Interview - Culture Deluxe 2006
Author: Natalie Moore
Date: 14th December 2006
Link: Culture Deluxe
How has the Phase Two tour been so far and what are the highlights?
Mike: It’s been awesome actually. So far the highlight for me has been the Port Talbot show. Playing Wales is always awesome. We should have played it last, shouldn’t we?
Stuart: Yeah. It’s kinda funny, we played it third and no offence to everywhere else but Wales where we’re from and we always have the best shows in Wales.
Mike: You get to see your family, your friends, all your best friends come down.
Stuart: So like, when you go play somewhere else the next day you don’t know anybody there. It’s still fun but it’s not as fun as.. you know, for us there’s nothing like playing Wales. The other highlight for me was the afterparty we had two days ago in Leeds. We had a boombox and an iPod and a lot of beer. Bring Me The Horizon and The Blackout were drunk out of their minds. We just kept playing bad 80s hits, watching them sing and dance and that was the highlight for me because I was sober. I just got to watch them, that was funny.
Mike: This tour has been a lot of fun for me, like the guys from Bring Me The Horizon are awesome and we’ve made some really cool friends and they’re really good guys. Like, the other bands we took on tour were our friends as well, The New 1920 and This Is Hell, The Blackout. So it’s just been a really, really cool vibe. It’s awesome that we can take our friends out on tour.
Stuart: Sometimes we can take bands out and they can be cool, but you just don’t get on with them. It can just be a bit awkward, you’re kinda like “Hey, how you doing?”..
Mike: But this has been awesome.
Are you looking forward to playing London tonight?
Mike: Yeah yeah because aside from Wales, London is one of my favourite places to play. We always have good shows in London too. It should be really good.
Are you planning to play any festivals in 2007?
Mike: Yeah.
Stuart: We’re not sure which ones.
Mike: Yeah, we’re not sure yet. We’ve got a few lined up.
British or International ones?
Mike: Both. We’ll do a lot, I should imagine. We’re gonna work on our new album and then we’re gonna probably spend the summer doing festivals.
Are you looking forward to your European tour and where are you looking forward to playing the most?
Mike: You know what? Holland. It’s always amazing. Every time we play Amsterdam..
Stuart: Not for that reason though..
Mike: No, not for that reason! Not for any reason that springs to mind with Amsterdam but every time we play Amsterdam, the kids there are fucking nuts. They go off and it’s awesome.
Stuart: It’s always fun.
Mike: Yeah, always awesome. We’re not playing Amsterdam, we’re playing another place in Holland which is like the biggest show on the tour and it’s sold out so it should be awesome. We’re taking The Blackout to Europe with us and we’re taking our other friends The New 1920 so it’s just gonna be like a Welsh invasion.
Stuart: We’re taking The Blackout to Japan as well.
Mike: Yeah and Dopamine. We’re on a mission to take as our friends to as many places in the world as possible. So yeah, we’re taking Dopamine and The Blackout to Japan.
Are you going to do any sightseeing when you’re in Europe?
Stuart: We’ve seen a lot of the sites already.
Mike: Possibly though, because our new dummer is obsessed with Europe. He’s obsessed with Germany.
He’s American isn’t he?
Mike: He’s American, yeah. All Americans are obsessed with Europe until they go there and they’re like “Hmm, it’s alright”. Like, he literally is obsessed with it and all he’s been going on about is how he wants to go to Cologne and Berlin so it might be a bit more exciting.. we’ve got a day off in Berlin. Me and him have got this kinda like.. I dunno, I wouldn’t say obsession..
Stuart: Watch what you’re saying here!
Mike: But we’re both very into Second World War history and stuff. So yeah, we’re gonna go on a historical trip.
Some fans are complaining that you’re not touring in places like Australia. Do you plan to tour there next year?
Stuart: Well, there’s two reasons why..
Mike: Yeah.
Stuart: The main reason is, we’ve never really been asked to play there! If we get asked to play somewhere we’ll go, but like without sounding like an asshole, it costs so much money to go over there, if we’re just playing for those three kids who like us… I know that sounds like really shitty..
Mike: If we can’t afford to go somewhere, we can’t afford to go somewhere. We were thinking of doing the Big Day Out, but we were too late to get onto the festival and everything so… you know, if enough people want us to go play somewhere and we can afford to go there. You know, it’s a bit different to playing Paris than it is playing literally the other side of the world.
Stuart: We’ve gotta go over on a plane..
Mike: And Australia’s such a big country, we can’t just rent a van..
Stuart: We’ve gotta fly to each place.. we’d love to play there though. We had a great time last time.
Mike: We have played there. Yeah, we toured Australia and New Zealand.
Stuart: So anyone who complains, where were you in 2004?
Mike: We were there, where were you?
Are you looking forward to Christmas and what do you hope to get?
Stuart: Course we are! We’ve got a few weeks off.
Mike: Yeah, I can’t wait. We’ve been on tour now since like April, pretty much. We’ve had one week off basically, since April, so we’re pretty tired. We’re ready to just like.. I just wanna watch some good old British TV, like Only Fools And Horses on Christmas Day. I don’t know what I’m gonna get. See what my mum buys me.
What’s your favourite on-tour memory?
Stuart: The first time we stepped on a tour bus in America, that was pretty amazing. We hadn’t played any shows in America about from showcases, bullshit shows. But I remember five years ago we got on this tour bus in America and I felt like we were the fucking coolest guys on the Earth. That was pretty awesome, getting on that big bus.
Mike: It was kinda like being in Almost Famous, wasn’t it?
Stuart: Yeah.
Mike: I don’t know what mine is..
Stuart: It depends like, what context you put it in. Best show or most fun you’ve had. There was one night when we were throwing milk at each other, which was one of the funniest nights of my life. Our old drummer poured a gallon of milk over our friend. He was drunk out of his mind and for some reason that was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Mike: There was another night when we were in Prague with the guys in Midtown. We set the guy from Midtown on fire! Our friend who was on tour with us was so drunk on absinthe and he couldn’t move, he was just throwing up all night.
Stuart: And we had to carry Midtown back home. When you’re drinking absinthe, you’ve gotta set it on fire. I’d done a couple of shots already so I was wasted and I set his on fire and he didn’t put it out, he put his t-shirt on it and it went up in flames. Always funny. And then he professed his love us after knowing us for like an hour and a half!
Who has the worst habit in the band?
Mike: Ian, he leaves his shit everywhere.
Stuart: When you’re a bus, when someone takes up more space than everybody else it pisses the others off.
Mike: There’s nothing like walking into the back of the bus and seeing a dirty pair of pants.
Stuart: He just leaves his clothes everywhere. It sounds really petty, it’s like so what? It’s like when you come home and somebody hasn’t done the dishes or something and you wanna make your food but you can’t because you gotta wash the dishes first. You’re just like, I could fucking kill that person. Apart from that, Ian’s cool.
What’s your favourite childhood memory?
Mike: Oh, I dunno. I have loads of good ones. There’s loads from like.. I dunno.
Stuart: Joining my first band.
Mike: Causing trouble with my mates. I remember one Halloween we went out and caused absolute fucking chaos. Threw eggs at everyone, flour.. that was pretty cool. I dunno, we just used to hang out and skateboard, stuff like that. I remember going on skate trips, stuff like that I suppose.
If you weren’t in a band, what do you think you’d be doing now?
Stuart: I’d probably still be broke. Working in a studio maybe, or maybe just doing some job I hated.
Mike: I really have no idea. I really, really do not know what I’d be doing.
Stuart: I always wanted to be in a band, so I really believed that what’s what I’d do with my life. I went to college but I just dropped out because it didn’t teach me anything. It taught me that I hated college. I started working in a studio so I’d probably still be working in a studio.
Mike: I still have no idea.
Stuart: I’d be in jail or dead.
Mike: I really, really do not know, I’m being honest with you. I’d probably be sitting in the back of a van with some other band, playing shitty hardcore shows.
What’s your favourite colour highlighter?
Mike: I used to love them when I was a kid. When I was like ten and I was in primary school, they were like the shit. If you had a pack of highlighters, you were the fucking hip kid of the class. Everyone to colour stuff in. I reckon green.
Stuart: Green.
Mike: Yeah, neon green.
Can you give us any indication as to what songs you’ll be playing tonight and how long you’ll be on stage?
Mike: We make it up as we go on stage so..
Stuart: Yeah.
Mike: We’ll be on stage probably about an hour and fifteen minutes, playing a mix of songs. It’s been cool on this tour because we’ve changed the set a lot. Sometimes we’ll just make up a set and keep playing and playing and playing. Probably start and end with the same songs.
Stuart: Anybody who’s already seen us on this tour will probably know what we’ll start and finish with. Depends on the day. Some days, you know, if Ian’s voice is a little sharp we’ll change the set because he sings into the fucking stratosphere, so sometimes we’ll drop some songs to make it a little easier on him.
Mike: We’ve been playing a cover as well, so we might play that. [after guessing which cover they would be playing – Going Underground by The Jam] Do you know why I’m bummed about that? ‘Cause you know that we’ve been playing it. I was just talking to my friend about it, about how much I hate the internet.
Stuart: It sucks. Like, you know what’s going to happen in Spiderman 3 and it doesn’t come out for like nine months.
Mike: Yeah, it kills everything. I’m genuinely bummed about it because it’s like.. we decided we’d do it for the Radio 1 thing and then thought “Let’s play it live, it will be awesome” because we all love that song. So we were like “Cool, let’s do it in London” and I was like “Alright cool, but we should it play for a couple of shows before London and get into it” but now everybody knows we’re gonna play it. I almost feel like saying “Fine then, we won’t play it”.
What about playing another cover that you’ve done before?
Mike: I just want to play The Jam.
Stuart: It’s like on Youtube and stuff you know. I was like “Oh man..” Some of the covers we’ve done before, we got a phone call from Radio 1 saying “If you’re doing a session, can you do a cover and can you make it something from the charts?” They give you guidelines, there’s nothing good in the charts right now. A couple of years ago we were like “Let’s do Justin Timberlake”, so that’s why we did it – to piss people off, really. It was in the charts and we knew it would piss people off and it did!
Mike: It was cool this time because Radio 1 called us up and asked us to do a session and were like “We want you to do a song which is important to you”. So we were like, cool. We can do a song we really love and we’re really into, so we picked Going Underground. It’s an amazing song, we love the band and the lyrics are meaningful.
Author: Natalie Moore
Date: 14th December 2006
Link: Culture Deluxe
How has the Phase Two tour been so far and what are the highlights?
Mike: It’s been awesome actually. So far the highlight for me has been the Port Talbot show. Playing Wales is always awesome. We should have played it last, shouldn’t we?
Stuart: Yeah. It’s kinda funny, we played it third and no offence to everywhere else but Wales where we’re from and we always have the best shows in Wales.
Mike: You get to see your family, your friends, all your best friends come down.
Stuart: So like, when you go play somewhere else the next day you don’t know anybody there. It’s still fun but it’s not as fun as.. you know, for us there’s nothing like playing Wales. The other highlight for me was the afterparty we had two days ago in Leeds. We had a boombox and an iPod and a lot of beer. Bring Me The Horizon and The Blackout were drunk out of their minds. We just kept playing bad 80s hits, watching them sing and dance and that was the highlight for me because I was sober. I just got to watch them, that was funny.
Mike: This tour has been a lot of fun for me, like the guys from Bring Me The Horizon are awesome and we’ve made some really cool friends and they’re really good guys. Like, the other bands we took on tour were our friends as well, The New 1920 and This Is Hell, The Blackout. So it’s just been a really, really cool vibe. It’s awesome that we can take our friends out on tour.
Stuart: Sometimes we can take bands out and they can be cool, but you just don’t get on with them. It can just be a bit awkward, you’re kinda like “Hey, how you doing?”..
Mike: But this has been awesome.
Are you looking forward to playing London tonight?
Mike: Yeah yeah because aside from Wales, London is one of my favourite places to play. We always have good shows in London too. It should be really good.
Are you planning to play any festivals in 2007?
Mike: Yeah.
Stuart: We’re not sure which ones.
Mike: Yeah, we’re not sure yet. We’ve got a few lined up.
British or International ones?
Mike: Both. We’ll do a lot, I should imagine. We’re gonna work on our new album and then we’re gonna probably spend the summer doing festivals.
Are you looking forward to your European tour and where are you looking forward to playing the most?
Mike: You know what? Holland. It’s always amazing. Every time we play Amsterdam..
Stuart: Not for that reason though..
Mike: No, not for that reason! Not for any reason that springs to mind with Amsterdam but every time we play Amsterdam, the kids there are fucking nuts. They go off and it’s awesome.
Stuart: It’s always fun.
Mike: Yeah, always awesome. We’re not playing Amsterdam, we’re playing another place in Holland which is like the biggest show on the tour and it’s sold out so it should be awesome. We’re taking The Blackout to Europe with us and we’re taking our other friends The New 1920 so it’s just gonna be like a Welsh invasion.
Stuart: We’re taking The Blackout to Japan as well.
Mike: Yeah and Dopamine. We’re on a mission to take as our friends to as many places in the world as possible. So yeah, we’re taking Dopamine and The Blackout to Japan.
Are you going to do any sightseeing when you’re in Europe?
Stuart: We’ve seen a lot of the sites already.
Mike: Possibly though, because our new dummer is obsessed with Europe. He’s obsessed with Germany.
He’s American isn’t he?
Mike: He’s American, yeah. All Americans are obsessed with Europe until they go there and they’re like “Hmm, it’s alright”. Like, he literally is obsessed with it and all he’s been going on about is how he wants to go to Cologne and Berlin so it might be a bit more exciting.. we’ve got a day off in Berlin. Me and him have got this kinda like.. I dunno, I wouldn’t say obsession..
Stuart: Watch what you’re saying here!
Mike: But we’re both very into Second World War history and stuff. So yeah, we’re gonna go on a historical trip.
Some fans are complaining that you’re not touring in places like Australia. Do you plan to tour there next year?
Stuart: Well, there’s two reasons why..
Mike: Yeah.
Stuart: The main reason is, we’ve never really been asked to play there! If we get asked to play somewhere we’ll go, but like without sounding like an asshole, it costs so much money to go over there, if we’re just playing for those three kids who like us… I know that sounds like really shitty..
Mike: If we can’t afford to go somewhere, we can’t afford to go somewhere. We were thinking of doing the Big Day Out, but we were too late to get onto the festival and everything so… you know, if enough people want us to go play somewhere and we can afford to go there. You know, it’s a bit different to playing Paris than it is playing literally the other side of the world.
Stuart: We’ve gotta go over on a plane..
Mike: And Australia’s such a big country, we can’t just rent a van..
Stuart: We’ve gotta fly to each place.. we’d love to play there though. We had a great time last time.
Mike: We have played there. Yeah, we toured Australia and New Zealand.
Stuart: So anyone who complains, where were you in 2004?
Mike: We were there, where were you?
Are you looking forward to Christmas and what do you hope to get?
Stuart: Course we are! We’ve got a few weeks off.
Mike: Yeah, I can’t wait. We’ve been on tour now since like April, pretty much. We’ve had one week off basically, since April, so we’re pretty tired. We’re ready to just like.. I just wanna watch some good old British TV, like Only Fools And Horses on Christmas Day. I don’t know what I’m gonna get. See what my mum buys me.
What’s your favourite on-tour memory?
Stuart: The first time we stepped on a tour bus in America, that was pretty amazing. We hadn’t played any shows in America about from showcases, bullshit shows. But I remember five years ago we got on this tour bus in America and I felt like we were the fucking coolest guys on the Earth. That was pretty awesome, getting on that big bus.
Mike: It was kinda like being in Almost Famous, wasn’t it?
Stuart: Yeah.
Mike: I don’t know what mine is..
Stuart: It depends like, what context you put it in. Best show or most fun you’ve had. There was one night when we were throwing milk at each other, which was one of the funniest nights of my life. Our old drummer poured a gallon of milk over our friend. He was drunk out of his mind and for some reason that was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Mike: There was another night when we were in Prague with the guys in Midtown. We set the guy from Midtown on fire! Our friend who was on tour with us was so drunk on absinthe and he couldn’t move, he was just throwing up all night.
Stuart: And we had to carry Midtown back home. When you’re drinking absinthe, you’ve gotta set it on fire. I’d done a couple of shots already so I was wasted and I set his on fire and he didn’t put it out, he put his t-shirt on it and it went up in flames. Always funny. And then he professed his love us after knowing us for like an hour and a half!
Who has the worst habit in the band?
Mike: Ian, he leaves his shit everywhere.
Stuart: When you’re a bus, when someone takes up more space than everybody else it pisses the others off.
Mike: There’s nothing like walking into the back of the bus and seeing a dirty pair of pants.
Stuart: He just leaves his clothes everywhere. It sounds really petty, it’s like so what? It’s like when you come home and somebody hasn’t done the dishes or something and you wanna make your food but you can’t because you gotta wash the dishes first. You’re just like, I could fucking kill that person. Apart from that, Ian’s cool.
What’s your favourite childhood memory?
Mike: Oh, I dunno. I have loads of good ones. There’s loads from like.. I dunno.
Stuart: Joining my first band.
Mike: Causing trouble with my mates. I remember one Halloween we went out and caused absolute fucking chaos. Threw eggs at everyone, flour.. that was pretty cool. I dunno, we just used to hang out and skateboard, stuff like that. I remember going on skate trips, stuff like that I suppose.
If you weren’t in a band, what do you think you’d be doing now?
Stuart: I’d probably still be broke. Working in a studio maybe, or maybe just doing some job I hated.
Mike: I really have no idea. I really, really do not know what I’d be doing.
Stuart: I always wanted to be in a band, so I really believed that what’s what I’d do with my life. I went to college but I just dropped out because it didn’t teach me anything. It taught me that I hated college. I started working in a studio so I’d probably still be working in a studio.
Mike: I still have no idea.
Stuart: I’d be in jail or dead.
Mike: I really, really do not know, I’m being honest with you. I’d probably be sitting in the back of a van with some other band, playing shitty hardcore shows.
What’s your favourite colour highlighter?
Mike: I used to love them when I was a kid. When I was like ten and I was in primary school, they were like the shit. If you had a pack of highlighters, you were the fucking hip kid of the class. Everyone to colour stuff in. I reckon green.
Stuart: Green.
Mike: Yeah, neon green.
Can you give us any indication as to what songs you’ll be playing tonight and how long you’ll be on stage?
Mike: We make it up as we go on stage so..
Stuart: Yeah.
Mike: We’ll be on stage probably about an hour and fifteen minutes, playing a mix of songs. It’s been cool on this tour because we’ve changed the set a lot. Sometimes we’ll just make up a set and keep playing and playing and playing. Probably start and end with the same songs.
Stuart: Anybody who’s already seen us on this tour will probably know what we’ll start and finish with. Depends on the day. Some days, you know, if Ian’s voice is a little sharp we’ll change the set because he sings into the fucking stratosphere, so sometimes we’ll drop some songs to make it a little easier on him.
Mike: We’ve been playing a cover as well, so we might play that. [after guessing which cover they would be playing – Going Underground by The Jam] Do you know why I’m bummed about that? ‘Cause you know that we’ve been playing it. I was just talking to my friend about it, about how much I hate the internet.
Stuart: It sucks. Like, you know what’s going to happen in Spiderman 3 and it doesn’t come out for like nine months.
Mike: Yeah, it kills everything. I’m genuinely bummed about it because it’s like.. we decided we’d do it for the Radio 1 thing and then thought “Let’s play it live, it will be awesome” because we all love that song. So we were like “Cool, let’s do it in London” and I was like “Alright cool, but we should it play for a couple of shows before London and get into it” but now everybody knows we’re gonna play it. I almost feel like saying “Fine then, we won’t play it”.
What about playing another cover that you’ve done before?
Mike: I just want to play The Jam.
Stuart: It’s like on Youtube and stuff you know. I was like “Oh man..” Some of the covers we’ve done before, we got a phone call from Radio 1 saying “If you’re doing a session, can you do a cover and can you make it something from the charts?” They give you guidelines, there’s nothing good in the charts right now. A couple of years ago we were like “Let’s do Justin Timberlake”, so that’s why we did it – to piss people off, really. It was in the charts and we knew it would piss people off and it did!
Mike: It was cool this time because Radio 1 called us up and asked us to do a session and were like “We want you to do a song which is important to you”. So we were like, cool. We can do a song we really love and we’re really into, so we picked Going Underground. It’s an amazing song, we love the band and the lyrics are meaningful.
