Photography: Jessica Clare Sandwell
UNSIGNED SPOTLIGHT
IN DARKLIGHT
Meet the Hampshire trio who are busy beating a path to London’s premier venues…
www.indarklight.com Words: Tim Slater
he sleepy market town of Andover in Hampshire already has something of an unlikely claim to rock and roll fame in the shape of 1960s chart toppers and local heroes The Troggs but a brand new beat is emanating from Andover’s leafy lanes. In Darklight, formed by bassist/singer Ben Sellers, his brother Louis (drums) and guitarist Ross Archer are currently working flat out on the follow up to a superb self-produced LP Dying to Confess that the band released in its original four-piece line up in 2010. In Darklight’s highly polished sound – imagine the stirring emotional headrush of vintage Coldplay mixed with the muscular power pop of Green Day or Feeder and you’re kind of in the right ballpark - earned them a glowing review in the June 2011 issue of Playmusic, prompting us to give the band a ring to find out more about them. For what basically amounts to a self produced home made CD, D2C sounds incredibly mature and confident, a factor that probably owes
T
something to the fact that 23 year old Louis is already a seasoned producer. g PM: Your LP sounds very professional, how did you achieve such a
great sound? g LS: “I have been producing for eight or nine years.We did some of
Dying to Confess in a little studio in Basingstoke but I run my own studio so we thought that this time we’d save quite a lot of money by doing it
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ourselves. We recorded pretty much the whole album in our studio here (Anton Road Studios) and a lot of the embellishments and extra production tricks that you hear on our record is basically just me adding a few synths and extra effects whenever I felt that the music needed it.” I record loads of local artists here and it’s a great way to help create a local music community in the area. There are a lot of good young bands coming up locally that I
work with.” g PM: So, do you have any more new tracks recorded? g LS: “We’re really excited about this next phase, the album was great
but the new EP is pretty much the epitome of what are right now. We are trying to outdo the album on the production side, as well as the songwriting,
we’ve got the bar set pretty high and we’re gonna try and jump over that.” g PM: Are there any gigs that you’ve played recently that you have
particularkly enjoyed? g LS: “The Clapham Grand is a venue that sticks in our memory,” Louis nods, “It’s a great medium size venue and you’ve gotta fill it all up! We are
“Festivals are the biggest stage you can play… and you learn all sorts of new things on the big stage!”
playing there on Friday August 19th, we’ve also played a few festivals recently which is also great because a festival gig is the biggest stage you can
play and you learn all sorts of new things on the big stage!” g PM: Your video for the track Human Race looks like it was shot
surreptitiously in a multi-story car park? g LS: “We shot it on a Sunday and we were incredibly lucky because it
had no cars in it! We thought ‘great, well go guerilla style here’ and do a few takes before we were told to bugger off! I imagine that over the next few months we’ll shoot another video to promote one of the five new songs on the new EP. We’ll try to get better and better!” Just don’t get a parking ticket, boys. PM
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