Interview with... Brontide

A Carefully Planned festival is the latest inner city festival to pop-up on the music calendar, staged at various venues across Manchester (including Kraak and The Castle) and with a very impressive line-up that included Tall Ships) it was not one to be missed. I caught up with guitarist Tim from the instrumental rock band Brontide, before their Saturday headline slot at the Soup Kitchen (which by the way was a remarkably brilliant set, it was packed full off all the face melting rifts you could ever wish for.) To talk about tummy tickling, touring America and how the recording of their second album is going.

Just wanted to get a general history about the band, so please could you tell us a bit about yourselves?

Me and Will (the drummer) have known each other since we were very young, and we’ve been in bands together over the years, and we basically started Brontide from just jamming out ideas with just the two of us. We realised at this point that we were going to need a bass player to really fill it out and finish it off, and Will spent some time down at uni and met Nathan, so he came to mine and seemed up for it, so we literally went down with a few song ideas and started jamming with him and it went really well. So we took it from there and started playing shows and its basically just progressed ever since.

A Carefully Planned Festival is quite different from your usual festival as it’s an inner city festival, are you a fan of inner city festivals or are you more of a traditionalist?

I think they both have their pros and cons, I really like the buzz you get from an inner city one because so many venues are putting stuff on, and your crawling round to each one, and they’ve always got a nice eclectic line up. And I think its best especially when certain venues have a niche to their style of music, like a stage might do at a festival.

Your debut album ‘Sans Souci’ came out last year, and I’ve been hearing through the grapevine that you’ve started working on a follow up?

Yeah we’re getting there, we’ve started playing a few new songs live and we’ve probably got three or four more that we’re working on at the moment. So it’s steady progress, but we’re not really in any hurry with it, but it’s our closest priority really. We’re trying to lay off playing live and get this ready,it’s just finding the time to do it. It’s getting there now, its nice just to have a few songs ready and start to picture how its going to lay out, and then you can start to say we might need a song there and then that can flow e.t.c. Because I love albums where its an album and it’s a whole thing, so its definitely when you start seeing that bigger picture it becomes more easier, I think initially the first hurdle is almost getting started and be like ‘right we’ve got to start a new record’, but now the balls rolling definitely, its exciting.

How does it differ in style from your first album?

I know it sounds clichéd, but what we’re doing is maturing to our own sound a bit more. With the last record we tried to experiment a lot with blending melodic sections with heavy sections, and I think we’re going to add another kind of axis to it with dark parts and almost quite ‘poppy’ parts as well, we just want to pull something together that is just more honed basically. We’re finding our feet more and more when we write and we’re also pushing things where the set is concerned and the sounds, like we’re looking into more electronic instruments as well and just pushing what we can do as a three-piece whilst keeping it all live. Playing everything live but just using drum-pads and samplers to really fill out what we do live and to what we do on the next record.

When I saw you at Y not Festival you said that you’d just returned from a US tour, how did that go?

It was awesome. We basically just did a few shows on the east coast, so we did a couple in New York and one in Philly. It was just a bit of an experiment really, we saved up some pennies and we had some friends out there to help us out and get a couple of gigs, so we literally just went to get the lay of the land with it. It went really really well, the response was great, and I think we’ve always known that we could potentially do quite well in America and our niche over there is quite receptive to our style of music. We got out everything we could from that trip and it was really exciting, so fingers crossed we’ll get to go back next year, maybe the west coast this time round.

How did the American audience compare to British ones?

They were great. I’d say they were a bit more receptive, I think Americans (without any offence to U.K. audiences because we love them) are just a little more excitable about a new thing and a little less timid at hearing new music. So the first show we played every band got a great reception and the whole crowd was so up for it, and that’s lovely to play to because you completely feed off that when your playing live.

I was just wondering what the song writing process was like with an instrumental band, is it more challenging as you don’t really have the standard structure of Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus?

To get a song going you have to get together a lot of different ideas and its kind of piecing it together, because you know its not going to be like ‘we need a verse and a chorus, we’ll put that together’. You know often I’ll just have a riff and some chords, and then you can start thinking I can fit that with that, and I think with this new record we’ve got more chance to actually play together and discuss ideas more as a group. So it could be a case of having a nice loop or melody and putting stuff around that, it works in a lot of different ways and the challenge to it always is, ‘okay so we haven’t got a vocal, so how can we supplement that?’ so its always keeping the ideas moving on and looking at where we can add melodies into it. Musically, whether it could be on electronic instruments or whether it be in the chord progression, so you have to think about it a bit more but that’s what we like about it.

I’m guessing it’s going to be quite an electric mix, so I was wondering what the bands main musical influences were?

Yeah electric is definitely the right term, I know it sounds funny but I think recently we’ve been listening to music we’ve started listening to music that doesn’t necessarily sound like our band. I think we’ve all got roots in quite heavy and aggressive music whereas over the last few years we’ve all started listening to much more electronic stuff and anything that’s a bit more interesting. We listen to quite a lot of hip-hop, and then I still like various hardcore bands so it’s a big pool to choose from but I think it’s nice that way. Brontide is everything we like about music and trying to suck it into this one band.

And finally I thought we’d just end on a quick game. I’m just going to read out some of the comments that have been left on your Youtube videos and I just want to hear what your reactions are to them, (and remember they’re your actually fans so you should be nice)

B2manatees says;
“So, 8 tracks from these beasts for 6 bucks? I’d Pay thrice that. Music of this calibre excites my sense greatly!”

(Giggles) I like that comment, as long as it excites his senses. I’m not sure which one, but as long as one of the six senses is ticked that’s fine.

Xthisisdisaster says;
“The bass is tickling my tummy”

He’s a very tickly bass player.

Whaleman888 says;
“Sorry, why is Matt Smith (Doctor Who) playing the drums? ;)”

(Drummer will steps in) he’s good looking that’s alright, maybe it’s the magical drumming.

My thanks go to Joe Woods for interviewing Brontide!

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