Stereoboard Speak To The Answer About Extensive Touring And Their Rock N Roll Revival (Interview)
Friday, 28 October 2011
Written by Heather McDaid
The Answer are one of the finer finds in the realm of rock ‘n’ roll. Proving that the genre, contrary to the opinions of certain press outlets, is far from dead, the Irish foursome are in the midst of a lengthy club UK tour following the release of their third and highly acclaimed record ‘Revival’. In the midst of this tour, and on a journey to find food for the evening, the band’s bassist Micky Waters took a little time to talk about everything from their extensive touring with the mighty AC/DC to proving to the critics that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t dead as they hit the top 40 with their latest offering.
Currently in the midst of an extensive club tour, the band have been close to, if not, selling out all venues on the run. “It’s been great, actually. We’ve just been going all over, now we’re somewhere in South Wales,” begins Micky. “We’re doing some small club shows and they’re all about 400-500 capacity shows. Thankfully, they’ve all near enough sold out now as well. It’s a very intimate tour for us to be doing; we haven’t done a tour like this for some time. It’s great to be back, sort of to our grass roots where you can look your audience in the eye. It’s just very relaxed on and off stage. It’s a bit of a party every night! We’re really enjoying ourselves right now, so.”
Having played to crowds of all sizes on all kinds of tours, do the band enjoy being able to go back to basics with their headline shows? “Yes, we do; we really do,” answers Micky. “We didn’t get to do enough of this on our second album because of the AC/DC tour and as brilliant as that was, we never really got to do the club circuit again and build it up through playing our gigs. We’re really happy to get to do these types of shows this time around and we’re loving it, actually! They’re all great audiences and there seems to be a lot of young people coming to our shows, which is great. There’s a great energy at every show. It’s a very different thing when you play in front of ten or fifteen thousand, or whatever it was, with AC/DC compared to 500 people in a really sweaty night club, you know? But it is a lot of fun.”
“[Seeing The Answer live] is definitely a party,” he laughs. “You’ll definitely want to be having a couple of beers and be prepared to get a bit sweaty. It’s a pretty high energy rock ‘n’ roll show. That’s definitely how I would describe it!”
That much is evident on their DVD ‘412 days of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, which followed the band on their epic journey on the road with the mammoth AC/DC. “You know we had days and days of footage after that tour. There were cameras rolling all the time,” he begins. “Once we’d found out we’d been given that slot one of the first things I did was go out and buy a camcorder, actually. It was just rolling constantly. To get that down to an hour and ten minutes wasn’t easy! We’ve probably missed all the best bits! It was the best time of our lives, to be honest; it was a great time to be able to watch back.”
Turning from their latest DVD release to their latest musical offering – ‘Revival’ – how did the band approach the recording of this release? “Well, this time around it was very different from the first to forms because we came off of that AC/DC tour and our own headline tour, which had been our biggest headline tour of the UK at the time...” begins Micky. “We were doing all the bigger Academy gigs and selling out two and a half thousand capacity venues; it was a real big deal for us. There was all this positive energy within the band and we just started writing straight away.”
“Instead of this time being around two or three months of jotting down a few riffs, we spent more time properly writing songs,” he elaborates, being cut off briefly by the loud rabble he’s walking through. “I’m walking through a bar here... sorry about the noise! We basically spent a lot more time writing songs this time around and put a lot more effort into it overall. The producer who was brought on board was someone who we hand-picked, that we knew was a really high-energy guy and a really positive person. He really brought something else to the table; he made us dream a bit bigger and think a bit bigger about everything. His influence definitely wore off on us over the recording process. He made us focus on production; there’s a lot more production values rather than just plugging in and recording in the studio, we actually did it all really, really properly this time. I think you can hear that difference in the recordings as well.”
“We definitely wanted to mature our sound a little bit,” adds Micky, referring to the intentions held going into this record. “We wanted to write better songs and I think after touring with the DC boys, we picked up that they have 25 or so songs in their set and every single one of them is a three and a half minute great rock song. Watching them work their magic every night gave us a lot of inspiration to be less ‘jammy’ and focus more on our song writing as well. So, basically we wanted to achieve better songs with this record and, I guess, bring more production values to it. We wanted to try different things; there’s piano and stuff like this on there, so there’s a lot of different things going on with this album that we’d never tried before.”
“We spent more time on this one and had a lot of pre-production on it where we worked out what we wanted to do,” he continues. “When we got there, we ended up on very alien terrain for four boys from Northern Ireland, in the middle of the desert outside El Paso – right on the Mexican border. It was a very different place for us to go and we were kind of cocooned in this fantastic studio called Sonic Ranch. That almost took over, being that wild west sort of theme; well, maybe not took over but it brought something new to the atmosphere. For us, we like to get away somewhere different that takes our mind off of the day to day stuff. We like to get lost for a couple of months so we can get focussed on what we’re doing. I think that definitely helped as well.”
With the album being out a few weeks at this point, it’s been long enough for the band to gauge the reaction. “It actually went in the top 20 in the mid-weeks and it ended up somewhere in the UK top 40 in the first week,” explains Micky. “You know, we’re very happy with that because we know we have to work from the ground up again and the reaction that we’re getting from our fans is that it’s our best record yet. That’s good because our fans are very fussy and are very honest with us; all the rock journalists have been digging it and saying it’s our best record yet and think it’s a triumph for us. I mean, it’s very great that they’re saying that but we still have to go out there and work our asses off and tour the hell out of it, force it down people’s throats! That’s pretty much what we have to do. We are very happy with the reaction to it. We’re playing a lot of the new songs live and they’re going down better than most of our old stuff.”
While fans an journalists are heavily supporting the band and their latest work, so too are their idols. With the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and AC/DC’s Brian Johnson just two of the names said to be fans of the band, the foursome don’t let themselves get carried away. “It’s great having your idols turning out as fans, it really is. It really makes you feel like you’re doing something right. At the end of it all, you’ve still got to establish yourself and I think our time of supporting bands is over,” explains Micky. “We don’t mind playing with a band now, but we’re not going to go out and play a whole year with a band gain, I don’t think. We want to go out there and do our own thing now. It feels time to grow up and do our own thing now as a band. That’s our plan just to go out there and keep playing, play as much as we can and see where it takes us, I guess! There’s definitely enough people who seems to like us out there for us to keep doing it. We’re just getting tour-fit now, we’re all starting to gel onstage again and things are looking good.”
With their feet firmly on the ground, the band’s newest record ‘Revival’ – as previously stated – hit the top 40 chart in the UK. While many publications and news outlets regularly tell us that rock ‘n’ roll is dying, the band are proud to be succeeding, even in direct challenge to the mainstream. “I think it’s a great achievement because when you look at the charts nowadays there’s nothing really like us, there’s not a whole lot of rock there,” he begins. “I know there’s a lot of bands like You Me At Six in there and there’s Joe Bonamassa, who’s a blues player but it’s all a bit middle of the road stuff. There’s no real hard rock ‘n’ roll bands in there, but we went out on that AC/DC tour and in total we performed in front of around three million people and that was the highest grossing tour until 2010, making more money than any other tour in the world. So, those fans are out there – it’s just trying to get to them, that’s the tricky part. The mainstream doesn’t really help bands like us do that, so we have to do it from ground level all the way up.”
“I think with the AC/DC tour, playing in America and touring coast to coast and getting to have that experience is just something,” begins Micky, touching on some of the greatest moments he’s seen with the band. “It’s a very special experience jumping on a tour bus and spending four or five months cruising around America, playing a gig every night. It’s just the stuff dreams are made of; I mean, when you’re a kid that’s exactly what you want to do. To be able to say I’ve done that is amazing, it was definitely fun. If I was to pinpoint a particular highlight, I would say it was our 2nd or 3rd gig in New York, which was two nights at Madison Square Gardens. That was pretty special considering a day off of that we would play a night club to around 200 people. So that was amazing.”
As for The Answer’s future, growth is where their minds are securely focussed right now. “For the next year, anyway, we’re just going to grow our live audience; hopefully we can build it up to playing the Academy’s again and selling those out,” he explains. “That’s our aim right now, for sure. And we’d like to do the same in Europe. We’d also like to catch up and pick up on some of the work we did in America. I mean, we played in American for 8 months over 2008/2009 and we played to a lot of people, so we want to go back over there and catch up on that, try to really expand and tour more on the record. Maybe then we’ll get another album out, keep growing... We just want to keep growing!”
“Yeah, well bring on Glasgow! Bring on King Tuts!” he continues, talking about the upcoming tour and watch to watch out for. “It’s been six years since we last played there and from what I remember, it’s was amazing. Bring it on! For those of you who aren’t coming to see us, watch out on our Facebook ‘theanswerrock’ and there’ll be another tour for you guys coming up in early 2012!”
With so much quality surrounding the band, what – pure and simple – are The Answer all about? “We’re just a great rock and roll band, you know; just some authentic rock ‘n’ roll that you will shake your head to, will bang your head to. You can let loose and have a bit of a party; I think our new album is definitely a party record. It’s a lot of fun, that record; I think it’ll leave you with a smile on your face by the end of it, that’s for sure.”
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“We spent more time on this one and had a lot of pre-production on it where we worked out what we wanted to do,” he continues. “When we got there, we ended up on very alien terrain for four boys from Northern Ireland, in the middle of the desert outside El Paso – right on the Mexican border. It was a very different place for us to go and we were kind of cocooned in this fantastic studio called Sonic Ranch. That almost took over, being that wild west sort of theme; well, maybe not took over but it brought something new to the atmosphere. For us, we like to get away somewhere different that takes our mind off of the day to day stuff. We like to get lost for a couple of months so we can get focussed on what we’re doing. I think that definitely helped as well.” 
