Posted 2 years ago 2 notes
5 (or so) Questions For Tom Williams & The Boat!
In a music industry which is so competitive and dominated by major record labels, it is great to see that the efforts of the young and upcoming band Tom Williams & The Boat are being rewarded. With their self contained EPs they managed to get Huw Stephens and Steve Lamacq of the BBC interested and soon they hit it off at the BBC Introducing Stage at various UK festivals in 2008. Since then the band has been busy recording, playing more gigs, made it recently to the final of the Emerging Talent Competition of Glastonbury Festival, and just released their single “Concentrate”. The launch was celebrated at the Old Blue Last here in London last week, and Tom was being so kind to give up Subway sandwiches just before the gig in order to have a chat with us. Sweet!
Let’s go back to the beginning, it’s about two years ago, a local gig-night in Tunbridge Wells - what happened?
There is a gig-venue in Tunbridge Wells called The Grey Lady, where about three of us played in different groups. I had been playing solo acoustic shows there for about two years from 2006, and I was getting sick of playing acoustic nights because I felt some songs could definitely be expanded in certain ways. So it was Geri, Ant and Josh from other bands and the rest was actually friends of friends. We still play at that venue every six weeks – Paul [Dunton], who runs it, has been amazing for the acoustic music scene there.
So you all weren’t complete strangers to each other?
Well, we had seen each other play, but we hadn’t really talked to each other.
Any personality clashes?
No, [laughs] everyone is really nice.
Soon afterwards you already started playing at the BBC Introducing Kent festival?
Yeah, we actually released our first EP called “The Penquin EP” already in the summer of 2007 and that started being played on the BBC Kent Introducing show on Radio Kent. It was then when we got our first Radio 2 feature with Steve Lamacq and started playing a lot of the BBC Introducing stages.
Heard in an interview with Likesounds.com that you prefer the London-gigs?
True, it’s usually whether my parents are there or not. They love to go to as many as possible but the London-ones they tend not to.
But they are here tonight I assume?
No they are not actually, so I’m gonna go mental [laughs].
The Emerging Talent Competition of Glastonbury Festival - out of 1600 entrants you made it with 11 other bands to the final!
Yes! But I entered the band and didn’t tell them about it actually, because I didn’t want to jinx it. Whenever someone calls me up to say “so and so are going to be at your show tonight” I just don’t tell the band because I don’t want to jinx it. And it’s been really good, because everything in the last 3 weeks just happened - we got to the final of that Glastonbury Emerging Talent competition, we confirmed a tour with Stornaway, and we just got confirmed for a big festival in the summer. So when I phoned up the band I was like “Hey! Eh, there is a competition, which I didn’t tell you, but we entered and… we’re in the final!” And they were all like, “huh, oh, hooray!” [laughs].
Tonight is the release party of your single ‘Concentrate’, what is the story behind it?
We released four EPs from October 2007 up to February 2009. The last one is called “Doing My Best EP” and follows the story of a character. “Concentrate” was more or less the beginning of the story unfold and was written about two years ago. There are definitely more catchy tracks which we could have chosen, but we wanted the first one to be really on our terms and it’s a track which the band really enjoys playing.
And it’s also released on vinyl - do you listen a lot to vinyl yourself?
Yes, we are MASSIVE vinyl freaks. That has been one of our major life goals, to get the single out on vinyl. All we’ve got left now is Glastonbury and Jools Holland - and then we might as well give up [laughs]!
Tom Williams & The Boat at the Old Blue Last from Levina on Vimeo.
Many thanks to Tom for the interview and the whole band for the gig. Visit their MySpace for their tour-dates and to listen to more of their tracks. You can buy their single digitally on iTunes or get it on 7” vinyl from their site!
Tagged: Interviews, Gig-footage, .-
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