Take The Leap Of Faith - Hadouken!

Something is up with music these days. Just the other week we were telling you about bands shunning release schedules and hype, and now we have a band in the fluro coloured guise of Hadouken! flinging conventional methodologies of music production out the window, by coming out with a release in the form of a USB stick. On top of that, they’ve been known to play virtual festivals and boast a mental moshing fan base gathered from cyberspace, who you really would not want to cross. Is everyone just trying to subvert the mainstream? Gigwise caught up with all five members of Hadouken! (James, Alice, Pilau, Chris and Nick) at Atlantic HQ to get the (non-RSS) feed on their digital revolution.

It’s been a good year for Hadouken!; their success self releasing has accumulated a cult following and some great press, which led to them being signed by Atlantic Records back in April – round about the last time we caught up with them. Their signing couldn’t have come at a better time, with three core members finishing university and hoping to converge their musical outpourings into a full time career without the distraction of overdue essays. Speaking to them today, Hadouken! are clearly happy with the label, who appear to be keeping the development of the band organic. Guitarist Pilau puts this down to Atlantic respecting the band’s needs by letting the band’s fan base grow naturally without the aid of mass advertising. James contributes this to them keeping it ‘indie.’

He explains: “They’ve kept the team really small. We only deal with about four or five people so it feels really indie. A lot of the labels talk the talk and can flash their cash but at the end of the day (we chose Atlantic) because when we were doing gigs we had the team coming down and saying ‘I just want to see your gig because I’m into you as a band’ and they seemed the most passionate.” Pilau adds, “You can tell so quickly who understands what you’re doing and what you want to do. The label is academic really; it’s about finding those four or five people you want to work with.”

So with the ink dried on the Atlantic contracts those boys and that girl have decided to release a mixtape in digital format. James notes, “We had a whole bunch of tracks and we wanted to get them out there without rushing an album. There’s a demand for new material from us, since we haven’t released anything for a while, and we wanted to give something back to the fans, whilst buying a bit of time to write the album. We’ve got quite a digitally literate fan base which we’ve built up on the internet so it made sense that the people who are into us would probably be able to understand this format. It’s not that groundbreaking nor is it probably about the future of music either.” The title ‘Not Here to Please You’ is taken from a lyric and signifies to the band that they are not doing it to either please or appease any of their critics.

CLICK HERE to see our EXCLUSIVE Hadouken! video from the London Astoria