Stereoboard Talks To Deaf Havana At This Year's Slam Dunk Festival (Interview)
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Written by Matthew Williamson
Hi! How are you?
Chris Pennells [Guitar]: We’re all good, yeah. We’re just uhh… Tom Ogden [Drums]: Having too many beers. CP: Well, we’re alright so far. James’ll probably end up in a… TO: The atmosphere at Slam Dunk is unreal.
How is Slam Dunk going for you guys?
TO: Amazing CP: Yeah, really good. We had a really good day yesterday, the set was incredible TO: Great crowd yesterday. CP: Saw some really great bands as well. Starting Line were incredible yesterday TO: It’s a great festival, for the smaller bands, right up to the bigger bands. It’s always busy and you can see whichever band you wanna watch, it’s great. It’s my favourite festival by far. CP: Yeah, definitely
You’re not on until later tonight, but do you think South will be as good as North?
CP: To be honest I don’t think it ever will be. I think North, because it’s always been traditionally in the North, wins every time. Regardless of what happens at either. It’s just the flagship. TO: North’s the original isn’t it? I don’t know. The stage we’re playing today is better than the one yesterday. CP: Yeah. Bigger too. TO: I dunno. Maybe, we’ll see.
You’ve moved up from the Kerrang! Introducing Stage that you played last year to the Honour For Glory Stage, which you’ve said is outside, it’s quite big. Do you think that shows how much work you’ve put in over the last year?
TO: I like to think so, yeah. We’ve put so much effort in. We’ve not released any new material until about a week ago but we’ve been working really hard behind the scenes and everything’s starting to come out now.
You released a new single earlier in the month, how’s the feedback for it?
CP: It’s not a single, to make that very clear. TO: No, we just put a video online because we’ve taken almost two years to write this record and we wanted to give something to the kids who want to hear something ‘cause it’s been so long. In terms of feedback it’s been good CP: Yeah, really good. TO: We’ve had almost 50,000 views on it in about a week, so it’s nice.
This will be your first album without your additional screaming vocalist. Do you think in many ways this makes it another debut or do you think it’s just a continuation?
TO: Yeah, I think it’s another debut album CP: I think you just need to look at it as a different band. TO: Obviously we’re still the same band, there’s still the main elements of Deaf Havana, apart from the screams, but for me we’ve literally reinvented ourselves. We’ve looked at everything we didn’t like about our band and changed it. CP: Yeah, I think we now actually enjoy playing music TO: Yeah, and we’re proud of these new songs. We’re really happy with the album
Is Deaf Havana going to go in a new direction from here then?
CP: I think it has been for about the last year. We’ve been playing new stuff since last March, even when we were on the Emery tour in March 2010 we were playing a lot of new stuff then.
Speaking of tours you have your own tour coming up in June/July time.
CP: Yeah, we’re doing a lot of the smaller towns where kids don’t always get a chance to see us. TO: We’re going to places we don’t normally go like, places we played back in the day. Give something back before our album comes out, and then when the album comes out we’ll do a proper tour. CP: We’re bringing some of our mates, in Not Advised and First out with us. It should be good fun.
Is this tour the last time we’ll see you playing such small venues? The Peel in Kingston etc.
CP: I wouldn’t say that TO: We like playing small venues CP: Yeah, we love playing small venues. TO: Even if we got big I’d still like to go and do an underplay tour once in a while and play really small venues. CP: At the end of the day we’ve played venues this size for the past 6 years of being a band. We haven’t just popped up on the scene all of a sudden and play academy 1 straight away, like so many bands are at the moment. Southampton Joiners is a great venue, Kingston Peel is a really good venue, we haven’t played that in 18 months. We have a really good time in there. TO: I’ll always want to play small venues just because the atmosphere for gigs, it’s really sweaty, it’s a mess. Then bigger venues as well… Play both.
So do you think that any point within the next couple of years you’ll take a step up to a bigger venue?
TO: At the end of the year we’re doing a big one CP: Yeah. We did our last tour in November where we played London Garage and Manchester Club Academy which were pretty much sold out. We had, I think, one show that didn’t sell out in Birmingham. Then we’re basically going to do some more support tours then come back and do a headline tour in bigger venues
So, is the album completely finished now?
TO: No, we’re going back in the studio tomorrow, for a week, to finish it off. We’ve got two tracks we need to do.
Have you got a time you expect it to be out?
TO: Nothing concrete yet. End of the year… Not end of the year, September kind of time. We’ll see, might come before, might come after. We really want it to be perfect, so we’ve taken our time, which is why we’ve given something out already. We just want to go over everything and make it perfect.
Well that’s all! Thanks very much for talking to us!
TO: Thanks man CP: Thanks.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
You’ve moved up from the Kerrang! Introducing Stage that you played last year to the Honour For Glory Stage, which you’ve said is outside, it’s quite big. Do you think that shows how much work you’ve put in over the last year?
