Reading’s The Amazons make instantly infectious rock and roll music, and we genuinely think that they’re going to be absolutely huge within the next year or so. We caught up with frontman Matt Thomson to chat about playing Joe Strummer‘s glockenspiel, their forthcoming debut album, the perils of tinnitus, and being threatened by a squirrel mafia:
How would you describe your music for people who don’t know you?
‘I think that it’s just rock and roll, really. There’s nothing too thought-provoking – it’s straight, it’s direct, and hopefully it’s anthemic. We basically try to make guitar music with an emotional urgency.
You’ve just announced that you’ll be playing a pretty big UK headline tour in October– are you looking forward to it?
‘Yes! We’re very much a band who love going to gigs and consuming music that way, rather than hiding away in bedrooms and listening to off-beat and under-the-radar stuff. We just love going to gigs, and it kind of feeds into how we make music. We kind of cut our teeth at festivals in terms of listening and being exposed to rock and roll, so festivals are definitely where we want to be playing our music. It lends itself to people who know the songs, but also to people who are watching it for the first time. I’ve always loved it when I see a band I don’t know and they come on and grab me and make an impression on me, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to do that.
‘I think that if a band can completely smash a support slot or a midday festival slot, then it’s usually a pretty good indicator that they’re going to be successful later on down the line.
‘Even if you do play at midday, you want people to be looking back and thinking ‘wow, they absolutely smashed it’. That’s where you make impressions, and that’s where you win fans – it’s the battleground of what we do. I guess the bands who are successful – like Catfish & The Bottlemen and Royal Blood – they’re the kind of bands where people come away saying ‘fucking hell, that was good’, and that’s what we’re aiming for.
Do you prefer playing festivals or headline shows?
‘They’re different, and I think that the experience of being in a band would be worsened if we didn’t have one of the other. There’s just no clear winner; there’s a beauty in festival appearances, because you don’t get a soundcheck and it’s not your own crowd, and there’s a kind of spontaneity to it. Lots of things can go wrong, so when it does go wrong it’s really good. Having said that, doing your own headline tour to your own fans is awesome. We wouldn’t want to pick one because they both complement each other – those two separate things add up to why we want to be in a band, and we could never cope with only having one of them.
It must be nice to hear your own crowds singing your songs back at you, though. Hopefully that’ll happen a lot more once you release your debut album…
”We finished the album last week, and we’ll be mixing it later in the summer, so by the time we play the tour in October we should be sitting on a finished album. I don’t know when we’ll be releasing it – probably next year.
Will the sound of the album be the same as the songs you’ve already put out, or will you be changing it up?
‘We’re basically excited to show that we aren’t just an indie band, to be honest. I think that the last three or four singles have leant themselves to that perception, and it’s just not an accurate representation of us as a band. I don’t think it’s deliberate – it’s just a case of wanting to put out the three-minute catchy song as the single. When you get to do an album, you get to show so many different sides of yourself, and we’re really looking forward to showing people more of what we can do. There are some much darker moments on there than anything we’ve done before, for example. Yes, there are riffs, and it’s dark, and it’s sexy, but there are also some ballads on there. I’m really excited for people to hear it.
Will any of the tracks from your EPs be on the album?
‘I think that’s part of an ongoing debate, actually. The thing with the EPs was that we didn’t go into one session and go ‘okay, we’re going to do an EP now’. Some of the stuff was recorded in Chris (guitarist)’s bedroom, so it was all put together really haphazardly. There were a lot of different recordings, and a lot of different stages of where we were at as a band. There are some songs on the EPs that we might revisit and give it a proper recording, but whether that’ll make an album? I can’t be sure. We didn’t want to just take the last EP and put it on the album – it’ll mostly be new songs on there.
Out of every song ever recorded, which do you wish you’d written?
‘Probably Yesterday by The Beatles. It’s such a clichéd answer, but I think that it’s a cliché because it’s so good. I read that Paul McCartney was twenty-two when he wrote and recorded Yesterday, and that hit home because I’m twenty-two, and I haven’t done anything with my fucking life.
If you could be in any other band, which would it be and which instrument would you want to play?
‘I think it’d be pretty good to be in Arcade Fire. I’d just want to stand at the back – they’ve got so many people on stage when they play live, and I’d just be happy to stand at the back and play through the first couple of albums with them. I’d love to be in Queens Of The Stone Age, too – I’d want to do percussion, because I wouldn’t want to get in the way with them! I wouldn’t want to encroach on them, or butt in on them; just to be in the same room as them, and maybe contribute some triangle or something… I’d love to just put loads of reverb on the triangle and then have everyone turn around and be like ‘what the fuck!? That was sick!’.
Put a triangle solo on your album. Go on.
‘Urm… Yeah, I’m not sure. Believe it or not, there weren’t that many triangles knocking around when we did our album. There were plenty of weird things, but no triangles. Here’s a fun fact about the album for you, actually: Joe Strummer from The Clash worked at the studios we recorded at. He worked there decades ago, and he left one of his glockenspiels there. He’s put his name and initials on there and everything. We put that on a couple of tracks, which was amazing. Our drummer used to play glockenspiel, too, so it worked out pretty well!
What’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you?
‘We were in Dunfermline once, and we were walking around this nice little park. I know this is weird, but you asked for weird, so here goes – you honestly wouldn’t believe the amount of squirrels there were in this park. We saw one, and we were like ‘ah, nice, a squirrel’, and it came super-close to us. More of them started coming, and they came right up close to us… We started to count them, and we got to thirty or forty before we got scared and went back to the venue.
‘That was a weird night. We went on at one in the morning, and there were all these drunk old Scottish people ballroom dancing. Then we went outside, and there was some old guy throwing stones out of his window at taxi drivers. Dunfermline – it’s an interesting place.
Describe yourself in three words?
‘Whenever we get email interviews I always just put ‘rock and roll’, but I can’t quite do that for a phone interview; I just feel like I want to punch myself in the face whenever I say that out loud. I’ll go for ‘very fucking loud’. Since we started the band, my hearing’s gone to pot, so I think that sums it up nicely.
