Described as Hurts-meets-Human League, synth four piece Girl Friend have been drawing vast critical acclaim since releasing their debut single ‘Monte Carlo’.

The Manchester outfit are now set to drop their much anticipated debut EP in the upcoming week, so we caught up with lead singer Amory to find out a little bit more about the band...

For those who might not have heard of the band, how would you describe your sound?

International Cosmopolitan Art Rock.

What’s your process for creating a new song?

Each one has it’s own set of circumstances. Often it will begin with a single idea, whether it be a vocal hook or a bass line. We don’t spend hours jamming. Songs are written at a piano or on a guitar. Once fully formed the whole band are drafted in to arrange the song.

You’ve said you like “to dress misery in something beautiful” in your work. Where does that come from?

I feel like we’re bombarded with people’s misery in music; we hear endless variations on the same, tired themes. I’m not saying I’ve created some new emotion, but when I write I try to apply my thoughts and feelings to situations that seem exotic and impalpable. I suppose I’m just bored of living so tirelessly in the real world. I’d prefer to dream of somewhere beautiful.

Your debut single was met so well by the critics that the Guardian said “in the pantheon of Manchester debut singles, it is in the ballpark of The Stone Roses’ So Young and Happy Mondays’ Delightful”. It must be pretty crazy to be compared to such artists?

It’s an honour. Sonically, we don’t derive much inspiration from either of those bands, but obviously we’re keenly aware of their influence on pop music. It’s great to be in that ‘ballpark’.

What artists do inspire you and who are you listening to at the minute?

We’re all into the most recent EP from Great Good Fine Ok, they’re an electronic act from NYC who are producing some pretty cool pop music at the moment. Tove Lo’s ‘Queen Of The Clouds’ is getting a lot of airtime at Girl Friend HQ as well.

How do you view the British music scene right now?

I’m really the wrong person to ask...however, well written pop seems to have come back into style. Girl Friend probably wouldn’t have gone down well 10 years ago, now feels like the perfect time.

Excited to be out on tour at the minute?

We are indeed. It’s our first headline tour. We're excited to gauge how people will react to our new material as well as visiting a lot of cities that we've never been to before.

What’s next then? An album to follow up the EP?

After the completion of the tour we'll be back in the studio. We don't have a date set for the album yet, but we've got lots of new material that we're excited to record.

Girl Friend drop their debut EP ‘Arrive Alone, Leave Alone’ on April 27. Find out more about the group here.

After spending a whole generation as the front man of pop-punk slash ska-rock group The King Blues, vocalist iTCH has now established himself as a prominent and successful solo artist. The versatile musician will release his debut album The Deep End on 24 March via Red Bull Records. Brig Music caught up with the charismatic performer before the Edinburgh date of his UK tour with Scroobius Pip and Dan le Sac.

How have you found the transition from a long term band member of The King Blues to a solo artist then?

“It’s been amazing really and not all that different. When I tour I normally tour with a band so there is normally a big crew of us. This is the first tour I’ve done with just one other – but you know I’ve still got my crew with me. I think a lot of people imagine me going around on my own. There’s still that camaraderie and I’m having a great time. Logistically it’s so much easier than having to sound check twenty drums and whatever else.”

Is it strange playing to a different type of audience now then?

“I am used to a pop-punk crowd where everyone is jumping around and hitting each other but this was a very different sort of crowd. But it was awesome. It went down very well.

“I think it’s kind of different, because when you do something like Warped Tour there are a lot of bands of the same genre. A lot of bands come from a similar scene. When you come with something different it’s kind of a blessing and a weakness – a lot of people have heard ten scream bands that day and they want something different and other people obviously aren’t that open minded.

“If you go through music in my day though it was sort of like you picked your tribe and genre and stuck to that and it defined you as a person, whereas nowadays if you go through people’s iPods they will have all sorts of music on there. They are a lot more open minded now to new music.”

Has the transition to a more hip-hop style sound been one you’ve been looking to make for a while?

“If you look at the transition of The King Blues over time we got progressively more into that scene. I definitely enjoy playing the stuff live a lot more now. By the third or fourth record I was pretty much exclusively rapping over the different kinds of music.

“For me to do this now is really just where I have wanted to be. We started the band ten years ago and I’ve changed a lot over ten years. I much happier doing this.”

Homeless Romantic with Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzara has been a bit hit for you. How did that come about?

“I wrote the song originally in LA with John Feldman and Patrick Stump from Fall Out Boy and we were looking for someone to sing the hook. A lot of names were thrown about and then Adam Lazzara from Taking Back Sunday was brought up. Someone put on one of his songs and although I think there are a lot of rock bands around these days that scream and shout really good they aren’t actually that angry – but when I heard Adam sing though I felt the pain in his voice and I believed he was genuine and real.

“So we sent the song off to him not expecting to hear anything back and then a week later we had flown into the studio and were recording.”

Obviously that element of honesty in your music is a significant factor. How does that impact how you listen to and write music?

“I would rather hear someone sing badly from the heart than sing technically brilliantly and put no feeling into it.”

How excited are you to see your upcoming album The Deep End drop on 24 March then?

“Yeah, I mean It’s been two years in the making, and most bands only get maybe two weeks in the studio if they are lucky but I’ve had like six months in the studio to put it together. That was a real privilege and a real honour.

“I’ve been sitting on it for a long time then so to finally have a release date and to finally get it out is very exciting.

“I really just wanted to write the best songs possible. When I sat down with John Feldman in the studio we wrote close to 100 songs before recording. We worked really hard day and night – didn’t sleep and didn’t go out – just worked solidly, and the songs that made it are the best ones of all of those.”


First published at www.brignewspaper.com


Stuart Kenny

After a recent past that has included support gigs for Jake Bugg and Miles Kane, festival spots at Reading and Leeds and a spot on the London Evening Standard’s Power 1000 alongside Disclosure, Rudimental and Sir Mick Jagger, you would think that charismatic rocker Natalie Findlay might have some time for a break. Wrong.

“We were in France and Switzerland last week,” told the artist, who performs under the abbreviated title of ‘Findlay’. “I’ve not had a day off in about three weeks or something horrendous but it’s all part of the fun. Better that than working in fucking McDonalds.”

Certainly, the electric artist has barely had time to sleep never mind take a day off recently, with her latest EP Greasy Love released late last month and a string of British tour dates quickly following. Findlay had only finished a hectic rehearsal session when she took to the phone for this particular interview, yet the artist seemed characteristically vivacious throughout the conversation – a trait which carries through to the assertive nature of her rock n roll work.

Indeed, in Greasy Love we see an urgent, empowering sound develop around fuzzy, blaring vocals, while in FakeBlackHeart a slow, circling guitar riff morphs into a boisterous backing dominated by the distinctive and delightful Findlay. Black Cloud Single Lining meanwhile, the final song on the record, slows the pace down, highlighting the originality and versatility of the artist’s work.

She continued: “I’m working on another EP just now and I’m still experimenting with which sound I want to commit to for an album. I will probably have done about three EPs by the time the actual album comes out but I’m still trying to find the sound that I want. I’m going to keep messing around and see how certain things sound and work with different producers.

“For Greasy Love I recorded and rerecorded and it became a kind of labour of love to get it finished. FakeBlackHeart I had had for a little bit and I thought that those two tracks went together well. The B side Black Cloud Silver Lining I wrote a couple of months ago about a break up – I played the track to the guy and he didn’t get it and then a week after I recorded it I left,” Findlay laughed. “The song was actually the demo and I didn’t want to fuck with the sound of it because it was so raw and we did it all in one take.

“My writing is constantly evolving though. For Black Cloud Silver Lining I knew what I wanted for the subject matter since it was so close to my heart, but that made it easy and difficult at the same time because you’ve got to be really honest with yourself which kind of hurts.

“It was a relief to get that emotion out and it was quite a painful one to write but I thought that the tracks seemed to fit together well, and the remix as well. We had a couple of remixes done of Greasy Love and the TYTHE one was my favourite so we put it on the EP.

“[The EP] was really a struggle for me. I wanted to release it on vinyl as well but I didn’t want to push the release date. It was just a fucking palaver to get it done but it’s out there now which is kind of a relief.”

It wasn’t just the music side of things that Findlay was worried with in the run up to the release of Greasy Love either. An electrifying music video accompanied the release of the title track, and the artist was keen to remark on her positive time with director Ruffmercy, with whom she worked to construct the emotive, supernatural-esk production.

“I’ve been a massive fan of the videos of Ruffmercy for ages,” she continued. “He’s been doing videos with Danny Brown and Blue Daisy and I just thought ‘fuck, wouldn’t it be cool if he did a video for me’, but I’m not the kind of artist he would usually go for. I sent him the track though and we met up a couple of times and he was really cool and said ‘yeah, let’s do something’.

“We shot it over September and it was fucking freezing. It was a really long and cold shoot but the results were great so I’m happy with that.”

With the Greasy Love EP now done and dusted the quirky artist admits she will be glad to get back out on the road, remarking casually on her pre-show rituals of listening to Return of the Mack and slamming ‘a few shots of whiskey’.

The hard working artist will have a lengthy list of plans that are ready and waiting for the turn of the year too, and if she continues to impress with her fresh brand of music, it could well be a future that will prove even more busy and even for bountiful for the talented Natalie Findlay.

Stuart Kenny

As published originally at: www.brignewspaper.com

An abundance of critical praise awaited the release of Old Souls, the third studio album released from difficult-to-define English six-piece Deaf Havana.

The once pop-punk outfit have been persistently progressing their sound ever since dropping Meet Me Halfway, At Least, their debut album, in 2009. After adding an indie-folk edge to their music in the wonderful Fools and Worthless Liars two years later, the group came back with the organic awe of Old Souls in September, a magnificent mix of musical purity that features nods to the rock, indie, blues, folk and even jazz genres by the end of the twelve song tracklist.

With a bold movement made to a reel packed with untested material, some may have expected a subsequent jumble of half-hearted, ungenre specific songs to make up the bulk of the band’s latest release, yet this ignorant statement could not be further from the truth. Old Souls is rather a brilliant blend of styles connected with the signaturely autobiographical lyrics of the group and irresistibly organic nature of their matured production.

For James Veck-Gilodi, the front man of what is now of the biggest bands on the British rock scene, the recently released album is the result of a sound evolution goal set long ago.

“It was a sound that we’ve always wanted to go for,” he said. “I guess after ‘Meet Me Halfway, At Least’ we couldn’t just change our sound that much, so it has been a progression. Saying that though, it’s all pretty natural. It’s not as though we sat down and said ‘I want this album to sound exactly like this’, it just naturally happened.

“When me and my brother [Matt Veck-Gilodi, rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist] were writing it we were coming up with all these different sounding songs, but we didn’t exactly say ‘that song doesn’t fit in let’s not use it’, we just put it in anyway. It is kind of an experiment but I think it worked.

“The reception has been ridiculous – I never expected it to be as good as it has been. I was pretty worried about how it would be received because it is quite different but the response has been amazing.”

A defining factor of the Deaf Havana experience is the anti-autotune attitude that has established the band as one of the most musically pure, natural artists currently on the scene. Veck-Gilodi was keen to emphasise that this, along with the deeply personal nature of his lyrics, is indeed among the most important components that goes into any new work from the group.

“I think there’s too many bands around that are doing it for the wrong reasons and too much music around that is just awful,” continued the vocalist. “We’re trying to be as honest and natural as we possibly can and hopefully people will take notice of that.”

“[The autobiographical style] is just naturally how I write songs, but also I like people to be able to understand exactly what the song is about without having to look into too much. I always like to keep it quite literal and plain... well not plain, but you know what I mean! It’s just the natural way for me to write lyrics though – a lot of bands that I listened to and admire have the same kind of style.

“This time around me and brother wrote the songs in my house and just start off with an acoustic guitar, and then we’d do a really crap demo of it on his laptop. After that’d we’d send it off and when we went into the studio to actually record it everybody would put their own spin on it and turn it into the actual song. It’s pretty simple, natural writing.”

With a new album comes the announcement of the biggest British headline tour to date for the group who have gone from promising potentials to proven critical hits in recent years. After supporting Bruce Springsteen and Muse in the past few months the band will certainly not be rusty for their live stage return, and Veck-Gilodi admits he is relishing the prospect of getting back on the road.

He continued: “[Springsteen and Muse] were both ridiculous. It was pretty weird because we’re not used to playing to such huge crowds like that, so it was pretty scary. It was awesome though too, because the people there weren’t fans of our band so we had to win them over and it was a challenge but really enjoyable.”

“I can’t wait to get going on the tour. We’ve had the new songs for quite a while so to be able to play them live will be so good. We haven’t really done a tour in ages so it’ll be nice to get back out and play. We can’t wait.”

Stuart Kenny

As published originally at: www.brignewspaper.com