Words with: Blofeld

Blofeld are more of a ‘show’ than ‘tell’ band. Before their Liverpool Barfly gig, they managed to stay still for long enough to talk about flashers, killer riffs and maybe even penning the next Gardener’s World theme tune.

I saw you play in Manchester a few weeks ago and was blown away. The people who haven’t seen you yet, what are they letting themselves in for?

AS: That’s the hard question..you know, hopefully something they haven’t seen before but at the same time something they feel comfortable watching.

AB: Not too comfortable!

AS: I don’t mean like armchair watching..I always want the gig to feel bigger than the venue.

Matt Ingram (Drums): Ideally, we want to get people moving like they’ve got worms.

AS: Er, yes I’ve always thought that too. Well we don’t want people to come to a Blofeld show and have a passive experience we want them to be moved in some way. If there’s three bands on a night, we like to stand out but not be so completely off the wall that people can’t get caught up in it. It’s like a pact between the audience, you give them X, they give you X and you get. I was going to say Y but…

AB: It doesn’t make any sense!

So is it right that you played a few gigs at school together?

AS: Well, some of us. Matt is a more recent addition on the drums. Me and Ali probably first played together when we were fifteen.

AB: Yeah, he (Adam) played the drums and I played bass..only because I wasn’t good enough to play guitar. I always wanted to play guitar.

AS: It was all just a fun thing to do..to get the girls really. I mean the amount of gigs we do in a week now is more than a year at school. Then me and Ali met at the same University (Manchester) and there was the opportunity to enter band competitions.

The line-up as you are now had it’s first gig this summer in front of 10,000 people. That’s quite special...

AS: Yes, it was pretty cool. You know it was probably one of the hottest days and people were sitting down. We went on at 9 o’clock and the sun was going down and people were sunburnt in only the way English people can be.

MI: For me it was really weird cause we’d had like a week’s worth of rehearsals and suddenly, first gig! But it was cool..I think what we thought lacked in ‘tightness’ was made up for in the energy.

AS: It was the biggest stage we’d played on. Although there wasn’t 10,000 people jumping up and down waving lighters in the air, they were just going crazy at the front.  AND! (exited tone) this girl came up who was topless..two large ‘blofelds’. James got a brilliant photo, totally spontaneous.

James Durrant (Bass): That was the mark of the gig. I had the whole summer catalogued in photos.

So this is the fourth tour you’ve been on, have things been getting progressively better?

AS: We’ve had some great gigs, probably the best one we’ve played. Northampton Roadmnender, it seemed to be the focal point of all music. It was packed, must have been four to five hundred people there, all from twelve to seventeen and they were really into it.

AB: Yes we got moshers…these little kids were like beating the shit out of each other. The rockier the songs, the more violent they’d get and I was in the middle of my solo when I realised I had the power to kill people!

AS: The gigs we play away from home are always interesting there are so many different people. But last night, Jesus Christ, we played in Leeds and it was just dead..A few people came along to see us but everyone else was just like statues..

AB: Thing is, the statues come along at the end of the gig and they’re like “Man! That was the best gig of my life..I shat my pants!”

AS: But that last Liverpool gig we did was great, really busy, proper beard stroking crowd.

How does the song writing process work for Blofeld?

AS: Well initially a few of us get an idea and it filters through to the band. Basically we all have a different role. Yes I had an idea to write about daffodils..I have an omnibus about bulbs and how they come up in summer.

JD: We could kind of choreograph a dance to go with that.

AS: Well it’s going on tour really, cause you just sit in your van all day. But as a band, I don’t think we write from a particularly lyrical point of view. It’s not political. I guess we just jam and occasionally like tap into something that’s really cool. Sometimes it’s a riff that comes up which dictates the mood, sometimes it’s a particular line.

Where do you draw your influences from then?

AS: A lot of places. Generally speaking, the normal ones: Zepplin, Stones, a lot of British rock from around the mid sixties, early seventies. People keep saying we sound like bands we’ve never heard of. But the performance has a certain vibe about it and so I guess we started playing the sort of music that was the best vehicle for that. You can’t exactly rock-out to jazz.

AB: Yeah, that was kind of why we went towards rock cause it’s the most fun.

AS: It’s the physical aspect, the way you connect with the audience. You don’t tend to get the archetypal rock gig much anymore, with the band giving it everything and the crown going wild, well not with pop music anyway.

AB: I don’t thing we separate the performance from the music. You can’t tell where one ends and the other begins..quite confusing.

And finally, you have a single out now, do you not?

AS: Yep, it came out last Monday. It’s a double A-side called, side A ‘I Wanna Be Human’ and side AA ‘Little Sister’. It’s out pretty much everywhere that we’ve played on the tour, usually in independent record stores..

AB: ..and on the net.

AS: Aaand, if anyone’s interested it’s got two front covers as it’s a double A-side so whichever way you have it around, cool artwork.