How did the band get together?
We're a bit of a band of brothers. The lead singer Jo was 15 or 16 and his best friend was my brother, and then his older brother's best friend was the bass player.
How long ago was that?
That was three year's ago.
Are you on tour at the moment?
No, at the moment we're having a lot of press, agents etc come down to watch us, so we're playing a lot of gigs in London, and then we do the occasional one in other favourite spots. But at the moment it's gigs, gigs and practising really.
So do you have a tour being planned?
Well, at the moment, we're being played on E4, xfm, and BBC London Radio, and we've just started getting out there, getting on regular play lists at club nights. We're playing Club NME this month in Swansea which we're all really looking forward to.
The promotion for the new single the 'Cost Of Living' has gone really well, our radio guy and press guy have done really well. We've got a lot of big TV channels and we're on NME tv as well, it's all cropped up over the last fortnight, and we're all absolutely ecstatic about it.
So how would you describe your music?
I always go with saying we're indie rock and roll.
So as a drummer who are your influences?
I like the best from certain styles, say for funk drumming I'd go for Geoff Love, but then when I was younger I also liked Danny Carey from Tool because I was a little goth/grungy kid back in the day. I was a bit out of my depth to be honest, but you've got to aim high and take baby steps, learning an instrument isn't a sprint it's a marathon. I don't really get into drummers particular styles, because I don't think any drummer has the perfect style really. I like taking little pieces from session drummers and then re-arrange it to make it sound my own.
What has been the most inspirational gig you've been to as a punter?
I haven't been to a gig in so long. We end up just watching so many gigs we're playing at. The last gig I went to was Smashing Pumpkins. I saw them at Reading Festival, and they were absolutely incredible, I was completely blown away by them, and I saw Pearl Jam the year before that. I want to go and see Radiohead, and Oasis those are my other two, I haven't seen them yet, because I'm on the dole because I'm in a band.
How often do you go to Reading is it in annual thing for you?
No, I went for two years, and I didn't like the line-up that much and then this year had the best line-up and I couldn't afford to go. Now, we're just doing the band thing and I'm living enough life, just doing that. We were supposed to play GuilFest this year, when it was the last date of our tour which we did over the summer, and our van broke down on the way from Scotland so we missed that unfortunately.
So did you manage to do any festivals this summer?
We did Sellindge, and Redfest, they're both pretty small, about 500 people, but GuilFest would have been 15,000 people, so that would have been really good. We didn't have our single out or anything by that point. Ever since the single has come out everything has started to pick up the traction which has only been the last couple of months really, and of course the festival season was over by that point.
So hopefully more festival dates next year, will you be releasing more material before next summer's festival season?
Well we've got 'Somewhere In Somebody's Heart' and we're going through that. We will be doing three singles, I believe. So it's going to be 'Cost Of Living' then the other two tracks are all arguing amongst themselves at the moment. We recorded that album about a year ago, and since then it's been moving slowly and picking up slowly. We went on tour and we've been trying to publicise it. now, suddenly we're getting all these reviews, and people are starting to buy us, even in China, it's gone absolutely mad.
Trouble with that is one person will buy it in China and then there will be eight million copies.
Yeah, that's true and they put it on those free download sites, and I think we're on three or four of those Even if you can pick up the album for free, it's all exposure at this point, and we're just getting down and working hard on it. The next thing is we will be going into the studio in March hopefully. So, up until then we're going to do B-sides. We were just in the studio yesterday, in fact, we put down the B-side for 'Cost Of Living' yesterday, to put on 7" vinyl, it's due out in a few days time.
You're cutting it fine putting the other tracks together for it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think from now on we're going to be recording every month and we also want to do a couple of collaborative tracks. I have a good friend who is a rapper so we might get him on a couple of tracks, and maybe put that out as a B-side because the whole rap/rock crossover thing is quite popular at the moment. We're just trying to cover all the bases, and we're trying to get an album which will appeal to everyone. It seems to have a very broad range of appeal and we're trying to delve into all styles of music.
Going back to the question, 'how would I describe the band'. Well, it's quite difficult because almost everything we write these days is different to the songs we wrote previously. We went into the studio yesterday and we made up this song which has three sections and it's a beautiful song it's one of my favourites of ours, but you can't work out from the three sections what's the chorus, and what's the verse or anything, it kind of all flows, and I wouldn't even like to say what style it is. And then we have songs off our album which are very typical indie songs about knife crime on buses and stuff. So, the new stuff is really going to broaden us really.
So do you think your sound has also changed much since you recorded 'Somewhere In Somebody's Heart'?
Oh, all the time, all the time, we went in to the studio last summer and we were all young. We got stuck in at the studio with James Lewis when we had only been around for less than a year. We got signed after six months, it was actually our first gig in London and we were in the Barfly, and we got picked up there. Then, ever since, it has been a rollercoaster. They chucked us in the recording studio after about a year, we weren't the best musicians in the world, but they can do beat locking and stuff on computers these days and so it all sounded so perfected, and now I find we are just starting to really discover, just what kind of style we are.
We were so young back then, the lead singer was 16 and we had to sneak him in to all the bars and the clubs that we were playing. I was 18 and it was almost like the band was still a bit of a hobby back then., we thought well what are our chances for crying out loud. We'd got signed, thrown into a recording studio and suddenly here was an album which a lot of people responded to.
Suddenly, it was hold on a moment, this is it, and so everything else was sidelined and we'd practise and practise. We actually record on top of a local pub, and hire out the rehearsal space, and do a good three or four hours in there everyday. Or music has gone from strength to strength. Our music has always been very honest, with lyrics where Jo was as the time, it was quite young, because he was 15 or 16 writing it and some of the tracks he was even younger. Now, the experiences have by going on tour, and playing these upper market venues, the people we're meeting and the life experience we've gained over the last year, has completely changed the sound. We now sound much more mature, and much more refined.
article by: Scott Williams
published: 08/12/2008 08:44
FUTURE GIGS
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