Interview with New Politics
Monday night saw me interview New Politics pre gig at Norwich Art Centre. The bane of a journalist’s life is a soundcheck, as these things never run on time. However, this was a sound check and a half as I was already warming to these guys and the devil may care attitude.
The interview ran something like this ……
Mark: Hi guys welcome to our fine city, can you give us some background on the band? It’s a pretty bizarre tale to say the least!
Sorin: Well thanks for having us! About one year ago David and I got together, well we already knew each other and we both wrote songs. Through the mixture of both our roots we ended up with this sound, we decided to enter this competition in Denmark called “Career Cannon”. We knew that we had to play a show in like fourteen days for it, which was kind of crazy! I knew a really good drummer so I called up Poul. We ended up out of 900 bands in the top four! Through this we got to play some really cool festivals in Denmark like the Spot festival – everything kind of just exploded from there.
Mark: When I was researching you guys I found it almost impossible to find like a bio or any background stuff on you at all! Is that a deliberate industry thing, or have you just not had time to develop anything?
Sorin: It’s all just so brand new…
David: We are only like one year old as a band so we didn’t have time to write it, you know things have just been crazy. It’s fuckin awesome but also kind of crazy. Over the last two months someone has been trying to put something together.
Mark: This afternoon I sort of thought I am going to interview these guys and I have no information whatsoever. You know I had listened to your music and I thought WTF am I going to say this can go one of two ways. You know, I may end up looking a complete prick here, luckily RCA got something over to me this afternoon. So Poul is it true that you almost beheaded a fan at Spot Festival with a drumstick?
Poul: Yeah, kind of. It was a crazy gig but he’s okay.
David: You go look at the drum kit now man, covered in blood still! Sorin whacked me with his guitar by accident, it was a crazy, crazy gig .
Sorin: My guitar also!
David: One of the guys from Iglu and Hartley came on stage yesterday right after our soundcheck, he said he had never seen a band with so much blood and we are not even heavy metal guys.
Mark: Out of the Spot Festival I believe there was mad media and label attention and you signed to RCA right? Is it also true or is this PR bullshit that you decided to all upsticks and move to Brooklyn? You know on the strength of it?
David: It’s gone so quick like, you know we entered the competition we had no idea where it was going to go. It’s like the demos that are on our site are just home recordings recorded in the attic. You know the interest was just mad after we won, interest from all sorts of labels especially the UK – Island, Universal, Chrysalis, Virgin, Ficton…they all contacted us as well. You know this was like in the first four months or something. This just never gave us the time to organise ourselves, I mean there was crazy interest in Europe as well. We had all been struggling with music individually for years, so it’s not like we don’t have back up as musicians.
Mark: There is definitely something there you know, I get a hell of a lot of PR stuff through my inbox on new bands, Anton from Bad Moon touched base with me last week and although you are way out there it touched a nerve. I said to him who the fuck are these guys!! I need to meet them and see them live. I’m not bullshitting you here there is a certain cross-genre appeal to your music.
Sorin: Maybe you are right, our backgrounds are different. For David he comes from a hip-hop background and for me it has always been grunge so we kind of had no clue of the direction we were going to make a band. Poul well he is just a crazy drummer!
David: But now we are re-recording everything properly so we are developing our sound and expanding on it all the time. I mean you can say Poul is a crazy drummer, but he is trained.
Poul: Yeah I started as classical and I thought I was going to be a professional classical musician. Then I ended up playing all genres except hip-hop, I just remembered that actually.
David: So we are growing all the time not only as a band but also individual artists. It’s just gone so quick. That’s not to say that is bad in anyway, this is just how it went. We have gone through our depressions, our rollercoasters, ups and owns and maybe we will continue to have them. Just because we are signed you know, it does not mean we can take anything for granted.
Mark: You know you have to think back to when you struggled with other bands or solo projects to my mind you have to seize the moment and run with it! I meet bands who struggle for years to get a deal ya know!
David: We see it as kinda like a mine – you keep digging and digging.
Mark: And you struck gold?
David: Yeah, so now we are going to take it, the puzzle pieces are falling into place. Which is kind of cool, we are living in the moment and that kind of makes it special. We are creating as we go along, which makes it exciting. It’s ridiculously exciting! We have nineteen songs now and we are going to try to finish more. There is just so much happening in the States, some of which we cant talk about. All the cyberspace stuff we are learning all the time.
Sorin: I think it would feel the same if we were a ten year old band this year would still feel special !! You know even though i have been in other bands the first time we played although it was not very good it felt special. I feel really blessed to be part of it and able to express myself.
David: You know I can really feel where Sorin is coming from art, music, whatever is about expression, expression of what you go through, what you see in the media, life in general. There is a mixture of irony and rage and it works for us.
Mark: I totally get that music is a very personal thing, when are we likely to see a physical release from you?
Sorin: We actually don’t know all the details, we are aiming for the first half of this year. After this tour we are going back to the States to finish the album, there is a lot of stuff going on. We are halfway through the recording now and I am very excited about it, we just want to make a good record!
David: We are not a 100% on this but I think we are looking at a May single and a summer album.
Mark: And back to the UK for some festival dates?
David: We are very focused on the UK so for sure, I mean that’s why we are here now before anywhere else.
Mark: Having watched some stuff from a French festival last year, you will rock a festival crowd! (mp3 of Yeah Yeah Yeah from trans-musicales below)
David: It’s like these UK crowds on this tour, despite the fact that no-one knows our name or music, the response has been amazing. Like in France we like to have fun, there was 6000 people there who did not know us and we played a 60 minute set and they were fantastic.
Sorin: We are so grateful for all the positive feedback from these shows, both after them and in cyberspace, we still feel like the same three guys who got together before all this craziness. It’s kind of surreal at times that we are here doing this. We’re really really grateful to everyone, and we try to write back on Facebook and Myspace personally. We handle that stuff ourselves.
Mark: And tonight you are here treading in Kurt Cobain’s footsteps on this stage!
Sorin: Oh really? Wow that’s crazy.
Mark: So I think we will wrap that there so you can eat and enjoy the show.
Sorin: You also enjoy the show!
Mark: I will! I enjoyed the soundcheck, especially the “Dungeon Of Love”. Poul wanna expand on that? (Poul repeated the words dungeon of love in the deepest voice ever many times through sound check)
This was followed by much laughter, I had a real blast with these guys including the arm wrestling with Danish Baker on merchandise – challenge him at your peril. Many thanks to Anton from Badmoon and Jakup the tour manager for arrangements.
Tags: new politics
