Only Sun
Interview (10/14/17)
How’re you guys doing today?
“Got a bit of studio madness. We’ve just come back from the studio.”
Yeah? What’d you guys do?
“Preproduction! So we’ve gone in and played through a couple of new songs. We just want to be heard (laughs). Erm, yeah, it’s quite alright.”
You can’t tell me what you’ve recorded, right?
“We could tell you the names of the tracks but it won’t mean anything (laughs). We’ve redone one track but we’re not going to say which one. But we’re thinking about releasing that.”
What inspired you to start making music?
“Great question. Uh, women (laughs). I think we’ve all been in various bands over the years. For me, it was kind of like, listening to lots of 90’s indie rock and I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m gonna do that. I wanna write that shit.’ Then I tried, and uh, we’re here. Although not very good indie rock (laughs).
What influences your songs?
“Ooh. Influences songs. It comes from various things. Generally it comes from annoyances, grievances, like, I think even the happy songs are about something that’s really pissed me off. I think from a musical perspective as well, we all listen to really different songs. A similar base of music, but we all have our different little niches, and in our own individual influences we try to like merge them into the genre and it seems to help.”
Before we go further, who’s who in the band?
“I’m Aabid, I’m the drummer.”
“I’m Euan and I’m the singer and tambourinist.”
“Hello, I am Ed and I’m the lead guitarist.”
“I’m Taylor, I’m the bassist.”
“I’m Daz and I’m the other guitarist.”
Do you play rhythm guitar or lead guitar? (Pointing at Daz)
“Lead. Kind of.”
So, just everyday life influences your songs?
“Yeah, sort of. It really depends. One of our new songs is about gossiping and how much that annoys me. We’ve got a tight knit group of friends, even outside of the band. And there’s a lot of gossip going around. And it drives me nuts. It absolutely drives me nuts. It really exercises it, like, it’s easier as well to write a song about.”
What is your fanbase like?
“(laughs) Well, I’d say, on like Spotify and things like that we’ve had a pretty good response to our songs, primarily our singles. And I think it’s something to do with us being put on playlists. Which is really good. And then we play a lot of shows in London, cause we sort of play loads and loads. I think we’ve built up quite a decent… When we go to shows, there are quite a few people know who we don’t actually know. Which is completely different from say like a year ago, where we’d do a show and absolutely everybody would be like a friend or family. So it’s a bit different. Remember that first show about a year ago where there were the first people that were there to see us, but we didn’t know them, and it was a very special moment. We were very socially awkward back then… We’re still socially awkward. The best people are."
Has the show that you played with Magic Giant helped?
“I think it’s weird. Magic Giant aren’t really that well known over here, it was one of their first shows in London. It’s interesting. It was a really cool show. It was basically in this vintage clothes shop, in the upstairs, they take all the clothes racks away and it opens up into this really edgy sort of bar thing. Really cool. Here’s the issue with us. There’s five of us, and we’re very energetic, we jump around a lot. And like, the stage is really small. We bashed into each other quite a lot. Magic Giant probably had it worse though ‘cause they’ve got like, violins and a shitload of instruments. They benefited though, they went straight into the audience, whereas we missed that chance.”
How well did you get to know them?
“I talked to the violin player slash guitarist, he was pretty nice. But it wasn’t very much, ‘cause obviously everything clashes when you’re on stage… They’d do their sound check, then they’d go off to eat, then we’d do our soundcheck, then we’d go off to eat, and by the time we get back we’re playing, and we have to get everything off and then they’re playing, so you don’t really bump into each other until maybe after the show and by then we had to rush off because we had work the next day. But I did get to talk to him. He’s a really nice guy, really really nice guy. They were very different and had we gone and supported them where they were known rather than them playing at a place where we were a little bit known then it would have been a different scenario. I think the opportunity would have been better had we gone to a show of theirs rather than their first show in London. It was still really cool. It was interesting to see how much crew and stuff that they had, three fellows, we’d never seen that before.”
What was it like to open for them? What was the show like? Did they play with you?
“No, it was very much set, I think they were just kind of like gearing up for what they had to do. We assume they were psyching themselves up. Every band has their way. We have our own.”
What do you guys do before a show?
“We do a vocal warm up where we stand in a circle and everyone claps, and someone will do something, and it can be absolutely anything so it gets a bit strange, and everyone in the circle repeats it. So it could literally be someone squawking, then everyone else has to do that. It’s very weird. So we were doing that a lot and people were like staring at us like, ‘What is going on?’. We do that before going on stage, it helps warm up the vocals, and helps like… Our banter is sort of like us being laughed at. We make a fool of ourselves and it helps us to loosen up slightly as well.”
What’s the weirdest noise you’ve made in that scenario?
“Probably the Arrested Development, ‘CHAW-CHEE-CHAW CHEE-CHAW CHEE-CHAW’. That one’s probably the weirdest.”
What is Best Laid Plans about?
“It’s kind of about the boredom of everyday life. So, we were trying to get it so we could play it in the studio for our last EP. Just kind of missed the deadline by two days maybe, we were really touch and go on it. But it was also about the time that I had got a job as a part time shoes salesman. The most boring thing. At an unnamed shoe store. There was a big point in time where it was just routine, one day I’d be working with shoes and another I’d just be holed up writing music and not really doing anything. It just got into a repetition where I felt like, ‘What the hell am I doing with my life?’. It was a routine to get into a bit of angst and vent my frustrations. And it came out into a fairly decent song, though not much further than that… We like to put ourselves down a lot.”
Why is that?
“I think it’s born off our banter, that we think that we’re terrible. I think it’s actually fairly good (laughs). So I think it’s just aids our humor. None of us wants to say, ‘Oh, it’s good. It’s really, really good.’ We just have fun.”
What’s your favorite song you’ve made?
“It’s different for each of us. You should probably ask which one that we hate. That’d get more of a response. So for me, it’s one that’s not yet released, but we’ll be recording in the next couple weeks. It’s called “Patience”, so when it comes out… (laughs).”
“It’s “Long Distance” I think for me.”
“Mine is “Rogue One”-- like Star Wars. We were the Star Wars guys.”
“Probably “Overcome”. It was the first one where we were like, ‘We are here. We are not fucking about.’ “Overcome” defined the turning point where we decided we’re here to stay.”
“I think mine was probably “Sacred Place”. I think that was one of the first ones I had a lot of input. ‘Cause I was like, I want to do a wicked bassline, and we made that really really heavy bit as well. I felt like that was really the first time that I had a lot of input into what we were doing. Which was nice. And it was just fun to play for me personally.”
“Yeah, I think that was a good moment, where you went from technically just being someone on the team to actually being a part of that. Taylor whips out, you could take the like song without a bassline and next thing, just on the spot he’ll whip out this huge hulking bassline with these little twiddly bassy bits. It’s ridiculous. He’s the most talented musically. He just gets it.”
If he’s most talented musically, why not put him on guitar? (Pointing at Ed)
“We’d already hired Daz. (laughs)”
“I kind of came quite a lot. I’m the newest member, their bassist had left and I was going back to uni. They asked, I’d known them since school, I was back in Wickham and they were back as well, so they said to me, ‘Would you mind coming in and just being a session musician for us?’. After that I just started getting into it and we all just kind of went from there. I mean, I always wanted to be in a metal band and I ended up being in an indie pop band so that didn’t really work out.”
What do you usually do after the studio? Just sit around and have a beer?
“I go home (laughs). I want to be at home.”
“It’s quite nice to be doing this sort of thing ‘cause we’ve got tomorrow in the studio as well, so we thought we might as well just travel together so we can come back to one place. And we’ve got the beers just to chill. It’s really strangely tiring doing it in the studio, like, ‘cause you’re concentrating so long. On paper it’s not a lot but it’s just really tiring to keep concentrating and keep playing the same things for a whole day. You just end up really fatigued.”
So right now you have 36k monthly listeners and one or two songs with over 100k listens. Where do you see your success in five years?
“Five years? I’ll probably be an assistant shoeman.”
“The dream is to go and kind of tour the US. That would be amazing. Hopefully by then we’ll have an album, get that experience. And we’ll have way more material.
Have you made it to the UK charts yet?
“Yeah. There’s a lot of people above us, I mean, it’s really difficult. It’s a small country. UK charts are very unbalanced. Charli XCX... It’s all pop. It’s not really bands. So many singer-songwriters at the moment.”
Are you on any other Spotify playlists?
“So we’re on the indie list at the moment. We’re on hot new bands, and we’re on summer indie.”
What’re your plans for the future with tracks?
“We’re releasing what we did.”
“No, no, we’re going to keep it. We can’t really talk about it, but we’re recording a lot of stuff and it’s gonna be exciting. Something special for next year. It’s varied songs at a much different approach. There’s going to be a lot of different stuff coming through, all different styles. Kind of exploring our ideas. Which is a lot more fun. Very experimental at this stage. Just different for us.”
When do you think that will be released?
“So, that’s part of what we can’t talk about. There will be a lot of stuff next year. It’s going to be very exciting for us, and hopefully for other people. All I can really say is you’re going to hear a lot more from us. Now for the next few months we’re going to be taking it easy, laying a bit low. But then it’s going to be some exciting stuff over here.”
Overview: ★★★★1/4
Best Laid Plans: ★★★★1/2
Does It Matter?: ★★★★★
Late to the Party: ★★★★1/2
Get Away: ★★★★★
Overcome: ★★★★★
Only Sun EP: ★★★★★
Comments
Post a Comment