SPRING OFFENSIVE INTERVIEW
22/01/10
On a cold winter’s evening in a flat in Abingdon the band ‘Spring Offensive’ sat and answered questions about their past, present and future. With their highly anticipated new upcoming album ‘Pull Us Apart’ the band is in high spirits and excited about their forthcoming release. This is a band which is consistently getting better not with every step but with every bracing stride. The first time i saw them was in a town hall in Bradford on Avon, surrounded by about 12 people (mainly underage drunk teenagers, of which i was one) making an extremely weak attempt to create some sort of energy through the art of moshing, but failing to do so very badly. I’ll be honest they have come a long, long way since then, my knuckles are whitening, my neck is stiffening and i can feel the cold sweat dripping down my back and as i grip the arms of my chair beside my stereo it can mean only one thing, I am listening for the first time to the writhing, slithering opening notes of the first track of the new album, here’s how they got there............
ELLIOT: When did the band start and how did it start?
MATT: We’ve been together for about 6 years. It started at school but the lineup has changed radically, we’ve been through about 4 different bassists. We lose a lot of bassists, well we’ve lost two out of four bassists. They go and study Ancient History at Exeter. Well, you know, it must be a great course, very attractive.
LUCAS: That’s something we do to people; we drive them to the sea.
MATT: We’ve only really been at it properly for about a year now, since ‘A Let Down’. We were really, really bad before, and are very, very grateful that we’ve had so long to improve.
THEO: Gestate
LUCAS: And not having to deal with anyone watching us as well, which is quite important. You can make all your mistakes in private so you know you haven’t made a tit of yourself.
ELLIOT: What are the main influences for the band, what inspires you?
LUCAS: We all started listening to The Cooper Temple Clause’s Kick Up The Fire and Let the Flames Break Loose and Hope Of The States' The Lost Riots quite a lot and that was the music that first got us into wanting to make it ourselves really.
MATT: I think everyone having different influences is so important because when we come to a writing session or rehearsals, we’ve each been listening to different records so we try to crossover a lot of what everyone’s listening to.
THEO: There needs to be some overlap otherwise you just get mismatched genres being jumbled up together and it doesn’t really work very well so you need to be fairly open minded
ELLIOT: Who are your favourite unsigned bands?
LUCAS: That’s quite a difficult question; it’s very difficult to actually get to know unsigned bands beyond your immediate scene because they don’t obviously get much exposure in the same way as a signed band.
MATT: It’s also very difficult to tell which bands are unsigned.
PELHAM: And it doesn’t mean nearly as much now as it did even like 5 years ago because so many bands are producing material without getting signed.
LUCAS: But in terms of bands who are definitely not signed to any labels, we are all into obviously Stornoway, but also Fervours and Ute.
MATT: ‘Ute’ are a 3 piece Oxford band and yeah have very cool sets and are fantastic live. Colchester's Fervours, sound wise, are almost the other end of the spectrum, with a much thicker and fiddlier sound.
ELLIOT: What’s the idea and concept behind the new album?
MATT: The new album?
PELHAM: Yeah the new album as in Pull Us Apart, the album we’re about to release in March.
MATT: I think it’s hard to apply one overall concept behind the album. We really wanted it to be a concept album, pretty much orientated around the opening track 'I Found Myself Smiling'. All the songs sort of stemmed from that really and that frame of mind. There are overall themes but it would be quite reductive to tell you what they are.
LUCAS: Yeah it’s kind of about being obsessed about things, which goes hand in hand with being in a band. This band, at least.
ELLIOT: Who did the album artwork? Did you know what you wanted it to look like or did you give the artist freedom to explore ideas?
MATT: I pissed a lot of people off actually because I told them all I wanted them to do the album artwork and then I found Joseph Carpenter. They were all awesome, but his style really appealed to us. We really like hand drawn things and think that goes really well with our sound. Going back to the last question, one of the reoccurring images is rats and what rats symbolise to us. So yeah we gave him rats and you can see the final product.
ELLIOT: How long did it take to record the album?
LUCAS: In a way we started writing it in May last year when we wrote 'The Cable Routine' which actually ended up going on the EP as well. We started off wanting to make a full album and we announced it on an interview with BBC 6 Music but then we realised we couldn’t afford to do that, so we had to scale down our ideas a little bit. So we've ended up releasing a mini album instead.
PELHAM: And yeah it took about four months to write and about two weeks to record it in early December at Courtyard studios, which is lovely.
ELLIOT: Where will you be able to get a copy of the new album?
JOE: You can get mail order copies from the store on our Myspace page, as well as iTunes, Spotify, Amazon etc.
ELLIOT: Do you think this is the strongest material you’ve done so far?
MATT: You’ve always got to have new ideas and songs coming out of the recording studio but you have to believe that your last material is your strongest. Which we feel it is.
ELLIOT: Is recording something you like doing or do you prefer getting it done and performing it to an audience?
LUCAS: I hate recording.
PELHAM: I love recording
THEO: The thing that’s quite enjoyable about recording is that you’re in quite a safe cocoon and it doesn’t really matter if you're not playing very well. It doesn’t really matter to you during that period whether the music is good or not, it’s not that important.
JOE: It’s not that it’s not important, it’s just you can’t think about it.
THEO: Yeah, it kind of ceases to be an issue to you. You can just leave all that behind and then suddenly the worst time is just coming out of the studio when you realise you can’t actually play because there isn’t someone cutting your parts together and the music might not be as good as you thought it was.
MATT: I think that the main worry is that you get so engrossed, to the point where you can barely function in a conversation outside the studio, and you can’t then entertain the thought of “is this any good?” because if you do you start to make decisions in the studio. We tend to try and not make any decisions regarding the material once in the studio. That’s why we spend so much time writing.
LUCAS: It’s a very relaxed atmosphere in the studio, but it’s the recording process itself that I don’t enjoy and I don’t really like recording my own parts. Playing live is a completely different game though and that is generally speaking a joy.
ELLIOT: How would you describe your fans?
PELHAM: Would you describe our fans?
MATT: I don’t think we have any.
LUCAS: Yeah a few close friends I guess; how would you describe our friends?
MATT: It’s really hard to tell if anyone really listens to us, I just try and block it out of my mind.
ELLIOT: What’s the idea behind the beaten up look at the moment?
MATT: We had a horrible patch when we started writing the album and we did a terrible terrible gig; probably the closest we have come to splitting up. I think it stems from one of our biggest problems and assets, which is the fact that we’re so self critical and we don’t really let anything go. I think beating ourselves up is something which we do and probably everyone does as well. I think it became a bit of a feature of our music and a feature of us as individuals.That’s my take on it. The new video takes it even further.
LUCAS: It’s sort of an anti-rockstar look in a way, you know the rockstar posing and pouting on top of a mountain, half naked oiled body with a guitar up his etc.. Showing yourself as quite a weak character, someone who's actually lost the fight is, you know, more interesting I think. It’s more what we think is cool about music. It’s not about being the big guy, it’s about being interesting.
PELHAM: There’s a lot of well intentioned advice to look glossy and produced and it’s not possible unless you're in a position where someone can pay you to be glossy and produced all the time.
ELLIOT: Are music videos something you think is key to the success of a band, and your band?
JOE: It's part of the overall project, you’ve got to have cool videos.
MATT: Videos are one way of bridging a gap between the record and the band when you can’t play live every night and you can’t afford to do world tours or there’s not enough interest for you to do world tours. I think that music videos are a step closer in terms of intimacy.
THEO: It’s the way that you can search for more material about a band that you may be interested in. It’s quite exciting that you can find and discover all that stuff.
LUCAS: It’s just a more interesting angle on the song, and that’s cool in itself and that’s a good enough reason to do one.
ELLIOT: Do you have a tour or a series of concerts coming up after the album is released?
THEO: Yeah we’ve got a couple of dates together for March with some really cool bands like “Cats and Cats and Cats”, “A Genuine Freakshow”, “Little Fish”- awesome bands so we’re very much looking forward to that, and there are more on the way.
ELLIOT: If you could have any ridiculous stage prop or effect what would it be?
LUCAS: Carrots
THEO: Yeah we like vegetable shaving.
LUCAS: When we didn’t have very many good songs, we were thinking, “how can we make ourselves more interesting?” We did talk about peeling vegetables on stage and preparing a vegetarian dish. It didn't happen.
ELLIOT: Do you have groupies?
PELHAM: Well some of us have girlfriends, but that’s not really the same.
MATT: Most of our lyrics are about inadequacy and sort of being crap at everything so I don’t think people are interested.
LUCAS: Chicks dig the sensitive guys.
PELHAM: Yeah that hasn’t been our experience but if anyone wants to prove us wrong then come along to the gig.
LUCAS: You can't say that! (laughing)
ELLIOT: Are you reckless youths on a path of destruction?
PELHAM: I’m just currently sipping on Ribena and Jim Beam.
JOE: That’s disgusting.
PELHAM: No it’s nice.
MATT: Ultimately everyone is aren’t they? So yes probably yeah, we are.
PELHAM: But not in a “Jagermeister / drinking trashing hotel rooms” way. More in a probably “ruining our career” way.
JOE: If we get enough money for a gig to afford Jagermeister and staying in a hotel room, I’ll drink it and then trash the room..
ELLIOT: Does Matt ever break his equipment?
LUCAS: Yes.
PELHAM: Well in fairness, Matt’s equipment has a habit of breaking, and the jury's out as to whether it’s his fault. It seems like misfortune a lot of the time.
MATT: It’s a curse, a curse!
JOE: We have an expression in the band which is the “Madras touch”, where instead of everything you touch turning to gold, it turns to shit. That's what Matt has with technology and electricity.
MATT: Is that our expression?
PELHAM: No I don’t think so. I think it exists outside of the band as well.
ELLIOT: Is there another album in the pipeline, are you already dreaming up your next masterpiece?
THEO: We’re working on it now.
ELLIOT: Lovely, that's the interview over now.
MATT: Just make sure we sound funny, clever, intelligent…..
PELHAM: Really attractive.
MATT: Yeah really attractive, sensitive, and not like dicks.
THEO: Yeah because we are not dicks….or the big guys.
