ESSER: INTERVIEW & GIG REVIEW ESSER black kids + kasier chiefs @ Nottingham Arena 22/02/0

At the moment You've got this massive arena tour starting with Kaiser Chiefs, how did that come about?
I think a couple of them came and saw us play at leeds festival, or heard some of our tunes and said they liked us. Last year we did a show with them at the forum and they asked us to come on tour! So its good to know they actually like us.

Will you be adapting your stage performance for the likes of your last date at wembley arena?
Ive never really been to arena venues before, so we didnt realise how vast they actually were. I dont know what we are going to do, but try and communicate to that many people. Its the simplest things in songs that might work the best I suppose Stadium bands like Queen, we'l have Hands in the air and claps!

Your single 'lets work it out' is out tomorrow! (23rd FEB) Can we expect the debut album very soon ?
I think its out in late April some time soon, along with it we'l be releasing another single. Im already working on new material, so when the album is out there'l be a new EP almost ready.

You spent two years drumming for Ladyfuzz - were you playing your own material back then? When did you decide to start writing for yourself?
Not really, I was playing in other bands at the time also and writing, I think its all part of developing and everything ive done up until now has been experience. Im really lucky in that respect, as alot of new bands come into the industry with no experience and Ive already had the opportunity to tour and record.

Is it true that you used to play in a covers band who did Butlins?
Yes, years ago! You defiantely realise what you dont want to do or end up being, but yeah it was good fun. You did get the experience of touring though - apart from you had to play two 45 minute sets of bad songs.



Your bands seems to have a big mix of styles, who or what would you say is your greatest inspiration?
Yeah, Ive gone through stages of liking different styles and listen to as much music as possible. But because this is my first album, all the music ive listened to from what my parents used to listen to and what ive discovered in electronic music have in some way ended up on the album. Either directly sampling them onto the record or just different records being a big influence on our sound.

What are essers plans for 2009?
I think we are pretty much touring for the whole of the year. The headline tour starts in april. Im going to be working with afew other people and doing some writing. Ive just sent some beats to Cee-lo (Gnarls Barkley) which should be interesting and just trying to write on tour as well.

I really like your song 'headlock'. what would someone have to do for you to put them in a headlock ?
(laughs) I dont know. Whoever has made me ill, surely deserves some kind of punishment.

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ESSER
black kids + kasier chiefs
@ Nottingham Arena
22/02/09

Arena tours are always momentous occasions and tonight sees a bafflingly eclectic line up of bands on tour together, but with the Kaiser Chiefs at the top of the bill one can only predict something riotous.
For London new comer Esser, who has had a rollercoaster-like ride in 2008 to earning a slot with internationally successful bands, an arena tour would seem quite daunting. But clearly Esser has not left any opportunity for holding back, as he decides to tackle any arena nerves by arriving on stage complete with pearly-king jacket and attire, brandishing his own name on the back. An image that is far from the quietly confident posture that he would otherwise confide in. His own brand of ‘wonky-pop’, a genre that could well reach sincerity in 2009, appears to bemuse most but does not lack lustre or any substance like so many other young pop hopefuls.
His sounds are at the very least eclectic, a universal mix of classic pop tones with his own electronic edge. It is not hard to something that you will unashamedly like, even if it might annoy you for days after, to arduously remove the shards and hooks of melody embedded deep in your head. The ska-tinged ‘I love you’ and new single ‘We can work it out’ shine effortlessly with enough bleeps and glazed hooks to please the otherwise indifferent audience. Esser are not exactly masters of the stage and they should not be, at least not yet. They still have a long way to go in crafting a convincing stage performance, but that should be far from their concerns when they are still yet to release their debut album.



Black Kids play through a solid set of songs that are more familiar to tonight’s audience, for a band of well, kids they fill the arena stage with a grand presence. Singles ‘hurricane Jayne’ and ‘I’m not going to teach your boyfriend’ still allure and have not lost any of the charm felt for them since their release.



The thousands of hungry fans finally feast on their northern pinups Kaiser Chiefs, who take to the stage as clear veterans of ridiculously big stage performances. Ricky Wilson, ever the ringmaster, directs traffic and conjures the arena to near eruption as he takes fans through selection of Kasier Chief’s anthemic repertoire. Despite the total commercial failure of their last album, tracks ‘Oh my god’ and ‘Modern way’ still shine relentlessly.


By Tom Walmsley

Interview : Glasvegas

How's The Tour Going So Far?

It's good, its been fun. It seems a lot longer than we've actually been here for, we've only done nine gigs but it feels like we've been here for months.

What's The Atmosphere like?

It's quite relaxed, everybody just wants to have a good time. Everybody has sussed each other out.

You've played Nottingham several times before, from The Social, To Rescue To Rock City, so youve climbed the ladder so to speak, and you've got quite a strong following in the city. What do you make of Nottingham?

Nottingham has always been great to us. There's a couple of citys around that are like that, and Nottingham has always been amazing. One of the first gigs we played there at The Social, before going to America and recording the album, it was all just amazing. I remember staying out for ages and going to Rescue Rooms, we had a lot of people come down and just had a really good night. It's just one of those settings that's always amazing. I remember last time we played here at Nottingham Trent University, I pulled my back whilst playing and had to click it back into place, then I knocked the keyboard over, it was a bit messy.

Did you turn it all into some kind of choreographed move or was it all a bit Spinal Tap?

No, I just locked in this position bending forward so I had to throw myself about to get out of it.

Your music has a touch of the anthemic to it. If you combine this with the support of Alan McGee and the NME, do you see stadiums and arenas in your future?

I see ourselves doing whatever's natural, and if that's what comes next then that's what comes next. I think with the next album we may possibly move in to bigger venues but we won't be doing any more touring of Britain this year. I don't really like big venues, I quite like these sweaty venues.


Bands that tow a similar line to Glasvegas (e.g. Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad) would struggle to match your success. What it is about the essence of Glasvegas that relates to so many people?

Just that we write good songs. The songs that James writes are quite honest and people can relate to them. There are different types of music; there's music people listen to for fun, there's music you go out and dance to and there's music that people want to believe in and relate to and actually get something from. James would probably say something different but thats my opinion. There's a lot of good bands from Glasgow, it's just one of those things. There are just a lot of good times involved.

How does it feel to hear English and international audiences adopting a Scottish accent en masse?

Well they try, Liverpudlians are the funniest actually. We were in Japan and they were all singing back this amazing and hilarious version of Daddy's Gone, “He Gone, he goone, ohhh-ohhh-ohhhh”, and me and Caroling just p*ssed ourselves. Accent is a beautiful thing. James wrote that song in his bedreem when he couldn't afford food, and now there are thousands of Japanese people singing it at us. You just don't expect these things to happen. I never take it for granted, but I wouldn't say its surreal, probably because we've done that many gigs this year.



Headlining the NME tour, as well as being their champions throughout the year, you've found yourselves victims of hyperbole and the hype machine. How have you as a band reacted to hype?

We've just done what we've always done without really listening to what people say, because when you do that it can make you a little crazy. You've got to ignore the good and the bad, because you can't let other people's opinions influence you. We've got to where we are by using our own heads. Saying that, we always appreciate that people like what we're doing, getting nominated for awards and that just lets you know what people think and makes you want to keep going.

I imagine that a new album must be in the pipeline, what kind of progress are you making with that?

We've agreed to do it so that's a lot of progress I suppose. James has written 3 songs, and they're all singles, easily. The plan is we're going to go and do demos in October then go and record it in January and hopefully it will get realeased in April or May next year.

How would say the band have grown in the lead up to the next album?

The sound is a bit bigger if you can imagine that. The songs to me, sound a little bit more American. I don't mean that in a bad way or a cheesy way, it's just something that I heard. We'll maybe experiment with some more beats and stuff like that. There is a definate progression.

What's influenced Glasvegas in the past, and what's influencing them at the moment?

In the past, the biggest influence on each of us has been each other. All the music or films or art or whatever that we all like kind of us influences each other. It's tough to stay influenced and stay upbeat on tour but everyday we surprise each other with some of the things we do and we say, be it in a good way or a bad way. Just now everyone on this tour has a cold, so all of the bands and sounch guys and what not all have the sh*ts. The NME Tour sh*s, it's nasty. So that's there, but yeah, we just always inspire each other. Musically it's always mainly Phil Spector, Oasis and Elvis Presley, and then you got reading Harry Potter and watching Star Wars.

Interview by Andy Trendell
Photos by Lucy Bridger (www.flickr.com/lucybridger)

Interview : Mystery Jets

First of all, welcome back to the North.

Isn’t this technically the midlands?

Yeah but we’re north of many places. Welcome back to the East Midlands. How does it feel to be back? Full of East Midlands soul?

It feels great. Nottingham is always really good fun. We’ve done some of my favourite gigs here actually, at Stealth and the Social back in the day. Nottingham has always been an important date on our tour. I like Liars Club and Rescue. I like Rock City because its so wide and wherever you are you can see.

You’re known as being a band of myriad ever-fluctuating influences. What’s influencing you right now?

At the moment we’re all starting to think about our second album so we’re all dipping our wicks in different areas of music. I think disco is definitely something we’ve all been thinking about, especially after working with Erol (Alkan, electronic super-producer who produced the band’s second album). I don’t think we are going to go down that disco road but I think it’s always quite fun and interesting to borrow production values from an area of music which is quite alien to you. Disco is one of those things that people always joke about and people always associate it with hen nights and YMCA, but there’s also loads of amazing Italo-Disco and some good underground disco some from the eighties which has never really been celebrated very much.

So, having previously lived and worked with Erol Alkan, would you say that you’ve learned anything from him which you’ll carry forward on to the next record?

Yeah, I think so. When we first thought about working with Erol our thoughts were about that we’ve never really been a dance band, we’ve never thought our songs could do that, they were just pop songs with a beat that would compliment the song whereas when we started working with Erol we started thinking a lot more consciously about what would work on a dance floor. I came out of the other side realising that beneath that layer of a dance orientated song there needs to be a melody and something memorable. You can dance to anything if you try as long as its got that solid foundation. So I think establishing that on our next record is going to be at the top of our agenda. Just those songs which at their core are the best songs we’ve ever written, whether or not they fall into a dance category.




There’s a great deal of growth between your first album and your most recent release. How would you say the band is growing towards the next album?

When we started off we were very stuck in our minds on being this pastiche-y prog rock band on the lead up to our first album, then on our first album we found we had all these messages and influences and by the second album we realised that there were probably too many. We realised that sometimes its much better to say one thing really well rather than ten things not so well. You can say them in a sentence which is five words long but it may not really say as much as a sentence which is one word. And we realised that its often harder to work with less words to say the same message. We do wanna puish the boundaries of what can be called a pop song, we do what put ourselves outside of our comfort zones as well. To me the most exciting bands around at the moment are those like MGMT, Foals and Vampire Weekend. It’s definitely pop music but it isn’t pop music which is at the top of that charts, it’s resculpting the idea of pop music. They can still sell loads of records and sell out massive venues but they don’t have to sound like a Kylie record; it can sound like whatever the f*ck they want. Foals and Vampire Weekend are very influenced by African music and I think it’s amazing that they can use that foreign influence. I think its fun to bring back these forgotten influences into pop music. Vampire Weekend for example, I wouldn’t say that what they’re doing is completely new but they have the nerve and the talent to bring that influence back into pop music and lots of people are doing that, like Beirut can whack Eastern folk music into the mix and make an amazing record.

Do you think you’ll ever become satisfied in trying to find that perfect edgy pop song?

I think we’re satisfied in between writing the song, when you think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written, and then you put the record out and you find that you’ll probably never listen to the song again. And then after touring it for a year you’ll find that you’ll probably f*cking hate it. The rating of that song in your mind goes from quite high to really low in the course of a year. I don’t think that means that the song is shit, just imagine if you were an author and you had to read a passage of your back to audiences around the world over and over again, you’d get f*cking sick of it. So I don’t that that speaks for the song I think that speaks for you getting tired of stuff which I think anybody would. Radiohead only started playing ‘Creep’ again after ten years of not playing it. Good questions by the way, good questions. We’ve had a lot of the same old shitty ones recently.




How would you say that always having been such a tight knit unit effects you as a band and the way you write etc?

When we started we wrote as a unit a lot more, like William would come a long with a guitar part and we’d embellish it, whereas now we write a lot more on our own. I don’t think that’s a bad thing I think its good that we’ve all grown into songwriters which we didn’t really known how to do before. We’ve grown separately as songwriters because we’ve become more mature as people and more confident as people. Individually we’ve come a lot closer to what we want to say, when I write a song I want t say something – I wouldn’t feel fulfilled if I was just throwing some keyboard parts over the top of a guitar line. I don’t think I’d be doing justice to what the other guys are doing either because I don’t think that would be me at my best. To be at our best is for us all to sit down and actually do some songwriting, because we’re all songwriters, that’s what makes our albums fun to play, rather than just playing awful songs with a backing band.

So it’s symbiotic?

Yeah, good word.

It’s one of my favourite words. So do you know what each other is thinking when you’re in the studio?

No, we’re actually quite secretive about how we write. Well, me and my dad are quite honest and up front with each other and we write a lot of lyrics together, or he’ll write a complete song and I’ll help him with his lyrics. Generally speaking we are quite secretive but I think that’s quite cool because you don’t want to know what each other is thinking because then there are no surprises when you do get into the studio. I think that creative, not jealousy but, creative competition and curiosity is what drives this band. When I know that whatever he’s working on is quite interesting but I may not hear it for a couple of weeks, I’m always waiting for the moment when he invites me to listen to it and vice versa. It does get very competitive because me, William and Kai have all been friends since we were young so it’s always quite competitive but still cool.



We were talking to Jeremy Warmsley the other week and he was quite quick to dismiss himself as part of any kind of London songwriting scene. How would you describe the scene?

Jeremy is someone who we’ve been friends with for a very long time and I’m surprised he’d say that because we played on one of his songs about three months ago. I don’t think I’d call it a ‘scene’ as such. We used to do parties and invite a bunch of our friends down, and that’s probably the closest we’ve been to being part of a scene. I quite enjoy not feeling part of a scene because when you think back to Britpop you always think of the main Britpop bands, you never think of great bands like Sleeper and Shed 7. In twenty years time people aren’t going to realise that they were this huge bands that sold thousands of records, just because they’re buried and overshadowed by the bigger bands on the scene. Being part of a scene but not as successful as the other bands on the scene is quite detrimental so we’ve always tried to distance ourselves from other bands. My favourite bands are always outsider bands, Late of The Pier for example. They don’t sound like anything else, people will say “Oh this is like, the second wave of new rave”, but new rave is just a fashion term, not of those bands actually sounded alike. Late of The Pier are the modern day Roxy Music, they’re like musical chameleons. Bless them, they’ll probably never have a single in the top 40 but who gives a shit? The Ramones never had a record in the top 100, it doesn’t matter, they’ll still be remembered. So, scenes aren’t really that important, only to those bands who need to ride on other bands’ coattails but we’ve never done that.




Interview and photos by Andy Trendell

Review : Kid British - Stealth - 8/11/08

The sound of Manchester’s Kid British is a combo of funky ska/reggae guitar with simple pop beats, generally lacking in diversity. Vocally, when lead singer James Mayer wasn't doing his rap-like thing, he sang with a conventionally in-your-face accent, à la most modern “indie” pop. So on the contrary, these limited musical combinations form only a small scope of music, and this is what comprised the set: from the boppy beats of “Elizabeth”, to the rapped over cover of Madness’s “Our House” [a band which strikes as a significant influence] to the clangy guitars and catchy harmonies of “She Will Leave”. A tight performance, nonetheless.

But what made this band shrine through was their fun-loving energy and sense of togetherness. Jumping about like lunatics on stage, arms around each other, a warm sense of euphoria rose into the air climaxing with teams of intoxicated students flooding the stage.

Certainly, this isn’t for everyone. However with their identifiable, down to earth lyrics and infectious energy, they are an ideal mainstream-student band. I doubt many who find themselves well into the popular rock scene would be disappointed; however look elsewhere if you enjoy something a bit more out-there and unique. Saying that, I don’t think they’re trying to be either of those things.

Review by Lewis Townsend