Late Of The Pier Interview

Here is an interview I did with Late Of The Peir a young band from north of Nottingham. This was published in the Vice 2007 Student Guide.

Late Of The Pier
make musical Ventolin

Okay okay, this whole New Rave thing has been played out already. Wait a minute though…For all its faults as a catch-all term New Rave captured something that was happening simultaneously all round the country last year: an unbridled enthusiasm to create and make music fun again. This energy and inventiveness is embodied by Late Of The Pier, They make the music they want to make and have a great time doing it thanks. Alongside bands like The Video Nasties and Fear of Flying these four kids from Castle Donnington have become staples of the pioneering underage Way Out West night in London and despite looking about the same age as their audiences have a single out next month on WOW Recordings entitled Space And The Woods. It sounds a bit like Dat Politics buggering Whirlwind Heat.

Vice: Hi, coming from Castle Donnington were you often bullied by Iron Maiden fans at school?

Faley: No, no one does anything up there. It’s so boring, just painful. There was no one to bully us; we had to resort to bullying each other and just generally free falling.
Sam: We never learned anything of any use at school. Maybe how to roll a good spliff. That was why we started sneaking down to Liars Club in Nottingham when we were like 15.

Vice: Did you learn more from Liars Club than you did at School?

Sam: Definitely. We were pretty young and Ricky, the guy that runs it, used to smuggle us in and feed us things.
Faley: It was amazing to be exposed to this weird mix of people and music. It would be Gravy Train naked on stage one minute then DJ Hell and Errol Alkan playing these insane electro records for hours the next but it all worked really well together.

Vice: Have you ever got naked on stage at a Way Out West night? That might get you into trouble…

Potter: Ha, no not really. Those shows are wicked to play though. All the kids just fully don’t give a shit and go mental and that makes you really give it on stage, make music to have asthma to. I have so much more fun doing a Way Out West show than say at The Barfly where we played last week.
Sam: Yeah that was excruciating, like sleeping on a bed of nails.
Faley: The kids at the underage shows are really easy to push over as well.

Vice: OK. You are all too young to even go to University yet but what would you like to study if you end up going there?

Potter: I’d like to do glass blowing so that I could build a glass casing for a synthesizer.
Sam: I suppose maybe something visual. What we do with the band, I don’t see it ending with the music you know? The visual side is just an extension of it all. I really like Dali, maybe something like that.

www.myspace.com/lateofthepier