My preposterous interview with Sea of Bees

I interviewed Julie in a luxurious Travelodge room whilst on tour with Smoke Fairies. It's fair to say we were both a little inebriated at the time. Have a listen:

  Sea of Bees interview by hells-belles

Goodbye, Faithful Interview! with Das Wanderlust

Das Wanderlust recently released a great debut album full of chaotic charm and they'll be headlining Goodbye, Faithful Kingom! @ The Macbeth on 1st September. I posed a few questions to singer/keyboardist Laura and guitarist Andy and here's what popped out:

I'm enjoying your new album Horses for Courses, it was definitely worth the wait. What took you so long to release it?

Andy: Fannying around trying to get a ‘proper’ label to release it. In retrospect it was a massive waste of time that could have been better spent writing more songs. You live and learn though, eh? We’re really pleased with the way the album itself came out, though.

I was surprised not to see your 'big' hit singles The Orange Shop and Sunday School on the album but pleased to find that the album stands up without them. Why did you decide not include them on the record?

Andy: We wanted to not try and cover too much old ground with the album. We decided that we’d only include tracks on the album that we hadn’t previously released versions of that we felt did the songs justice. There are two re-recorded versions of tracks off our original demo EP from 2005 on there, …Robot and Sherlock Holmes…. The Orange Shop was on that EP too, although much slower, badly played, and called Lenor. Also, we got sick to death of playing that song live, so the last thing we wanted was to continue feeling obligated to play it. Imagine what it must be like having an actual hit!

The album track Celebrate Ourselves covers social networking sites, paranoia and jealousy. Are you opposed to sites like Facebook? Do you think these kinds of sites are turning a generation into self obsessed idiots?

Laura: I recently deleted my Facebook, because who gives a good God damn that I ‘just ate some toast’. Nobody should care, I’m not interesting, I’m totally boring and so is everyone else. MySpace and Facebook are used by loads of people to make their normal lives look totally amazing and like a film, which makes other people feel bad about themselves and sad that they don’t have a film life, and in turn makes them jealous of the film life people. So then everyone just becomes really false and they take loads of stupid posed photographs of themselves and it becomes one sick battle of who’s the coolest, ‘and I’m a photographer’, and ‘I’m in a band’, and ‘I’m a blah blah blah.’ When really nobody is anything other then just a person who does the same stupid stuff that everyone else does; going down the shops; watching telly; and reading magazines. I don’t spend any time on the internet anymore, it makes my head feel funny.

The lyrical content on the album is pretty bleak at times, like in Pyramintro, "my lucky stars, they do not exist" and We're All Doomed, "sometimes I forget that I'm doomed". Are these all personal or character based?

Laura: They are all personal. If I don’t keep myself busy I start to think a lot about things and then I get sad, which is what We’re All Doomed is about. I’m really just a depressed sixth former goth at heart.

I like the way Laura's voice morphs into a robot on the last track I Wish I Was A Robot, no question here, just sayin'

Andy: I like that way that rain makes all the snails come out.

Any current plans for a follow up to Horses... or will there be another agonising wait?

Andy: We’ve already abandoned our first attempt at recording the follow-up! The songs are all finished, we just didn’t play it as well as we could. We’re going to start again in the next few weeks, but in the meantime we’ve written a Christmas song which we need to record as there’s an obvious deadline for that. The second album’s going to be a lot more varied than the first, and with less reliance on the old slow/fast, quiet/loud business. And its going to be longer. The songwriting’s become a little more sophisticated, and we can’t really get away with playing crap any more. Being a crap lo-fi band gets pretty tired pretty quickly!

You've been through more drummers than I've had hot dinners. What's your ideal hot dinner?

Andy: Vegetable dhansak, chana massala, onion pilau, peshwari naan.

Laura: I like sausage and mash with onion gravy and peas. Yeah!

Red sauce or brown sauce?

Andy: Red sauce is good with almost everything. Brown is an acquired taste, and really for far more specific applications (such as cheese on toast). HP is the undisputed king of brown sauce, but for an interesting and exciting alternative to Heinz tomato ketchup I recommend you check out Tiptree.

Laura: I’m allergic to brown sauce, which is why I only sing ‘red sauce’ in that song. I love red sauce. Chips without red sauce are a waste of my time.

The composer Robert Schumann used a finger stretching device in a vain effort to better his wife Clara in the piano playing department. This plan failed dismally and destroyed his fingers rendering him unable to play piano at all; to add insult to injury his wife ran off with Johannes Brahms. Have you ever cheated at anything and got your comeuppance?

Andy: I went through a long phase of being really quite naughty in secondary school, and as a result letters started being sent home to my parents. I hid them all underneath the bottom drawer in my room, thinking that was a brilliant and original hiding place. The longer this went on, the more ridiculous the situation got as more and more letters got sent home, until one day my carefully constructed web of deceit came crashing down around me when my Dad phoned the school to ask why he hadn’t received any letters for such a long time. I came home from the scouts that night to find him in my room surrounded by the letters, and more angry than you’ve ever seen anyone in your life. In hindsight I should have burnt the fuckers. What an idiot.

You win the lottery and experience a strong impulse to travel, or wanderlust if you will. Where are you going?

Andy: Scandinavia, Japan and Canada are top of my list.

Which five albums are you taking on this trip?

Andy: You’d need some decent driving music, so ZZ Top, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Quo, and Meatloaf.

Are there any new bands that tickle your fancy?

Andy: An Austrian multi-instrumentalist called Mayr sent us her CD the other day for a pilot radio show we’re putting together – she’s very good.

Goodbye, Faithful Interview! with Artefacts For Space Travel

Artefacts For Space Travel headline Goodbye, Faithful Kingdom! on Tuesday 7th July @ The Macbeth, advance tickets can be picked up from here.

I caught up with Joe and posed him a few questions.

The band name comes from a William S Burroughs quote that states, "Man is an artefact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole." What are your thoughts on the statement? Are you longing to become that metaphorical frog? or are you happy remaining a tadpole?

Definitely want to be the frog. I’m very impatient about progress and I have a tremendous sense of urgency about everything. I just don’t have enough scientific knowledge to provide any answers, I can bluff a good argument though. For me the name represents an endless frustration, I believe the only things worth knowing can not be understood by the human brain.
I found the quote one night when I was researching stuff, I thought it'd be a cool band name. I’m not actually a Borroughs fan and have only read a few of his books. I basically only read Philip K Dick at the moment.

You're sent into space to start a colony on Mars, what 5 albums are you going to take with you?

Well I would definitely take 5 'best ofs' because everyone knows that a 'best of' is always a band's best album because it has their best songs on it. Anyone who says otherwise is a complete liar. I would also take in to consideration: if I end up meeting an Alien race while I’m on Mars who have never heard music before, what will I play to them to help them understand human music? I guess it'd be something like this:

Best of Beethoven
Best of Michael Jackson
Best of The Kinks
Best of Bob Dylan
Best of The Beach Boys

Not really sure why I left out the Beatles and the Stones, I think Martians prefer the Kinks.

Two of your members share the same surname as me, are we related?

Yes, Sam and I (Joe) are brothers, we have another brother called Luke who plays the drums, we're going to start a family band, we'll be like an uglier version of Hanson. Oh . . . Are we related to you? I don’t know, do you have any money you can lend us? If you do then you can be in our family. But unfortunately there was only three brothers in Hanson so you’ll have to be the manager.

You site West Coast American bands like Melvins, Nirvana and Pavement as influences ... what particularly interests you about those bands?

I was raised on Guns and Roses and Nirvana. Brit pop bored the shit out of me. I liked metal in my early teens, then I started get into weird Rough Trade indie type stuff. Now I just listen to everything. We're not JUST into 90's American stuff, though Sam and I went to see Melvins and Dinosaur Jr concerts recently, I’m a massive Mark E Smith fan, and I like a lot of 60's stuff. I guess bands like Pavement have that laid back, slacker appeal which we relate too, we're really easy going people. We want to make 'stoner indie rock'.

Has anyone written anything wildly inaccurate about the band so far? how do you feel about terms like "toxic punk sludge" being used to describe your music?

It's really dumb. We find it both funny and depressing. Our favourite live review came from Manchester News and said we were 'either really good or really bad', at least make a fucking decision! Jesus. But yeah it's depressing because we want journalists to listen to us and not just say, 'oooh, loud guitars, they must be influenced by the Pixies'. We like noisy, heavy music, it's not because we're trying to bring back grunge.

If Artefacts for Space Travel ever found themselves in a tricky situation, who would have instigated it?

We've had a lot of punch ups after gigs, it's actually normally us standing up for a friend who has come to watch us and ended up getting into a fight. Some of our friends are a bit rowdy. We once had to fight our way out of Southampton University, luckily students are pussys and we beat them all up with ease. Sam also causes a lot of problems, we thought he'd been kidnapped by Mexican coke dealers in Texas, he tends to wander off and find new friends when he's wasted. Alex's car is always getting stolen too, or towed away by gangsters. Everything is always a challenge with our band. If it can go wrong it will. But it’s normally all just down to too much beer. So I guess the answer is beer would've instigated it.

Are there any new bands that you're particularly fond of?

Don’t know if they're new but I’m listening to a lot of Blank Dogs, it's right up my street. We saw lots of cool bands out in SXSW mainly at a bar called Miss Beas. I want to go see a new band called A Grave With No Name, I like the tracks on their myspace. I'm going to see Ariel Pink on Sunday which I’m looking forward to, he's a sexy fellow.

How did the EP 'Power of The Brain' come to fruition? Any reference to popular brain based game shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or Eggheads?

Power of the brain is the name of one of our songs, it's all about telepathy and transhumanism. I watch Egg heads a lot though, I get really angry at the show. I hate that old lady who knows everything, they're such smug arseholes.

Any plans for a follow up?

We're ready to release more, just waiting for the all clear, we have loads of new songs that we like playing, so ASAP for another EP on Stolen Recordings.