Marika Hackman interview

On the eve of her largest headline tour to date, Marika Hackman recalls the "hellish" start to her live career – where nerves threatened to get the better of her. "I used to not be able to eat before shows. When you're playing as a support act and no one is listening, it gets really gruelling."

Now, the 23-year-old is gearing up for a 17-date run across the UK and is fully accustomed to life on the road. However, she admits there's one bad tendency that she hasn't been able to shake off.

"I have this terrible habit that when I do mess up my first instinct is to swear quite loudly down the mic," she chortles.

Marika is set to grace the Bodega on Saturday March 28 and she is no stranger to the revered venue. In fact, her most recent of forays came only a few months ago. So what's different this time?

"It's going to be funny because it will be a solo tour without the band. I'm excited because it's a return to a really raw and intimate show," she explains.

"It's just me up there with the audience. The songs are as they were when I wrote them sitting on bed at home – there's no embellishment."

Marika recently released her debut album, We Slept At Last, to critical acclaim. Although most artists tend to shy away from reading reviews of their work, she was overwhelmed by the gleaming response.

She adds: "It's an immense relief when you spend so long making something and then get it out there."

When queried about the album's themes, she cites them as "loneliness and the acceptance of it" and "the capacity for darkness all humans have". These are all rather solemn topics on paper, but Marika manages to transpose them onto record in a harrowing manner.

Her upcoming single, Ophelia, is a poignant tale of spurned love which teems with all the traits of an accomplished wordsmith. This comes as no surprise when Marika recollects her early penchant for songwriting.

"Instruments were put in front of me at a very early age so I would always try and write. When I was 14 and I started to learn the guitar was when I really wrote songs properly because it was an instrument I could finally get my head around."

She also uses songwriting as tool for coping with her most intrinsic of anxieties.

"My way of making sense of it all is writing about it. I edit it a bit and make it more abstract because I don't want to put my heart on the line for everyone to judge," she concedes. "I like to keep a protective shield."

Through the years, Marika has noticed an improvement in her writing, but she isn't keen on resting on her laurels. In fact, she's already pushing herself with a view to album number two.

"I've started writing for it and have got a couple of songs already," she reveals. "I want to get those written and get back into the studio as soon as possible. It's my favourite part of this job."

She's even keen to write while on the road – something she hasn't done before.

"It's something I really want to do on this upcoming tour. Generally I find that there's not enough time and personal space to write because it's a very private thing."

For those unfamiliar with a Marika Hackman live show, she labels it as an intense, yet intimate, atmosphere "full of abstract, grungy folk."

Having overcome any initial jitters in the fledgling stages of her career, the songstress now boasts a compelling stage presence. By taking a stripped back approach to her live fare, this will only be further intensified when her next venture to Nottingham rolls around. Just watch the language this time, Marika.

Young Fathers @ Rescue Rooms [26/05/15]

Swathed beneath a veil of mystery, Young Fathers orbited into the public consciousness after last year’s shock Mercury Prize victory – staving off competition from the likes of Royal Blood and Damon Albarn.

Though still not an established household name, at the Rescue Rooms it was plain to see why they’re held in such lofty regard.

The trio, hailing from Edinburgh, have been a tough act to label throughout their fledgling existence. Though rooted in hip-hop territory, they traverse paths where art rock, Motorik and electro all intersect. It’s a truly inimitable blend which is salient from the get-go.

Anchored by a touring drummer, the group tear through a visceral set – pouring out their soul over dystopian beats. On-stage, their chemistry is mesmerising. With essentially three distinct frontmen, each member constantly grapples for centre stage, to the extent that they coalesce into one frenetic entity.

Of all attributes, discord is a tenet of Young Fathers’ trademark sound. While Ally Massaquoi’s graceful vocal momentarily softens the intensity, cohorts Kayus Bankole and G Hastings spit caustic rhymes of angst and disaffection. The band’s charm lies in this unique incongruence.

Breakout track Get Up sees the trio amped up to the highest of planes. In what is the closest they’ll get to a fully-fledged hip-hop banger, the group urge the listener to “get up and have a party.” This, their mantra, is delivered with unbridled vigour.

Amidst all the chaos, there are lulls of undeniable beauty. Low, from award-winning album Dead, is a wistful number which further showcases Massaquoi’s soulful warble. Hanging over a plangent backbeat, the track throttles into life when reaching its explosive hook.

At a time when live music can be so insipid and predictable, along come Young Fathers. By championing a genre-bending ideology, the frantic three-piece more than justify the buzz that precedes them. If ever in doubt, it’s now time to believe the hype.

Hookworms @ Rescue Rooms [22/03/15]

A hookworm is a parasitic organism which creeps into and inhabits its host. Akin to their namesake, this burgeoning five-piece from Leeds, create a similar effect at their visceral live show.

It's tough to pigeon-hole Hookworms. At a push, they're best described as engineers of psychedelic noise rock.

With a glut of synths and all sorts of frills at their disposal, the group manufacture an inimitable, sprawling sound.

Showcasing cuts from their 2014 release, The Hum, it becomes salient that every nuance in every track is a deliberate touch of artistry.

Songs like The Impasse and Radio Tokyo crescendo, note by note, into hulking anthems and a sea of bobbing heads bow in approval.

For most part of their set, the Rescue Rooms is transformed into a cacophonous box of throbbing feedback. The intensity is unmitigated. And they are angry – very angry. Frontman MJ's guttural refrains intersperse with thrashing, violent guitar strokes to frightening effect.

You should need to sign a waiver prior to a Hookworms gig. There is little to no respite as the group execute what is an all-out sensory assault. At times, this can overwhelm – particularly when the set heads wayward at its mid-point as tracks begin to segue into one long thrum.

Admittedly Hookworms are a challenging listen, but once they have you in their clutches, it's a wholly rewarding experience. Set closer Retreat epitomises their fare. Cymbals crash, guitars wail and synths resonate for an utterly enthralling climax.

In full stride, they are a beguiling force majeure – but as is the nature of their sound, they are an acquired taste. If you really want to reap the rewards of this band, just free your mind, take a deep breath and let Hookworms slowly creep into your conscience.

Mini Mansions interview

Michael Shuman has had little time to relax after a hectic few weeks. The Mini Mansions multi-instrumentalist has only just returned to home soil in Los Angeles after traversing the United States on a support tour with ubiquitous rock n’ roll newbies Royal Blood.

His band are also hard at work with the release of their second LP, The Great Pretenders, very much on the periphery.

And Mini Mansions aren’t resting on their laurels just yet. They are currently on the road supporting Brit Award winning buddies Royal Blood, including a sold out show at Rock City.

Shuman, who you may also recognise as bassist of arena-churning monoliths Queens of the Stone Age, reminisces on his budding relationship with the British breakthrough duo.

“We get along really well with Royal Blood. I met Mike probably a year and a half ago at a Queens show and we’ve played some festivals together and hung out. We had fun on this last run and they’re up for the party, I’ll tell you that much,” Shuman muses.

With the Royal Blood hype seemingly percolating all over the world it was no surprise that this upcoming tour would be an instant sell out.

Is it a daunting prospect filling the support slot for one of the most in-demand bands of the past year?

“Supporting other bands is tough. You’re trying to win over a crowd that either doesn’t know you or doesn’t care – they just want to be drinking and waiting for Royal Blood. It’s tough, but I kind of like the challenge and feeling like I’m an underdog going into a game.”

The LA three-piece have already had a taste of the UK this year, managing to squeeze in a London headline gig in between a laborious touring schedule. On the gig, Shuman says: “We did loads of shows with Royal Blood and then to come to London to our own people in a small venue was super fun.”

It was at this show at the Lexington where Mini Mansions unveiled a very high-profile collaboration – with Arctic Monkeys’ indie deity Alex Turner. Michael compares the track, Vertigo, to a 90s West Coast hip-hop standard.

“We had this idea that Tyler, our keyboard player and vocalist, would take the first verse and then maybe I would take the second verse – having a different voice come in.”

Although the collaboration came about organically, the band initially imagined the track in a completely different way.

“I envisaged some kind of British thug character from a Guy Ritchie movie so we tried a bunch of different things and spoke to a number of people. But then Al had been hanging out with us a lot in the studio, so when we went to do the vocals it was a no-brainer. He wrote his own lyrics and melody for that verse – and that was it.”

If that collaboration wasn’t impressive enough, then Mini Mansions really up the ante on single Any Emotions – featuring none other than The Beach Boys’ founding member Brian Wilson. For Michael, this was a pipe dream which became a reality, but he admits that he never got to meet him in the studio.

“Someone from our label was working on the recent Brian Wilson record and asked our bass player Zack to play on one of his songs – which was insane.

That track went really well and a few days later we were doing the vocals for our record and Zack thought if he didn't ask Brian to sing on our record then he’d regret for the rest of his life. We gave him two or three songs to choose from and he picked Any Emotions. It’s just one of those things that you never believe will happen – having a guy like that who has been such a huge influence on us playing on your record.”

Aside from the dream collaborations and crazy touring plans, the conception of The Great Pretenders was a fairly stunted process. After writing eight songs in 2013 for a proposed EP, the band soon found themselves mired in record label issues and Michael was swamped in with Queens of the Stone Age album sessions. The only resolution was to start from scratch.

“It wasn’t really going our way and in that time, so we started writing a bunch of new material and those original eight songs are now the B-sides to the singles from our new album because we wrote so many new songs over the last year and a half.”

So how is it juggling both Queens of the Stone Age and Mini Mansions?

“It just means you have no life,” Michael puts bluntly.

“I just give everything to both bands and when I’m not doing Queens, I’m in the studio writing for Mansions. It’s tough because you make sacrifices to do what you really want to do and a lot of things suffer, like friendships and relationships. It’s been an interesting, but exciting, couple of years.”

As for the upcoming record, Shuman insists it still retains the Mini Mansions sound, but is far more engaging on a lyrical level.

He adds: “Where the first record was much more fantastical and arrangements were wilder, this is more focused and we’ve been able to open up and talk about real things.”

Themes like love, death and existentialism all feature heavily on The Great Pretenders – and are motifs which reflect the band’s current life, says Shuman.

As he talks about the new record, it’s obvious just how much he has invested in Mini Mansions. Quite simply, he loves his job. For a man who has headlined some of the world’s biggest festivals with Queens of the Stone Age, Shuman remains refreshingly modest and entirely engaging.

Juggling projects and a compromising schedule with apparent ease, you could say he is one of the hardest working musicians in the game. And with Rock City on the horizon, that work ethic shows no signs of abating.

Palma Violets interview

Tackling album number two is a tricky juncture for any band, but before Palma Violets could even begin working on their new record, they had to learn to become friends again.

“We’d been on tour for about two years and we got signed pretty quickly after releasing about four or five songs. It was a bit frantic at first and so by the end of it we got pretty sick of each other to be honest,” reveals frontman Sam Fryer.

A malaise has settled deep within camp Palma and they knew it would be tough to return to their hometown of London.

Speaking candidly about the experience, Sam explains: “We decided instead to go to Wales, where a mate of ours knew this lovely couple who owned a farm. There was a barn there and we set up all our equipment, spent a month walking the hills of Wales and then learning how to be friends again – and even write songs again.”

Despite its hackneyed term, did the four-piece find themselves falling victim to the dreaded second album syndrome?

“It was pretty tough because when we were writing all of our songs as an unsigned band we didn’t have all of those outside pressures, but being out there in Wales took those pressures away and made us realise why we got into it all in the first place.”

With their new album all wrapped up and set for release in early May, the group are itching for a return to the live circuit.

After some brief warm-up dates around Cornwall and Scunthorpe, the band will embark on an 11-date jaunt across the UK with the NME Awards Tour, including a show at Rock City on February 24 – and Sam could not be more excited.

“It’s good to start with a UK tour because when you go around the world you tend to miss the British fans – they definitely are the best.”

Sam compares touring to a “never-ending festival”, and even though it can get a little overwhelming at times, the peaks definitely outweigh the troughs.

Palma Violets return to this year’s NME Awards Tour bill as headliners after playing lower down the pecking order in 2013.

“Headlining is kind of like a dream come true for most independent bands. I just hope all the kids that came to the NME Awards Tour two years ago come back and haven’t grown up because we had such a good response that tour.”

Sam sees the imminent tour as a perfect occasion to premiere tracks from their forthcoming LP.

He says: “We love to throw four or five new ones in, but we don’t want to bore everyone to death. We still love our old songs just as much as our new ones.”

The effervescent frontman also hints that they may play some tracks that didn’t even make the new record – largely due to the prolific nature of recent recording sessions.

“We wrote about 17 songs for this album campaign. We were a bit frantic with our writing because we wanted to put ourselves in the best position when picking for the album and going out on tour. We’ve got a huge catalogue now – about 35 songs.”

Talking about the follow up to their 2013 debut, 180, Sam reckons their fans could be in for quite a surprise.

“You can hear a lot of elements of the first album in some of the tracks, but quite a lot of it will come as a shock to fans. We’re breaking down boundaries. The idea is to write something that we would never normally feel as though we’d write in order to test ourselves.”

So are there any particular standout moments on the new record?

“The standout moments for me change and I learn new things about our songs all the time. We’ve focused on making this record well balanced,” responds the assured vocalist/guitarist.

Ahead of a return to Nottingham, Sam takes the time to reminisce about the band’s previous ventures in the city.

“Our earliest memory is playing a club night in Stealth and nobody had a clue who we were. There was only one person in the room watching us and I think he’d take some sort of psychedelic drug, but he seemed to enjoy it at least.

“Then the NME Tour at Rock City everything broke down and a beer fell into my amp, which ruined it. Miles Kane had to lend me his one so we could do the show!”

Despite their fair share of mishaps, Sam insists that Nottingham holds some very fond memories for the group.

When pushed to describe a Palma Violets live show, he says it’s “raw power mixed with intense, europhic emotion.”

Well now we know what to expect, let’s just hope there aren’t any broken amps this time.

Kate Tempest @ Rescue Rooms [17/02/1994]

As she takes a break during a whirlwind set, Kate Tempest tells the capacity crowd at Rescue Rooms that it took her 15 years of grafting to finally reach this momentous occasion – her very own headline tour.

With her beginnings firmly rooted in spoken word and poetry, Tempest chose to tread a new path with the 2014 release of her debut rap album, Everybody Down. The record was so well received, it was nominated for last year’s Mercury Prize.

But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill rap music decked out with superfluous beats and vacuous, clichéd lyrics. No, this is much more.

Tempest is a story-teller and tonight’s venue is her canvas, where she crafts tales of love and squalor. At times it’s pure vitriol as she spits ferociously over percussive tracks – baring her soul for all to see.

The bulk of Tempest’s songs see her challenge the status quo, from corporations to politics to war. In fact, you’d be forgiven in thinking she was the more considered sibling of a Sleaford Mod.

She segues between tracks from her LP, including standouts The Beigeness and Marshall Law. The former transports the crowd to the setting of a pretentious East London club where “everyone here has a hyphenated second name.”

There are intervals when she proselytises to the Nottingham audience – emphasising a need to nurture creativity which embraces the community. This is met with peals of applause.

Tempest bids farewell with a poem, and it’s at these a Capella moments when her fare is most endearing.

It may have taken fifteen years to get to this point, but Kate Tempest should now only be looking to the future – and it looks exciting.

Peace interview

Despite an arduous day of rehearsals and signing almost two thousand records, Peace frontman, Harrison Koisser, remains in good spirits. This is because his band are on the verge of hitting the road again in support of their second studio record, Happy People.

Having spent “what feels like years” cooped up in the recording studio, the four-piece will be flexing their muscles at some of the UK’s most intimate haunts – including three consecutive dates at Nottingham’s Bodega. Easily conquering mightier venues in the past, the band decided to base their new tour on a pang of nostalgia.

“We’ve done Rock City twice now, and as is the case with most cities, we’ve played in most venues. So we wanted to do a tour going back to the ones we used to do when we were just starting. It’s a different vibe comparing a big show to a small show, so it’s all about balance.”

Peace’s sophomore album is set for release on February 9 – taking just under a year to record. Now, they’re eager for it to hit the masses. “We’re raring to go and get other people listening to it because we’ve heard it so many times,” says Harrison.

He believes Happy People is a natural progression for the band and an altogether more conscious effort than their debut, In Love. “I guess we’re a little more grown up now, but it just makes sense – it’s the next logical step.”

As a result, they flipped their usual recording process on its head and were more than willing to tread new ground on a sonic level. “There’s a little part where we used a string section, we’ve used brass and all kinds of stuff.” Their most recent single, Lost on Me, is testament to this. The track sees the outfit dip their toes into a cocktail of funk riffs and saccharine falsettos, to emphatic effect.

Whilst many artists are stumped by the daunting prospect of album number two, Harrison’s compulsion to always write material meant that it was pretty much plain sailing. He says: “The songs are always there and I always write album-worthy songs, so we had an album ready in a short space of time.”

Though fans will be assured of a tight live show, they’ll also be keen to see how the band’s new material translates on stage. Harrison vows to include a fair amount in their Bodega setlists, but doesn’t want to overwhelm the Nottingham faithful with too much unfamiliar music.

Peace will be joined on their UK dates by a plethora of exciting, new artists; all cherry-picked by the band themselves. Emerging from a vibrant scene Birmingham scene around three years ago, they know too well the bearing a support slot can have on any aspiring band. “It’s really important and it’s how we got noticed by people. We had our own little scene, but to help us grow we had to play in front of other people.”

And they certainly have grown as a live force. A schedule of relentless touring, which includes a huge slot on the Reading & Leeds festival main stage last summer, has benefited the band immensely. “We’ve been playing Peace songs for three years, so we’re getting pretty good at it. We’re probably better live than most bands I see,” exclaims a cocksure Harrison.

So, was the Reading & Leeds slot not even a little daunting?

“You’ve just got to take it in your stride. We were pretty excited about it, but because we’ve played around the world, we feel like there’s nothing too big for us.”

For those not au fait with a Peace live show, Harrison describes them as “really electric, with everyone getting involved – singing to every song, rather than just the singles.” It’s at these gigs where their fans have built quite the reputation. “We’ve got quite a rowdy fan-base, so the live shows are a bit of a celebration.”

As the Bodega gears itself up for its very own Peace residency, Nottingham could be in store for one of the biggest celebrations of the year.