The Tunics: Interview

The Tunics are a 3 piece band hailing from Croydon and citing hard hitting issues from knife crime to gang culture as their lyrical inspiration.  Described by the press as Kate Nash meets the Arctic Monkeys, there is definitely something compelling about this trio that makes you stop and listen, whilst the honesty of the lyrics addresses what many people choose to ignore. 

Signing to Manta Ray Music early on in their career the band recorded their debut LP with James Lewis in 2008 which is set for official release later this year.  However last year as a thank you to their loyal supporters they made the album downloadable for free, track by track, allowing their fans to take control of the album’s tracklisting order and make their own physical copy if they so wished.

So far in 2009 there has been a change in line-up with the bands former drummer being replaced by newcomer Joe Blanks after the band advertised online.  And with their second single off the album ‘Shine On’ released in anticipation for the album, The Tunics look set to continue on their musical journey taking them from Croydon to stages across the UK.

Amongst all this activity frontman and guitarist Joe Costello, bassist Scott Shepherd and new drummer Joe Blanks took some time out to speak to 4or The Record before a headlining show at Londons Dublin Castle in Camden.

4TR: First things first, The Tunics have recently gone through a line up change, what is the story behind that?
Joe : Well The Tunics as a band have been together about 3 years, but we actually parted company with our former drummer a little while ago and now Joe Blanks is our new drummer.  So you are looking at a new formation of the band.
Joe Blanks : It’s a new feel and more driven, this is the new look Tunics.

4TR: How did you get together with this Joe? Did you hold an X-Factor style audition or drummer boot camp?
J : [laughing] Yeah exactly that, we went to Miami and held it there.  Actually it was as simple as advertising on the Internet, [laughs] you know the old fashioned way.
S : Yeah we posted a drummer wanted style ad.
J : And this guy came along and he could really play and plus we all got on, so now here we are.  It all happened so quickly but really feels like we’ve been playing together a lot longer.

4TR: So since the beginnings of The Tunics a few years ago, would you say your sound has progressed at all?
J : Yes its definitely changed.  I mean because obviously everybody has their own influences as a musician, so when we started the band and with the recording of the album we had 3 musicians who had different influences, and obviously now we have a different drummer who is also bringing a whole new influence on board to the group and mixing things up again.
JB : I’ve done a lot of session work previously and play pretty much every genre, which really helps with song writing because you can get like a light feel with a rock sound, or you can play a hip hop track, or a groove and a chorus and then go into something else, you know, drum and bass or something.  It really helps to get different feels and that then gets a different emotion going etc and so you then have an albums worth of material where you feel a different emotion at each point of the track.

4TR: So are you all influenced by different things when it comes to making music?
J : Yeah definitely, like a good indication is when we’re in the car and put an I-Pod on and swap around.  Like I really love Radiohead, I love the Libertines and then people like Leonard Cohen and stuff, whereas Scott…
S : Well I like anything, anything with a good beat really.  [laughing] Now that’s a generic answer.  As long as you can feel it then I like it.

4TR: Describe the Tunics sound as you hear it.
J : If you were going to bracket us I would say indie/rock and roll, or maybe alternative rock and roll , but it seems to depend on what publication is doing the article.  But I think we play some really driven music, with a lot of energy and urgency in the music.
JB : And the lyrics are also thought provoking.  You can really look into what the songs are about, its not just mindless baffle, you know its stuff that has a purpose.

4TR: There is a prominent social aspect to the lyrics and you touch upon sensitive subjects that have been all over the news lately, for example knife crime.  Were you always intending to be a politically or socially motivated band?
J : Its hard, if you’re an ambitious song writer and want to write things that mean something, if not to anyone else but yourself, then its hard to ignore the things that go on outside your front door, and inside to be honest.  For example knife crime.  Scott and I are from Croydon and there’s so many things going on in that area its hard to ignore it, especially at our ages. I mean I’m 18, I wrote most of the songs on the album at 16 or 17 so you cant get away from it.  Although I wouldn’t necessarily say that as a song writer and a lyricist I’m striving to be socially aware and write about political issues, but I like to write about what I know and what I know coincidentally is socially and politically aware.

4TR: Joe, are you the primary song-writer in the band?
J : well when we write I write the lyrics, but the music is certainly a band aspect and I’m certainly not a band conductor or anything like that.  What I like to do most is to write the lyrics, but we generally write the music before the lyrics.  That helps to structure things because you know poetry, in inverted commas, is hard to apply to the music before the music is actually there.
JB : The influence is what the song is about.  You know you listen to the song and then you get what you feel about it and what comes in to your head, which is an evolving thing, especially with the band as it is now.  We are still finding our feet and the band is continually evolving.
S : And hopefully it will forever evolve now that we have injected a new lease of life into what we do.

4TR: Your debut album ‘Somewhere In Somebody’s Heart’ will be  physically released soon.  But you actually made the album downloadable for free in stages last year.  What was that all about?
J : What we did is we released the album regionally last year and we basically gave away 2 tracks for free every 2 weeks off the album and that became the limited edition release.
S : So a big thing for us was the one thing about buying a cd is having the artwork and the actual physical release.  So what we did was we released a blank cd with the art work, so then people could download and burn the tracks onto it themselves and so that also meant that people could if they wanted put them in a different order and play around with it a bit if they wanted to.  They could create their own album in a sense.

4TR: And how was that received by your fans?
J : It went down well actually.  I mean art-work has different relevances to different people, not everyone cares about it or about actually having a physical copy of an album, so that gave people the choice.   So there were loads of different versions of this limited edition going around and yeah it went down well.  But we also do have a physical release with the tracks in the order they actually are.

4TR: Did you not worry that that would dilute the actual release when it properly came out?
J : Well not so much, because naturally in a way we were kind of giving it away to our fans that were of that time and we were going to hopefully be a bigger band by the time we released the album [laughing].  So it was kind of a gift for the people who have been there from the beginning.  As we said we‘ve been together for 3 years so by that point it was a kind of a nice things to do for the people that have been behind us since then.  And not to say that people who jump onto the bandwagon now are not as important, but it was a kind of a thank you.

4TR: You are signed to Manta Ray for this album, who seem to have been involved with The Tunics from the very early days.  Why did you chose to work with them?
J : Well they seemed to understand music from our perspective, because one of the guys who started the label used to work for Sony BMG and he did well there, but it was kind of too impersonal for him.  So the reason they started up Manta Ray was to have the kind of ethos of a major, by being able to really release things and not be small in that respect, but not to have too many bands signed to them at once.  We liked the fact that they only wanted 3 or 4 bands at once until they were able to build them up and not just drop us after like a month if it didn’t work out.
S : And obviously they can focus a lot of time on us.  One of the things we have with Manta Ray which is brilliant is you can phone them up pretty much anytime to ask them a question and they know it, and they are happy to talk to you.
JB : They are like your best friend, not your boss.
J : And they are young and they understand music and not just driven by business.  They don’t just want to release the next indie big thing, they want to really create something brilliant and work with you until your 10th album.  It’s not a quick fix solution for them, which sounds like a cliché but its genuine you know.

4TR: The album was recorded last year, did you enjoy the whole process?
S : It was amazing, and so much fun.  And it really sort of inspired us afterwards as well because in the time that followed recording, was a mammoth songwriting time for us, and within 2 weeks we had written another 10 songs.

4TR: Who produced the album and did they influence the album in different ways to what you expected?
J : Absolutely, we worked with a guy called James Lewis and he has done lots of other bands like The Wombats and from a production point of view the guy is genuinely a genius.  There were ideas where he’d sheepishly kind of suggest ideas which we would try and suddenly we would hear it and go wow that guy is so cool.  So being in the studio with somebody who understands music again in the same way we do and just being in the studio environment itself, kind of inspired us to create what we are playing now, so we are a different band from the one that went in to start with.

4TR: And is it everything you hoped it would be?
J : I love it yeah, but I mean I think it can get better, I genuinely wouldn’t regard it as the best thing we could ever do, but it’s a very good record.

4TR: How well was debut single, ‘The Cost of Living’, picked up by the media?
J : Really well, yeah in terms of tv, E4 and NME TV picked the video up which was really encouraging actually.  For one thing its awesome to see you own music vided on TV and it seemed to be liked by people.  And then the reviews were generally good and if they weren’t they were about me being an idiot and stuff [laughing], but whatever, we were really happy so hopefully that will steamroll into the new stuff.

4TR: And since the album was finished before the drummer change, will you be re-recording any of the tracks?
J : No we wont be rerecording anything but we are going in to record some new demos imminently, so there will be some new tracks soon and actually we are already writing together and have a new song that we have written in the past week.
JB : [laughing] It’s bad ass
J : Yeah its officially bad ass, so the band certainly didn’t stall when we lost our drummer beforehand, if anything we are moving quicker now.

4TR: And finally can we expect to see you in any festival line-ups this summer?
J : There’s nothing penciled in yet, but if your listening we would absolutely love to play some, so get in touch.

Interview: Francesca Strange

Images: Gareth Jackson : Jackson Foto © www.jacksonfoto.com

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