[avatar =”Gary” size=”50″ align=”left” /]I caught up with Paul the guitarist in The Jokers to have a wee chat before the gig in Edinburgh recently.
Your album Hurricane came out last year and we gave it a good review back in Sept 2015. It’s been getting good reviews all round! How do you feel it has gone down and how do you feel it has progressed compared to R’n’R is Alive?
Think we’ve done what’s more natural to us, it’s got more of a live feel. The one before it was more contrived sounding, so I think we’ve just gone back to what we naturally do.
How has it been since you signed up with SPV/Steamhammer? Has that helped you a lot, as you sold a load of the first album independently.
Well I think it just helps you to distribute it world wide, and the hope is that we’re going to be a lot more successful in Europe than we have probably been in the UK. I think it’s been hard here because you do all your sort of ground work here, and it’s almost like you hang your laundry in the public and you’ve played in every hole there is, as out in Europe there’s a more exclusiveness about the band. So for instance someone messaged me saying there was a whole record display in one of the shops in Hamburg, so I think they take us a lot more seriously out in Europe.
I saw you last time in Bannerman’s down the road when you were promoting the fantastic Rock ‘N’ Roll Is Alive album. A great show with Paul going nuts including running through to the bar while still playing his guitar. Apart from getting the new album recorded and out what has been happening since the last time I saw you all?
Well we had the first single “Run for Cover” which I’m sure you’ve seen the video for. We’ve just recorded the new video for the track “A Word is Love” and that’s the next single due for release late this month… and we’ve got the European tour, so we’re going out to Belgium, , Spain, and we’re waiting on Holland and Italy as well.
a Two month European tour through the UK, N.Ireland, Belgium, , Spain ending back in Liverpool at the end of April. Are you looking forward to it now that the first night in Newcastle is out the way?
Newcastle was brilliant and it was busy. I would love to be out playing in Europe. We’ve been to Spain twice before which was great – great audience there and very appreciative. We’ve not been to and that’s where SPV are based so I think most of our main press has been in Europe and which we’ve never experience before.
You’ve been on the go for what 10 years now. How did the band first get together?
We’ve been slogging it out for years! Me and Wayne have been about for years, Dan came about because he was playing on the second album for the guy who produced it and he was fairly local to me. He was from Liverpool.
In of songwriting, who does most of the writing and do you have a set sound in mind when writing?
We all try and do it together. Wayne does most of the lyrics but we try and do everything together as much as we can.
As you have grown as a band, have you found that your musical influences have changed at all in of how you sound, as each album is quite different?
Not really no, I think we’ve gone back more to our influences and have just gone back to where we started out and the more that we progress the more that we seem to go to our roots if that makes any sense? It’s weird the journey, you start out, but I always end up back to where we started.
The press has described your live performances as “just what the doctor ordered” and “great classic rock”. How would you describe your live show?
I think, very ionate, ion from the heart, a good solid band, a live honest rock band.
You’ve done you fair share of s with a lot of big names.
Hayseed Dixie! Nicest dudes on earth and a lot of fun. There’s not many shows you can watch night after night after night, where you’re on tour as that’s what you tend to do. They were insane every night, usually after two shows you’re bored!
They are educated red necks therefore dangerous men…. They were incredibly nice people.
We’d work with anyone except American wrestlers as they’re dicks. We even went out with Hawkwind, who have a different psychedelic kind of thing going on compared to our sound.
What’s next after this tour?
We have a few festivals and we’ve got a European booking agent now, so hopefully get us some more shows in Europe. Some of the small festivals are really good, some of the family ones are great! We were supposed to be on Wildfire last year but we were in , and there was a cancellation, so I was hoping we’d have been on it this year.
