound like a thousand beasts tearing open our own souls and examining the contents. We came together in a weird kind of way, a couple of us wrote all the stuff, then found various people to play the music from other bands, and then formed our own band, and that's been Turbowof for the last year and a half at least.
Your music has been labelled 'Concrete', what does that mean?
We were just looking through the list on the MySpace music thing, and we decided that was obviously the best thing we could be. Because we sound like concrete, what is that like? Dunno, that's what we are. We figured if you were on our MySpace page then you would know what we were about anyway. So you can make your own choice about what you really want to call it.
You played South By South West recently, how was that?
Amazing! It was an amazing time, we went to Canada for Canadian music week, the week before that and went to New York for one gig, so a 24 hour stop there. Then, we went to Texas for a week, to South By South West, which was incredible because it was boiling hot there, and Austin is an amazing place. We played six gigs altogether in the five days we were there. It was really intense because there's so many people everywhere, and it's just a constant party really. We had to lug our stuff around, but we were all so happy to do it because it was a bit of holiday for us as well.
So did you experience any downsides?
We didn't find any problems with anything really. Well, we did find a problem with them giving us too much alcohol, which we don't normally have a problem at all, but when you've got to play shows it can be an issue, I find. But, everyone was so nice to us, even in small bars where we thought, 'it's real Texan in here, not a festival crowd'. We were expecting decapitation, or something, but everyone loved it, it was great.
You're playing Great Escape this weekend are you looking forward to that too?
Yeah, absolutely it's a big one. It's England's answer to South By South West. That's what we're doing at the moment, getting ready for that. We've got some new songs to play, stuff that we haven't played live yet, so we're just going to try some new stuff out. It's a lot of gambling really, a lot of risk, we always like to have an element of risk when we're playing so we'll try that.
I presume a lot of the audience both there and at SXSW haven't heard of you.
That's right, there's so many bands about these days, that you can be doing fairly well, and still not be heard by the majority of people. So, we are looking forward to playing to people down in Brighton, we've played down in Brighton a few times actually, but we haven't done The Great Escape ever, and there's so many people there, that I'm sure we won't be playing in front of people that have seen us before.
What other festivals have you got lined up this summer?
We're doing Vans and Relentless gig called 'Dawn Of The Shred' which is kind of a snowboard festival type thing, that's at the end of May. Then we've got Download festival next month, and that's going to be amazing. That will be incredible, we're massive Faith No More fans, I've been a Faith No More fan since I was a kid. We're doing a festival in Middlesbrough, a live free one at the start of June. We're doing another gig for Relentless the NASS festival which is an extreme sports thingamygig, and we're doing a Cock Rock festival, I'm not really sure what that means, so we'll see what happens there. Then, we're doing more Relentless stuff, Boardmasters in August as well, and Lovebox on the way too, in Victoria Park in London. We've got Bestival and Camp Bestival and Rob Da Bank has been championing us. We've just done a session for him in Maida Vale.
Has that been aired yet?
It hasn't been broadcast yet, no. I think it's going to be broadcast. His shows on the Sunday night I think, and it'll be when we're actually playing at Download on Sunday 14th June, and it'll be on that show.
What was it like at Maida Vale?
It was incredible, it was just like a big rehearsal room really, a big studio, and the engineer there, a guy called Mitty, he was just fantastic. We just set everything up in the room, and he miked it all up, and we did one take of this and two takes of that, and he said, "Yeah got it" and we went in and he just made it how we wanted it to sound, dirty, raw and live. It was all of those things, he was brilliant.
Did you get any vibe of the musicians who had been through there?
Yeah, we were just sitting in there, and there was a Propagandhi album on top of the desk, and I picked it up and asked Mitty what it was doing there, and he said that they were in yesterday and left it. He then said, "There's a book here if you'd like to have a look through, and sign your name at the end of it." It was just a little guest book of who had been there, and it was just incredible, White Stripes, Queens Of The Stone Age, Mars Volta, everyone. We were a little bit shocked by that.
Who are your musical influences by the way?
Well I guess we all listened to the same sort of stuff, and different stuff. We go through phases, like everybody else, of listening to different stuff. My influences would be old stuff like Pink Floyd, Rush, and ELO, I like prog rock stuff, and growing up it was Guns 'n' Roses, Alice Cooper, Slayer, all sort of metal stuff Pantera, White Zombie. White Zombie were a massive influence on me, I'm a big White Zombie fan. I saw them in '95 and that was my first proper big gig, that blew me away, and made we want to do that really. Then moving forward it was Death From Above, that's more recent I guess. A lot of stuff really, it's hard to think of stuff now. Our influences are mainly older proggie and psychedelic stuff, mixed with Eighties thrash, and more recent stuff like Justice.
So did seeing Rob Zombie make you want to be a sing?
(laughs) I guess so. But, I didn't actually want to be a singer. I just wanted to play in a band, I used to play bass in a few bands. The way I became a singer was a bit weird, we had some songs, me and a guy in this band a long time ago, and we were just playing with other people, and getting singers in. We couldn't really find anyone who could what we wanted to do in the band. So, I started trying to show them, and in the end we thought that I might as well just do it. I didn't really want to, I was a reluctant frontman but once I got out on stage, I just found myself, and I found it was actually great.
You throw yourself around on stage a lot. Have you ever injured yourself?
Yeah I have, I cut my lip a lot of the time, because when I get in the crowd with the microphone, I end up punching myself in the face a lot. I've cracked a few teeth, I'm making myself a little more beastly every gig, but that's all part of it. It's all about going all out live, just go for it all the time, and try to get the crowd into it, and just try to be wild.
For that interaction we like paying smaller stages and to smaller crowds, it works for us. We like having low stages, and being in the crowd. We like immersing ourselves, and make it more of an experience, and trying to get everyone to participate.
What's been the best band you've appeared on the bill with so far?
I'd say our favourite band at the moment are Monotonix from Israel, and they are just fucking crazy, they are the best live band in the world at the moment. The story is, they are three guys, guitarist, drummer, and singer, and they always play in the crowd, on top of the crowd, and everywhere else, they are absolutely wild.
Their shows are legendary, they have about 100 pages of YouTube stuff, everyone is just filming them all the time because they are amazing. I've seen them quite a few times, and played with them a few times, and they are really nice guys. They are currently off in San Francisco making their album. Invasion from London, Tweak Bird from the States awesome band, plyed with them a couple of times, and The Computers as well. They're new friends of ours, we've been playing a few gigs together, nice guys and we want to do some more stuff with them. You might see a tour at some point with them, you never know.
So what's the music scene like back in your home town in Bristol?
Bristol's like a practice ground really I find. There's a lot of musicians here and a lot of bands playing and a lot of them don't make it out of this city. They get wrapped up with playing Bristol, which is good, but it's nice to get out there and let London know we exist. We find it to play with bands in Bristol because there's so many different genres of music and people doing new, weird stuff and crossover stuff, which is cool. But we haven't really found anyone who is doing what we're doing. Which is good, but it makes it difficult to book good nights here. So, we usually play club nights here or we put on our own shows and we get bands from all over the country that we've played with to come down to Bristol, which is great.
There's loads of stuff going on here in Bristol, it's all about the mixture between the electronic side which is dum'n'bass, dub-step is even bigger now, and a lot of house is still here. Then you've got all the weird stuff, I guess the trip-hop style stuff like Portishead, and loads of new bands doing that stuff.
There's loads of shoegaze bands coming up now which is interesting, there's a bit of a revival of that scene. But I guess we're the thrash party rock sort of guys here.
And who would you love to support?
I'd love to have time to think about this, but off the top of my head, Faith No More, and I guess in a way, we're not supporting them, but we're playing the same festival as them. If by any chance they liked us, and they said, "We want to do a world tour, and we want you to play with us." Then we'd probably all shit ourselves, and then say yes.
What's next for the band?
well there's the single 'Read & Write'/'Seven Severed Heads' out on June 15th. We're writing more stuff, recording more stuff, and getting a tour together in the autumn, We're taking our time because we're unsigned it takes a lot of time and blagging, and we want to put something together that our fans will like.
Enjoy Download and other festivals this summer.
Thanks
article by: Scott Williams
published: 18/05/2009 15:41
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