As a child of the 90s, I first listened to music on cassettes, so it was a nice surprised to see you release a limited run of ‘Heavy Money’ on tape rather than on vinyl. Yeah, it’s a bit of a gimmick really, but that’s how I first started listening to music too. Te audio quality means it’s not the best way, but in this climate it just makes things interesting, and people have got it as a nice token. I still enjoy listening to tapes, but more for the nostalgia really. Maybe we’ll release something on Betamax!
Having seen you before and after Dave’s accident, I think it’s remarkable how you’ve managed to retain the depth to your live show despite being cut down to a two-piece. Have there been lots of changes? Yeah, with the three of us we were trying to sound like a five-piece, and we have to try and do that as two. Tere was a lot of head-scratching, but there ended up being a lot of stereoing, and I’ve got a lot of amps - like, A LOT of amps. I can’t jump around as much as I used to ‘cause I have to be on the pedal board so much - if I stop playing guitar then the music kind of stops! In a way it’s just made the songs rawer, and because of the situation surrounding it, it’s given us more intensity. We knew that people were going to be on our backs and they were going to say we weren’t as good as when Dave was in the band, but that just made us want to be a better than we were before.
Lots of your lyrics are surprisingly poetic – how do you find inspiration?
It’s just real life things that have happened to me. Tere are a certain amount of stories that I won’t tell people, but you can try and figure them out I suppose. I’ve written some nonsense songs that I thought were just streams of consciousness, but then I’ve found different meanings in them later on. But for some of them I just stand in front of a microphone and see what happens; ‘Fought In Te Mirror’ was a song that I never had any lyrics for. Somebody asked me what ‘Dangle Like Skeletons’ was about too, and I told them and they said they kind of wished they didn’t know. You’ve got to take from it what you will – it’s nothing terribly dark; it’s all stuff we’ve all dealt with, but even so, you’ll enjoy it more if you don’t know.
them the name of my band,
have to say that if I told
I normally
they probably wouldn’t
employ me!
video, and lots of things that people can learn from it – there’s a fun side to it, a horror side to it, and also this deeper moral side to it. Te song’s about gluttony and people hiding behind their money and thinking that makes them the big man, when really the people who have massive egos, or go the gym and give themselves
massive muscles, are just scared little children; they’re no more powerful than children. I’m a teacher by the way, which explains part of it – I’m a supply teacher now as I’ve had to cut down because of the band, but I work in a special needs school, so there’s that in it too.
On the other side of the creative spectrum, the video for ‘Heavy Money’ is amazing too. Tat was down to Ben Parry. He had the idea to put ‘Heavy Money’ over this film he’d made, and it just looked perfect. Te first time I watched it back it felt really powerful. It fits the meaning of the song perfectly, but it came out of a fluky situation where the perfect video had already been made, so we owe him a lot for that! Tere are a lot of layers to that
You do have a hectic New Year tour planned, but apart from that, what’s in the pipeline for 2014? Tere’s probably going to be an album, and bigger shows, and more festivals, and more touring. It’s a big year for us next year, and hopefully towards the end you’ll see Dave back at a few more gigs too.
So finally, how does a band from Wolverhampton get signed to a Norwich based independent, Gravy? Fever Fever played some gigs over here, and we kept wanting to play with them – we were like “guys, they’re the girly version of our band” and of course we didn’t say that cause we’d probably have got punched in the face! But yeah, we loved their music, and they kept inviting us to Norwich, and Norwich slowly became part of who we are as a band really. Tat’s the nice thing about music; it takes you places and you meet people. You don’t make money, and people like us probably never will make much money, but you get to meet some pretty cool people. Gravy are part of our soul, and Norwich is part of our soul now.
Alex Trossell Live
Photographs: Keira Anne Photography
MORE INFORMATION God Damn play the Gravy showcase at the Norwich Arts Centre on
January 25th. For tickets, go to
www.norwichartscentre.co.uk. Read the uncut version of this interview on
Outlineonline.co.uk
outlineonline.co.uk /Janury 2014/ 19
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48