Recently I had an interview with Yorkshire rock group, The Humour. They'll be playing at the Download Festival this weekend, and I spoke with them before they went on stage at The Cockpit in Leeds, to play their album release party gig.
The band celebrate the release of their debut album, 'Your Gonna Pay', which is due for release later this month.
Tonight’s about releasing the new album, are you happy with how it’s turned out?
Yeah it’s been a long time coming, we started writing it a year ago. We’ve had an up and down year so to get to this point where it’s been released is a relief.
So what are your expectations from the album?
Well so far we’ve got a press agent who’s done a lot for us, we’ve been put on Kerrang Radio and the XFM playlist and Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden has been playing us. So were hoping to move to the next level. We're still part of the underground scene now, so we wanna get to the level where we are touring and in a lot of magazines and stuff regularly and just ditch our jobs. That’s the main thing we just wanna do what we love.
So the main objective now is to go professional?
Yeah exactly. We’ve still managed to fit some cool things in, we’ve done Leeds and Reading Fest which was amazing. We’ve done our own little tours and supported some of our heroes, so hopefully now we'll be able to do even more.
You just mentioned playing with your heroes. So who are your heroes?
Muse, Rise Against, The Gallows, Fight Star, we did a gig with them and they were really nice guys. We thought Charlie White, a bit egotistical but he was the nicest guy though. We were really young, about 18 and they’d just started, we were dead excited it was the first time we'd played with a celebrity and during sound check we all got hard ons. We grew up listening to bands like them and it was that scene that inspired us to be in a band.
So did you find it daunting?
I don’t know, we’ve done some pretty damn daunting things in the past. The opening of the chaos stage, there were like 2000 people there and Blackout were following us and we didn’t think anyone would care about us but we went on and did 4 songs and everyone went absolutely mental for us and it was pretty scary but then again the more pressure that’s on us the better. If we get put on that pedestal and pushed to perform at that level its good and up to now, we’ve nailed it, so far! But next week at Download we're opening. I mean, that’s scary. There’s gonna be booking agents there and that’s the one thing we need, a booking agent with contacts to get us out there and maybe on tours for a month or so, supporting a band, which is something we can’t do at the moment without a booking agent.
Have you any supporting gigs at all planned?
Were trying to up the venues, we’ve played all over the UK, but really, really crap venues, but it’s trying to get to the next level, small academies and that, but it’s impossible, they don’t wanna use us. We're just another band of many. We need a booking agent who’s affiliated with quite a few acts in our genre.
So what would you class your genre?
Ooh it's hard. We're in the rock category but with pop sensibilities,
Would you say then that your sound is commercial and accessible?
Yeah, it is and that’s from a lot of our influences.
So is that purely a sound you like and have been influenced by or have you also done that, to appeal to more people and to try and become commercial?
Well you start out and you just wanna make really cool music and rock the fuck out but then you grow up and realise that if you do wanna sell records and do well then you’ve gotta play for your audience. And any band, no matter how big they are, who say they write their material just for the love of it are talking bullshit, you’ve still gotta take into consideration what people wanna hear. You can’t let it rule you, because that’s when bands write a shit second album. ‘Cos they think this is what the fans wanna hear, so we’ve gotta go slightly more commercial. What we do is basically pop songs, but it’s a rock band playing them and as much as we don’t like Green Day, they're a perfect example, they come out with some god awful cheesy songs, but my god they manage to make it so successful that they can also make the other songs that they wanna play. There’s a fine line between selling out and then also been completely inaccessible. We wanna play songs we enjoy but at the same time we wanna be as accessible to as many people as possible.
So purely from a sound point of view, who are your influences?
We're crap at answering this, Muse are a huge influence, they have basically the same setup as us and their sound is fucking huge and they sound massive live, so we try to replicate that size. James’s big influence is Def Leppard, how big they sound and how they wrote their material to be played in huge stadiums and that’s what we wanna do and then we have individual influences like Queen. Their stage presence and how they wrote pop songs with a guitar and that’s what we wanna do, write great pop songs that will be remembered for 20 years or more.
So who are the writers amongst you?
Matt(Guitar) writes 90 per cent of the music music and I (James-lead singer) writes all the lyrics and then we record it and get together and all work on it and remove the shit and decide on the good bits and then record it again, so we all do our bit.
So other than the Download Festival, have you got anything big lined up this year?
We're hoping maybe for a spot at Leeds and Reading and there may be a big tour but we're not allowed to talk about that yet.
Is that supporting somebody huge?
Yeah, but it’s not confirmed and we can’t talk about it yet, but we’ve no doubt we'll get on some pretty big tours before the end of summer. But we’ll know more in the next couple of weeks.
So are you looking forward to tonight?
Yeah, we haven’t played in ages, our last show was February and it gets us ready for download and it’s also exciting ‘cos were playing some new songs, that are even newer then the album.
Do you enjoy playing at the Cockpit?
We love the Cockpit, we have a good following, in 2008, we released an EP and then we were headlining here in the main room in front of about 500/600 people, and that was the year we played Leeds and Reading and we thought we were gonna get a booking agent and we got a bit ahead of ourselves really and we were really naive, but we realised that our songs weren’t good enough then, so last year we worked really hard on our material and people who follow us in Leeds, thought we weren’t doing anything, so we’ve lost a little momentum here but now we're gonna release the album and we're happy with the material we’ve got were hoping to build up our following here again.
The group obviously have their sights set high and rightly so, but a few knock backs and reality checks have kept them grounded and realistic. I’m sure they will go down a storm this year though; expect big things from this band.
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