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 Modesty doesn’t seem to be a word used
often by indie-rockers Urban Circus. Chatting to The LINC on an early
Saturday morning, the band forgo the apparent after-effects of a hard
Friday night of rock ‘n’ roll to enthuse about how and why their doing
so well for themselves lately.
Yet they are far from arrogant. With their catchy, rip-roaring rock ‘n’
roll tunes causing something of a storm on the North West scene and
leading them to be voted ‘Unsigned Band of the Month’ by BBC Liverpool,
you get the feeling that the band are quite justified in their claims
and have every right to be proud of their ongoing success.
Here, Richard Washington (vocals) James Cannon (lead guitar) Matt
Whittaker (rhythm guitar) Neil Smith (bass) Chris Appleton (drums) tell
us exactly what’s been going on with Urban Circus.
First things first, how’s things with Urban Circus?
RICHARD: Yeah they’re going alright, we’ve been gigging a lot this year
and it’s all going well.
You seem to be doing quite well for yourselves right now, how hard is it
to keep everything moving in the right direction?
RICHARD: It can be a lot of a bit intense with practice and gigs and
everything.
NEIL: It’s a big commitment but it’s worth the sacrifice isn’t it?
JAMES: Oh yeah, definitely, it’s all working for us.
Do you all work jobs as well as doing the band?
CHRIS: Yeah yeah. That’s the hardest part really, you have to make a
living as well. I mean, a lot of bands can make a decent living by just
playing covers, but that’s not for us. We want to play our own stuff,
that’s what it’s all about.
You did start off playing covers though, didn’t you?
MATT: We did at first, we had a lot of covers that made up the bulk of
our set, but we started writing our own stuff more or less straight
away. So the early gigs had maybe two or three of our own songs and we
fleshed it out with covers.
Then as things went on we’d thin out the covers and put in more of our
own stuff in.
RICHARD: [How many covers the band does] depends where you’re playing
really. Pubs and bar gigs you’ll probably throw in a few more covers,
whereas if you’re in a proper music venue you’ll hardly play any.
JAMES: The first time we did a set with just our own material was at the
Academy in Manchester.
NEIL: We just took it all from there didn’t we? We did Academy 3 and
then just went on to bigger and better places.
You play Manchester and Liverpool more often than you do local venues.
How necessary is it for bands to get out of the local area and playing
in the big cities?
CHRIS: You have to really.
RICHARD: I think it’s a bit of a shame that you do have to keep trekking
up to Manchester and that, but apart from Club Nirvana in Wigan and WA1
Bar in Warrington there aren’t that many great places to play locally.
Don’t me wrong, I think there’s a lot going on ‘round here, but there’s
a lot more diversity and a lot more places to play in the cities than
there are in small towns like Wigan.
There are places to play round in Wigan, but it’s just that, especially
in places like Manchester, there’s a lot more people around into music
and it’s a lot easier to pick up a following, which is obviously what
we’re trying to do.
JAMES: Yeah, so we did Manchester and Liverpool and then to Leeds, down
to Worcester…
CHRIS: We are massive in Worcester!
How did that come about then?
CHRIS: We went down there for a battle of the bands at the university.
They put us on, but they said ‘to be honest, you’re not gonna get
through to the final because it’s really a local thing for local bands
who’ve got their fans down.’
So we went down anyway and played and we ended up winning the
semi-final. Then we went back down for the final and they said the same
thing again, ‘local bands with their own crowd, you won’t win.’ We ended
up winning that too and going back down to play other gigs down there as
well.
Let’s talk about influences shall we?
RICHARD: For me it’s all the indie stuff.
CHRIS: Everyone has different influences really, but they all tend to
overlap. For me it’s stuff like Led Zeppelin, any kind of dirty, filthy
old blues.
JAMES: I’m more into classic rock, AC/DC and things like that as well as
some of the classic guitar players like Satriani and Steve Vai and all
them.
MATT: Whenever we start writing a song and then go away to think about
it individually, we’ll automatically start thinking about it with our
own influences in mind. But then when we bring it back to the band,
those influences slowly get diluted until the ideas we’ve had sound more
like Urban Circus.
And what does Urban Circus sound like?
NEIL: It’s just good rock ‘n’ roll music.
RICHARD: It’s like, indie-rock.
CHRIS: Some of it’s like the Rolling Stones, some of it’s more like the
Stone Roses.
MATT: We make really catchy, sing-a-long music somewhere between rock
and pop.
RICHARD, as the chief lyricist, what are your songs about?
RICHARD: It’s weird; sometimes they’ll just be completely
tongue-in-cheek, sometimes they’ll be really serious. They’re about all
sorts of things, how I’m feeling or what I’m thinking, or just how
annoying it is that none of the cash machines work in Golborne!
I’m murder for writing lyrics on the bus. Writing stuff in the ‘draft
messages’ bit of my phone and saving them. Then sometimes I’ll go back
to them and just think ‘What the hell is that about? It doesn’t make any
sense!” so they either get kept or chucked.
Sometimes though I look at the stuff I’ve written and it’s difficult to
tell if they’ll work as a song, if it doesn’t fit to music then its
poetry.
What’s your view on the current state of music?
RICHARD: There are a few good bands out but a lot of it sounds quite the
same.
CHRIS: You’ve heard of Maximo Park? They’re good, I really like that new
album.
JAMES: Locally, I don’t ever remember there being this many bands
around. Everyone you meet is in a band.
CHRIS: We have played with some c*** bands though! I mean, we’ve played
bad ourselves, fair enough, but we’ve played gigs with some s*** bands
who just didn’t have any strong songs. I think that’s our biggest point,
we’ve got some really good songs and I really think that we could rival
any band out there.
JAMES: There are some really good local bands too, they’re not all bad!
Where do Urban Circus fit into the musical landscape?
CHRIS: I don’t think we do.
NEIL: We’re the outcasts…
RICHARD: It depends where we are, like in Warrington there’s us and a
couple of other bands who are well-known in the area just like other
bands are well known in Wigan or wherever.
Any major disasters so far?
MATT: Not really, a few small problems but nothing like Spinal Tap or
anything.
CHRIS: Our only problem is drinking, but that’s our own fault!
MATT: CHRIS, that’s just your problem!
JAMES: What tends to happen is we’ll get to the venue for six to sound
check and all that, then we get told we’re headlining at one in the
morning, so for the next six hours we’re just sat around waiting to go
on and all there is to do is drink.
CHRIS: And then you get on stage and you’re tryin’ to get everything
right whilst half drunk.
What’s been the highlight so far?
NEIL: I would say the Academy gig.
MATT: Yeah me too.
RICHARD: Definitely the Academy.
CHRIS: The thing with that is that we’ve seen so many bands playing at
the Academy; it was just really cool to be up there ourselves.
JAMES: there was the other gig we did in Manchester. We got a call at
the last minute to come up and play, so we did, but we didn’t bring
anyone with us. It was just short notice so we came on our own which was
a bit daunting. By the end though the whole place was bouncing.
RICHARD: That was a good feeling.
JAMES: It was, it was the first time, I think, that we realised that our
music can be enjoyed by other people, not just our mates and family.
You’ve attracted quite a following, how do you keep fans interested in
you and continue to attract new ones?
NEIL: Websites mainly
RICHARD: Yeah, we’ve just tried to get on as many websites as possible,
so that if you search for ‘Urban Circus’, you’ll find us easy and can
listen to our tunes, find out about gigs and everything.
JAMES: Through doing that we ended up getting onto the BBC Liverpool
website and being their unsigned band of the month.
RICHARD: And that exposure then led to a guy from a record label in New
York finding out about us.
RICHARD: The web’s such a good thing for bands; you don’t have to have a
label or anything to pick up new fans and that these days.
CHRIS: I worry though about whether it’s becoming cool to be an unsigned
band now, like it’s cooler to be unsigned than to have a label and all
that.
JAMES: There’s definitely a lot more of people putting out their own
albums, even when bands are getting deals these days, they’ve normally
got the album recorded before they get the deal.
Is getting a deal the main ambition for this band?
All: Yeah, definitely.
JAMES: Just to do this fulltime would be enough for me.
CHRIS: Yeah exactly. I’m not asking for millions or anything, just
enough so that I can quit my job and concentrate on the band. It’d be so
much better to have the time to sit in the studio working with different
sounds and making the music better.
What’s in store for the immediate future?
MATT: We’ve got a few gigs lined up, a HMV showcase and the St. Helens
show to do.
NEIL: After we’ve done those we’re just gonna be writing and coming up
with new material. We like our songs, but you can’t keep playing it
forever.
CHRIS: We owe it to the people who come watching us to write new songs.
They’ll come to see us and they’re singing along and loving it, but if
we’re playing the same stuff over and over again it’s gonna get boring,
so we owe it to them to come up with some new stuff!
JAMES: It’s just onwards and upwards from here isn’t it? Just keep
getting bigger and better.
Recommended Link:
www.myspace.com/urbancircus
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