Interview: We Are The Ocean

We Are The Ocean are the latest British band about to try and conquer the  USA. Before they want on stage to support The Blackout at Portsmouth Pyramids, we had a chat about their secret plans for Slam Dunk Festival, why they don't scream so much any more, and the British music scene they are (temporarily) leaving behind...

How are you finding touring with The Blackout and Canterbury?

Jack Spence (bass): We’ve managed to hit Hull, Lincoln and Edinburgh. We’ve never been to Lincoln before and Edinburgh we went to ages ago. But it’s good to do some venues that aren’t just London, Manchester, Birmingham.

Alfie Scully (guitar): You can really tell the people coming to show appreciate the package.

Jack: Lincoln last night was probably the best crowd. They’re thirsty for it because they don’t get that many shows. Whereas in London they’ve probably got another show to go to the next day.

Alfie: Also there’s been no tour awkwardness, no getting to know each other because we’ve all toured with the bands before.

Jack: It’s a reunion tour!

You’re all British bands on this tour, but are there any other British acts you admire at the moment?

Alfie and Jack in unison: Loads!

Alfie: Deaf Havana, TwinAtlantic, Straight Lines, who are a really good Welsh band.

Jack: There are loads of bands from Wales. They’re lucky, they have the cream of the musical crop. Canterbury are one of my favourite bands . The UK scene is really thriving at the minute. You’ve got You Me At Six at the top, who are making it more accessible and helping everybody out.

Alfie: It’s a very close knit community.

You’ve toured with a lot of bands, who has been your favourite?

Jack: There are different ways to answer this. I think the band we liked the most and listened to the most were Thrice and Underoath. They were tours when every night, you want to watch the bands.

Alfie: There’s those tours and then there’s the tours where you havnt necessarily first heard of the band but then you meet them and it’s mindblowing. They turn out to be really nice guys and you stay friends with them.

Jack: Then there’s the ones where you just get along with the bands so well. Like a year ago, we did a tour with Mayday Parade and they were just the nicest guys. So there are different reasons but weve been really lucky with every tour we’ve had. There’s no band we havn’t got on with.

You’ve also played a lot of festivals, which has been the most memorable?

Alfie: Reading Festival 2011. Brilliant festival.

Jack: It’s the biggest thing we’d done

Alfie: It was a good head-turner, that we were going to open the main stage.

Jack: Our second album was out, we’d had a great tour and so that was just the cherry on the cake, right at the end of festival season.

You’ve become regulars at Slam Dunk Festival now, will you be back next year?

Alfie: Ooh I don’t know, they’ve had us for every one so far. I think now, if they we’re to not put us on, we’d take it personally.

Jack: I think we should do a secret set. Beacsue if we’re announced everyone will be like ‘ah they’re playing again?’ But I kind of want to see how many times we can do it now. Every year we climb up the bill slowly so if we keep doing maybe we’ll headline the main stage and we can say ‘right that’s it, never again!’

Alfie: Even if we don’t play next year we should just demand that our music videos are played throughout the sit.

Jack: There has to be a We Are The Ocean presence, whether you love us or hate us.

You have just signed with Side One DummyRecords in the US, so what are your 

plans for conquering America?

Alfie: Well we can’t just go over and start dictating. We need to make friends first and lure them in.

Jack: We’ll use out Brit charm and accents. We just want to get over there now. We we’re supposed to go over there in December (supporting Dance Gavin Dance), but that’s been cancelled.

Alfie: But the album is on iTunes over there at the moment and the physical release will be at the beginning of next year.

Jack: We want to branch out and take this album over there and see how it goes. And the way to do that is touring. But America is so much bigger than the UK so it’s impossible to hit everywhere.

Alfie: It will be like starting again, it’ll be wicked.

Jack: Exactly, in a little cheap van just trotting along the highway until they’re sick of us.

You’ve been to America before though right?

Jack: We recorded our debut album in Baltimore and then we went to New Jersey and did BamboozleFestival. We didn’t get paid and we weren’t announced because we didn’t have the right visas to get paid. So it was just a little favour for our manager while we were out there.

Alfie: It was all a very ‘under the table’ type thing. It was a really good experience though we got a surprisingly good reaction considering nobody knew who we were or what time we were playing.

The album ‘Go Now & Live’ has been out for a while now. Are you pleased with the reaction it has received?

Jack: The whole campaign leading up to know has been more than we expected. The reviews were good, the old fans liked it and new fans came.

Alfie: It was ‘the difficult second album’. And you’re always going to have you naysayers but a lot of the feedback online and at shows has been good stuff.

Jack: It’s always hard because nobody wants to rehash the same album but at the same time you don’t want to do a new albums and all your old fans don’t like it. So we had to find a sound we were happy with but it was still the band.

Alfie: We always had that worry that people weren’t gonna get it. But we like it so we don’t care!

There’s a bit less screaming from Dan (joint lead vocals) on the new album compared to your debut ‘Cutting Our Teeth’, was that a conscious decision?

Jack: It wasn’t like we sat down and said ‘no more screaming!’

Alfie: No and if you watch the live set you’ll still see Dan going crazy with pure aggression and energy. We wanted to keep but harness the albility and use it as a musical dynamic and have more melody in the songs.

Jack: I think Dan wants to challenge his own voice as well.

Alfie: We just wanted to raise the bar with the second album and try something new.

What have you got planned next?

Alfie: In December we maybe want to write some more songs and see where it can go.

Jack: And then in the new year, we want to get touring. But we don’t want to over saturate anywhere so we want to get a nice cycle of UK, Europe, America, Australia going.

Alfie: We have been touring the UK for a very long time now

Jack: It’s worked well for us, getting our name out, but we’re at the point now where we can’t do it as much anymore because people are going to get sick of us.

Are you nervous about making album number three?

Alfie: I wouldn’t say we’re nervous. I’ve found that practising and writing with the band has been the most fun it has ever been.

Jack: And because we’re starting really early this time it’s a lot more fun when there’s no stress. When it comes to we’re going to the studio in a week and we’ve only got four sings, that’s not as fun. But as we’ve already started writing it’s going to be fun, not much pressure at all. 

Interview: Twin Atlantic

‘This is all a big blag’, not my words, but the words of Twin Atlantic front man Sam McTrusty. Following the release of their first full length album ‘Free’, the ‘blatantly Scottish’ band – again, not my words – have just completed their biggest UK tour to date. I caught up with them at Southampton Joiners to discuss such rock ‘n’ roll topics as Tom DeLonge’s shoes, cats and their ultimate goal; to show that real music still exists…

The UK tour is nearly over, how has it been?

Sam McTrusty (vocals & guitar): Outstandingly brilliant. Full stop. It’s been such a milestone for our band. We released an album and people started coming to watch us. We put music out there and people listen to it. We’ve done UK headline tours before and, not to take any merit away from them because they were as important, it’s just that this one has made us feel a bit more gratified. We’re getting something out of doing this now because more people are coming and were enjoying ourselves more.

You’re pretty far from home right now, what do you miss most when you’re on tour?

Ross McNae (bass, piano & vocals): My cats. They’ve all got rock names. Brody Dalle, Jesse James, Sid Vicious and then Lucky, she’s not named after anyone.

You have some pretty dedicated fans, does the reaction you get still surprise you?

Sam: Yes. I’ve always read about my favourites bands saying that they’re in this little bubble when they record an album and then when it gets released they don’t really realise it all blah blah blah. But that’s actually how I felt. We were so concentrated on making something and perfecting our art that now to be back in front of people and getting that immediate response, it’s amazing.

Ross: Yea because you can record a record and put it out and you only read what a magazine says or what someone says about you on the internet. But when they’re right in front of you, people can’t lie. You can see it on their faces if they enjoy it.

Sam: Yea and it’s the first time we’ve had any sold out shows in England, which doesn’t really happen to us. I’m just waiting for our van to explode or something like that.

How was the recording process for the new album, ‘Free’?

Sam: Beautiful. Simple. It was just so easy. And I think that’s because we had such an experienced producer (Gil Norton - Foo Fighters, Jimmy Eat World, Pixies, The Distillers). We just had this focused drive towards what we wanted. We’d made an EP, then a mini-album. We practiced making an album in that sense, so we knew what we didn’t want to do. And when we got into those situations we glided right through them, whereas before, we would not know which direction to go in. Say we had a completely different opinion, we’d usually argue about it for honestly two days and it would just get in the way of the whole process but this time it was just obvious which route we needed to take. And with Gil being there, he just gave us this sense of self belief that we didn’t have before. I think part of it was because we had a mini-album called ‘Vivarium’, and that was essentially our band up until that point and the songs we thought were good enough to let people here. Where as with ‘Free’, we actually set a goal. This is what we want this album to represent. And we want it to fill this gap and be what music fans aren’t getting from British bands right now.

Do you have a favourite track on the new album?

Sam: Well I think there are songs that I’ve made big statements in with the lyrics so I’m proud of making them work in a song. But there are songs that I prefer the music to. So I can’t choose between ‘Free’ and ‘Edit Me’, or ‘The Ghost of Eddie’. I like playing ‘The Ghost of Eddie’, it’s fun, but those other ones are total mission statements for me. But we’ve all got different answers probably. Ross said ‘The Ghost of Eddie’ yesterday but it changes from day to day.

Ross: Yea and then today we played a song called ‘Yes, I Was Drunk’ at sound check and that’s now my favourite.

What songs have been getting the best reaction when you play live?

Sam: The song ‘It’s Time For You To Stand Up’, which is probably one of the most immediate songs on the record. It’s pretty rocking but it’s also really upbeat. It’s got everything. It’s like a short pop song but it’s still rock music if you know what I mean?

What’s the story behind the name of the album?

Sam: Any idea we have always starts as a joke. And we thought free was the cheesiest name we could give the record. But we also thought the song, ‘Free’, on the record was a real focal point. We didn’t really think about it much we just thought that’s a pretty obvious name so we’ll just go for the obvious name and see what happens. And then all those things came up about ‘what if people think they can get it for free? Wont that be confusing?’ But we were just like, well they can get it for free if they want. More people will get it for free than go and pay for it. So our response to that was to just make fun of it.

How do you think ‘Free’ differs from your mini-album, ‘Vivarium’?

Sam: Well, personally I think it’s better. Better songs, I mean. The song writing definitely took big steps forward, probably because we’d experienced a lot more and we were a bit more grounded as individuals. We’d broadened our horizons by travelling a lot and meeting new people every day.

Ross: Something as easy as being a little bit older, and having done music for a little bit longer. Just being two years further down the line of trying to be a professional song writer, they’re gonna be better. So we’re almost winning before we’ve started. Hopefully we’re all better musicians.

Sam: We also just tried less hard. We just chilled and had fun rather than trying to impress people. We just thought lets fucking make ourselves happy and then if people like it then cool. If not then at least we’ll be able to look back at it when were 40 and not be embarrassed.

You were originally planning to record a concept album, what made you decide to scrap it and record ‘Free’ instead?

Sam: It wasn’t really a concept record, it was more like a theme to a record. Because we’d never written an album before so it was like, lets write an album about something. Then I realised that that wasn’t going to work because I’d not actually experienced much death and stuff. That’s what it was about, the theme of being scared of dying. A pretty fucking grim topic, but I don’t actually have much experience of death in my family or anything like that where as I’ve got loads of experience of being 23 and loving music and getting to mess about with my friends and travel. So I just decided to write a record about that instead. It was a pretty straight forward decision. I think it would have been a pretty morbid album

You’ve done quite a few shows oversees, how was that?

Sam: We did more last year. I keep exaggerating this but I think it was about 20 countries. That’s new countries, because we’ve definitely been around the block once. Hopefully we get to go round the blobk a million times.

Ross: But sometimes you’re only there for a day.

Sam: Yea we’d drive through Switzerland or somewhere like that and say, yea that counts. But we also did a full North American tour and went to Canada which was fucking crazy. It felt like we were in one of those documentary films I watched when I was 14, like The Blood Money 2. We were with American bands which was so weird, playing venues that you’d see on drive through DVDs and shit like that. So it was pretty cool, but a weird experience.

What was the reaction like from the fans abroad?

Sam: It’s been more immediate than the UK. I think being so blatantly Scottish, people immediately pay attention because they’re not used to that. So we kind of stood out I suppose. And especially in Germany, we’ve supported bands over there, and they just love rock music so as soon as you play anything with distortion they get excited. And Americans are just so over the top, they’ll come and chat to you for ages and want to buy you drinks and all that. They’re like the cheesy stereotypical music fan in America. 

You supported Blink 182 for their Scottish shows last year, were you surprised to get the gig?

Ross: Yea because it’s one of our favourite bands when we were younger. It’s weird because it was obviously a massive surprise but for some reason Tom DeLonge decided to give us some shoes from his company, I don’t know why, but he did. So I think it wasn’t as much of a shock because we knew that he knew who we were.

Sam: There were a lot of steps on the way to it.

Ross: It wasn’t like one day my mobile rang and it was Tom DeLonge, but it was a really good opportunity to get.

Sam: It was crazy! 30,000 people over 3 days got to hear us play all because Tom DeLonge asked us to.

What has been the highlight of the past year?

Sam: I want to say this tour. And I’m not even joking. It’s maybe been the biggest highlight of the band. Because we’re standing on our own two feet, people are taking us seriously, people are responding to our music as passionately as we did the first time we wrote a song. But also, the people that are coming to the gigs are music fans.

Ross: It’s not like all 14 year old girls and it’s not all really trendy people. There are some 50 year old men out there too.

Sam: And that’s the real indication that they just love music and want to hear honest songs. That’s why this is the highlight for me. We’ve finally reached a point that we talked about during our first couple of days as a band. This is what we want to achieve.

Ross: Also I think it’s because, not that we haven’t written any songs about relationships, but a lot of the songs have covered more universal things so there’s something for different types of people to relate to. It’s not just the one thing.

Sam: It’s not all ex-girlfriend songs and all that shit.

You all had opportunities to persue different careers when you were younger - Ross played hockey for Scotland in school, Sam passed up a golf scholarship to an American university and dropped out of a prestigious art degree at Glasgow University, Dummer Craig Kneale was doing a degree in graphic design and guitarist and cellist Barry McKenna played cello for the Scottish National Youth Orchestra, - do you ever wonder what life might have been like if Twin Atlantic didn’t exist?

Sam: Nah, we’ve kind of always just winged everything.

Ross: We’ve just taken every opportunity and not thought about the consequences.

Sam: That’s the way we’ve been living since we left school. We had pretty mediocre grades at school so we’ve just tried a bit of everything. So we don’t know any different really.

Ross: I think it was drummed into us by load of people. My dad in particular has always said just do what you’re gonna do. There’s never any pressure to do anything or make money and have a career.

You’ve been involved with the band’s artwork in the past, where do you get your inspiration?

Sam: Well for the artwork it’s usually the songs. Whatever mood listening to the record puts me in. And then I’ll get a picture in my head of something. Because things like that usually come to me really quickly and I don’t really think them through, which is probably why we’ve stopped using my stuff. I think we just make it up as we go along. This is all a big blag.

What are your plans for the rest of the year?

Sam: Just playing as many gigs as we can and getting the record into as many new ears as we can. Just letting people know that we exist and there are still honest rock bands out there that sing something worthwhile. Basically to show that real music still exists, that’s out mission this year.

Album Review: Vivarium - Twin Atlantic

Biffy Clyro’s little brother has arrived in the shape of Twin Atlantic

The four lads from Glasgow’s debut album Vivarium is packed full of strong vocals, powerful guitar and more sing-a-long moments than you could shake a stick at. From the huge force of ‘Old Grey Face’ to the beautiful ‘Better Weather’ this album has a lot to offer. It’s also refreshing to hear a strong accent as opposed to the usual whiney American persona many British bands adopt, an issue which happens to be covered in anthemic track ‘You’re Turning Into John Wayne’.

All of the tracks on the album would be right at home in big arenas, which goes some way to explaining why these Scots have previously supported such huge acts as Smashing Pumpkins, Funeral For A Friend and Lostprophets. And with another support slot for pop-punk giants Blink 182 coming up this year, Twin Atlantic could get pretty big, pretty quick. But if it doesn’t work out, they could always make a decent living as a Biffy Clyro tribute act.

I also recommend you check out the Innerpartysystem remix of ‘Human After All’ and the Skrillex version of ‘What Is Light, Where Is Laughter?’ Truly impressive stuff.