Stereoboard Talks Touring and Record Labels with Spring Offensive
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Written by Adam Simpson
Stereoboard interviews unsigned band, Spring Offensive during the Manchester leg of their UK tour. We find out what the band have achieved through touring and also how the band feel about life as an unsigned band and whether the draw of a label to organise your tours etc, is something which they desire right now.
This is the penultimate leg on your UK tour, why did you decide that now was the right time to go on tour and how has the tour gone?
“This is our 11th or 12th date on the tour, were going up to Newcastle tomorrow for the last show on the tour, it’s gone really well. We have done this all ourselves, we booked it all at the start of the year and we didn’t really know what to expect. We don’t have anyone working for us, no booking agents or tour managers or anything, so yeh we just organised it, we felt we just had to get out there and get people listening to our music.”
So now that the tour is nearly over, do you feel it was the right decision?
“It’s quite hard to reach people coming out of a town, like Oxford. It's not that fashionable a place to come from at the moment, so there is no easy access to the rest of the country. It’s quite easy to get stuck in one town, especially a place like Oxford, where there are a lot of venues and a lot of bands, so it’s quite hard to expand from there. So for us it’s been really mixed where we have played some really good, well attended shows and then some shows where very few people have attended. But it has been a lot of fun and we have learnt a lot.”
Considering you have organised this tour by yourselves, how difficult was it to organise and how have you been received by promoters and the like?
“We’ve had a real mixed bag of promoters, some who had no idea we were even coming, to some who cancelled all local bands for us and we have had to do all our own promotion. I guess that’s just part of it really. But it’s not at all been bad, every gig has been totally different and it’s been a good learning curve. But more importantly, we’ve got out there and played to people we never would have before.”
What have you learnt in particular from this tour?
“Just the other night at a show, a guy came up to me and said ‘I heard you on the radio’ and that’s an amazing feeling, it’s hard to tell when you’re making music, who is listening and how your music is been received, so it’s nice to go out playing and get some feedback as well.”
So what does feedback mean to you?
“It’s great to get that, because all you have to work with is sales data and hit counts; we don’t really know what that means, so to get genuine feedback, really tells you more about what your music is doing. It’s very easy to sit back and go into the studio and make music and then sell it yourselves. But you have no idea who is buying your music. We don’t know if our mums buy every record we sell, so having the live shows is a good way of having that one on one with people and finding out how people respond to us.”
Other than playing live in a particular town, how else have you been promoting yourselves?
“Were giving away a free download for anyone who comes to our shows and that’s a really cool way of getting music to people, from towns that we have never been to before. So it’s been fun and really well received.”
For anybody who is not aware of you, how would you describe your music?
“There are just loads of bands right now that are making music that we love. But for us to say, we sound like that band is really difficult. We also think that puts people off in a way. As for a genre, I think we’re just a rock band, but that’s really vague. That could mean a lot of things, to some people that might mean metal and then to somebody else it could mean bands like The Libertines. We have a lot of focus on the lyrics, we have a focus on creating a story with each song and we try and make the music to suit that. We heard a story about a guy having to eat everything in his wallet and we really liked that idea, so the challenge was to try and make that into a song. I suppose we bend ourselves according to what we are trying to do; we don’t purposely change from psychedelia to rockabilly. So it’s really hard to put ourselves into a category, I guess if you were in a rush, you would call us alternative indie rock.”
So is your music ultimately dependent upon your lyrics?
“Yeh, I think the main focus is our lyrics, we probably used to focus on the lyrics a bit more, where as now we do try and work on similar topics so that there is more continuity to our sound, but ultimately we do make our music to work with the lyrics, yeh.”
If your focus is around your lyrics then, how do you produce a sound which people can familiarize with Spring Offensive?
“We spend a hell of a lot of time on our songs, trying to get a sound that we are happy with and I think that is the key really, to take the time to produce a sound that people become familiar with. Our new single, that took us about 4 months to write and record.”
4 months is a long time for a record, when you finish that process, having taken so long. How do you define whether it has been worth it?
“We listened to a DJ the other day, who said he wanted to listen to music that desperately cries out for your attention, well we don’t really do that. We want to make music that’s a slow burner really, because we’re in it for the long haul and ultimately we wanna make a career out of this.”
So do you feel that been an unsigned band, with no targets puts upon you, helps you to achieve what you want from your music?
“Yeh, I think that the great thing about doing everything yourself is that you can take your time over your music and take it where you want it to go. Our latest song is kind of a concept record. We didn’t sit down and decide to make a concept record, it just happened through the time we spent working on it. We wanted to write a song about the 5 stages of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle and it just evolved into this 14 minute long concept record. But nobody said we had to do it that way, apart from us.”
Are you looking at becoming signed as a long term goal?
“If we are signed to the right label yeh, we don’t really have any long term goals at the moment other than to just keep making music. Yeh we wanna do this long term, I think a lot of bands obsess over been signed as the main aim, but we enjoy the freedom we have to be creative right now and not have any pressure on us apart from the pressure we put on ourselves, through our craving to make music. Our aim is to get our music out to as many people as possible and to a certain degree you can’t do that without a label.”
So you recognise that ultimately, you will eventually need a label to reach the next level with your music?
“There is only a certain amount you can do on your own, we have organised this tour on our own and we do our own press and spend all our time when we are not working, on the band. So we do realise that to get beyond a certain level we need a label. To have somebody helping us with that and helping us get out there is a really attractive thing, but to then sacrifice our creative freedom would also be something we would have to think about.”
Have you had any offers so far or any strong desires to try and gain that help?
“We have had some offers but basically what you get is, ‘how about we take your track and do what the fuck we like with it and we won’t give you any money, but we will give you some exposure.’ Well that’s not for us, so we just have to be patient. We think that’s why it is good now to produce music on our own and have that catalogue of work behind you, but in saying that, although we took 4 months over our single, we set ourselves a deadline of making an album in 7 months. We managed it even though we scrapped everything because we were not happy with it and started again. So I think we like working to that pressure. We love writing music, it’s the best bit second only to somebody coming up and saying, ‘that’s awesome.’ The hardest thing is releasing it, you don’t join a band to do online PR or working out budgets, we joined a band to make music.”
Spring Offensive have just completed their UK tour, they are quick to follow this with a string of gigs. The next few dates are as follows.
14th August – The Hope, Brighton.
20th August – The Bullingdon, Oxford.
21st August – Morton Stanley Festival, Redditch.
2nd September – The Cellar, Oxford.
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