“It started off with myself and Nick, the bass player,” Tremayne says. “He had some concepts and ideas song-wise about two years ago. I started penning some ideas down with him loosely over the summer.” Soon some demos came together and the pair realised it was time to bring in a serious drummer, and a band was born. I suggest to Tremayne that a lot of ‘second bands’ featuring established players seem to be built around a particular vision for a sound, as opposed to their first band which often arises out of mateship and good old fashioned weekend jamming. “Sometimes it’s a natural progression, as with this one, because it was vision based-but the progression of us as far as playing together was natural as well. Yet it was more vision based as well. If that makes any sense.”
Being a three-piece but having such a monolithic sound, the band approaches live performance creatively. Rather than add extra live members or play along to a pre-recorded track, they take a more unified, all-in approach. “We play as much as we can physically live,” Tremayne says. You can see much of what the band uses live in the rooftop clip for DTX, and it’s a pretty good indicator of the kind of energy you can expect from a live show too. “As far as the drum stuff in the video, what Benny had was what he uses, but we pulled out a few instruments. Be he plays basically a live drum set-up, obviously, as does Nick but with a few bass effects. But with the drums we have MPCs and DTX and little MIDI pads and stuff like that, so he’s got lots of MIDI instrumentation to hit as much of the synths and the sounds in real time as possible. And he only has two arms and two legs, so anything that can’t be played in real time is on a track. But it’s really minimal. Just the three of us straight up. It’s pretty large for three cats. Just the three, no more, no less. But as much as Nick can play live, he does.”
The band is currently recording, but they haven’t yet decided if they’ll release the tracks as an EP, an album or individual tracks with accompanying film clips. “I suppose that in the day and age of the internet being the most powerful tool of communication as far as the audio visual goes, we could go down the track of doing albums and EPs and all that jazz, but as a young band I suppose that in getting the attention of a potential fanbase it’s more powerful for us to record big singles. Really, really banging film clips, rather than recording five songs and still essentially having a single or maybe two. So I think we’ll release it in singles and clips.”
“We can do a lot of it at home on the cheap. We’ve all got pretty smart studios at home. Apart from the drums we can lay it all down and then spend a day or two mixing and mastering it with a dude like Forrester Savell, like we did last time and will in the future as well. So I think the vibe is, between now and October or November we’ll come out with huge releases every ten weeks or so, then come the end of the year we’ll release a full big album. That way people actually give a fuck about the album.”
Tremayne, incidentally, is full of praise for Savell, who has worked with bands like Cog, Dead Letter Circus, Birds Of Tokyo and Karnivool. “He definitely has the ears. He’s awesome. He has ears and ideas. And he’s a lovely guy as well. He brings new things out in the music and he brings it together in a new way which all sounds lush.”
For the band’s upcoming headline show at The Evelyn Hotel, they were to be supported by another supergroup of sorts, The Khyber Belt, featuring members of Rook, Bushido and .Hinge. But Khyber Belt had to drop off the show when they scored the support slot for the Evanescence tour. “They pulled out on Friday, so now we have a band called Artilah, plus I Am Duckeye, which is a couple of boys from Sydonia, who are good mates with us, and a band called Fisker.”
BY PETER HODGSON
