INTERVIEW: The Tapestry - GigslutzGigslutz

Kate Crudgington caught up with three quarters of Tameside’s finest ahead of their upcoming UK tour…

It’s been a while since you’ve spoken to Gigslutz. What have you all been up to recently?

Liam: We’ve just finished our new single and b-side, ‘Connectives’ and ‘Catacombs’. Also been writing and rehearsing for our upcoming UK tour in March and April.

Katy: We finished up the year with a Christmas gig at Islington Mill, which is a great venue and arts centre just outside Manchester, then we took the last couple of months off from gigging to concentrate on getting some new songs recorded, which we’re going to release on vinyl for Record Store Day on 16th April. We’ve also got a download-only single coming out on 18th March.

Your UK Spring tour starts on 24th March at Manchester’s Deaf Institute, and finishes on 2nd April at The Chameleon in Nottingham. What can fans expect from your shows on this tour?

Zara: A full throttle ear bashing and a justified reason to not go to the gym the next day.

Liam: We’ve got a good mix of cities we’ve played before and those we haven’t, so looking forward to catching up with old friends and making new ones along the way. People can expect some new material as well as the tunes we’ve released previously and maybe an unexpected cover for good measure.

Katy: Dyna does a good Barry Gibb impression, so we might let him do that If no one turns up… There’s some places we’ve never played before too, like Cardiff and Nottingham, and all the venues we’ve booked on the tour are ace, so it’s gonna be good.

You’re also playing at Confessional Festival in April at the Holy Trinity Church in Blackburn. Are you looking forward to sharing this venue with Jeramiah Ferrari, Cupids, Not Hot Ashes, and more?

Liam: Yeah, the venue looks class. Gigs I’ve been to as a punter in churches always have beautiful acoustics too. We’ve gotta make sure we repent our sins before we go in or it will be like a scene from The Omen. Dyna thinks he’s bigger than Jesus, so there may be a power struggle there, and I must remember to leave my Cradle Of Filth t-shirt at home.

Zara: We’re really looking forward to playing this festival. It promises to be a great night if its predecessors are anything to go by.

Katy: We were asked to play last year, but we were already booked somewhere else, so we’re really glad to be asked again this year. It’ll be a new experience for us playing in a church! The line up’s great, and Pete Eastwood who runs the event knows his stuff and always gets the best bands. He’s let us in to a few secrets about his plans for the day…. it’s going to be a special one, definitely.

What was the first festival you attended?

Liam: Leeds 2001 was my first. Eminem, Travis, Queens of The Stone Age… My mate threw an apple at Marilyn Manson, which nearly knocked him off his stilts. Superb. Remember seeing Mogwai on the last night at the time Rock Action was out and it’s still one of my favourite festival gigs. There were riots on the final night too, full of cunts wrecking shit. Awful. Not been back since.

Katy: Mine was V ’99 – Suede, Cast, Stereophonics, Ian Brown, Gomez. Bit different to the stuff they’ve booked at V the last few years…

Zara: Leeds 2006. I remember Arctic Monkeys, The Streets & The Raconteurs played.

Liam, in your last interview with us you said you’d “crawl over broken glass for four days straight, just to blow on one of Bowie’s turds”. How did you react on the day the news of his death broke earlier this year?

Liam: Woke up and stuck the radio on as I lay in bed and ‘Life on Mars’ was playing. I was just lying in awe with a strange feeling of melancholy, then they announced he’d passed away and it felt like a kick in the stomach. For me and a lot of people it felt like a friend or a family member had died. Since then I’ve realised what he’d done with Blackstar and how it was a carefully planned epitaph, which just makes me love him more. To live on through his art was his focus and I respect that. Still gutted I never saw him live though.

You were nominated in the Best Unsigned Band category for the annual Gigslutz Awards alongside Viola Beach, who recently lost their lives in a car accident whilst on tour in Sweden. Do you think awful accidents like this make musicians and fans reassess what’s genuinely important to them?

Liam: Yeah, definitely. The way musicians and bands came together to pay their respects was impressive. To help the band get in the charts and make sure they live on through their music was heart-warming too see. A lot of bands on the up spend too much time being negative to each other, being too competitive, but the fact is we have more in common than things that set us apart. And I think we should pursue that together and support one another. It hit home with musicians more as you think of all the times you’ve driven for miles, crammed in to cars, probably tired etc, and how it could happen to you. You do thousands of miles to play gigs for not much money because you love it.

Katy: It’s such an awful thing to happen to those lads at the start of their career. We’re a nightmare to drive about after a gig, as were usually pissed and talking shit to whoever the poor bastard is who’s driving. We’ve had a few scary moments ourselves in the past. I think what happened will certainly be in the back of our minds in future, as it will be for a lot of other bands too.

Zara: It did make me realise how much of a bubble you can live in when you’re in a band. You’d just never imagine that anything like that would happen, and when it did it made me rethink some of the stupid things you do in a band in your Peter Pan reality. You never really think about the people back home or how what you’re doing will affect them. It just doesn’t cross your mind for a second that you won’t get home. I can’t imagine the pain that those lads’ families are going through. It’s very sad.

You recently tweeted that your new songs were back from Abbey Road and sounding “massive”. Tell us more…

Liam: We recorded with our good friend Christophe at Oxygene studios in Salford. The tracks are called ‘Connectives’ and the b side is called ‘Catacombs’. We got the tracks mastered at Abbey Road. Being in there was probably one of my favourite moments of being in this band.

Zara: The first time we went there for a look round it was so surreal. We all kept pinching each other to make sure it was happening. It’s definitely the stuff of dreams for any young musician. Hopefully if things continue the way they are, we’ll be recording there soon too.

Katy: I think we get better with each record we put out. You kind of learn a bit more about the medium of the studio and how to make it work for you as a band. We’ve certainly explored a lot more sounds and techniques this time around, especially for the vinyl we’re putting out, we’ve experimented with effects and reversing sounds too. We also got our old drummer Reece in to do some synths on ‘Connectives’. He’s a proper whizz when it comes to electronics and he brought the track to life with the bits he’s added. Being in Abbey Road was a dream come true for us, and It’s proper chilled as well, which I didn’t expect.

Liam: They have a bar and a beer garden, and wandering the corridors and going in the studio where The Beatles recorded was mind blowing. It was all going so well until Dyna shit himself walking back up the stairs…

Katy: True story.

Your schedules pretty full on for the next few months with the tour and putting the final touches to your record. What do you do when you have a spare five minutes?

Liam: Chill with my two house rabbits.

Katy: We never have a spare 5 minutes! We’re all still working, which is a drag when you’d rather be spending time writing or playing. Me and Liam are moving house at the moment so we’re mostly decorating actually. Liam’s just realised he’s a dab hand at wallpapering…

Zara: I like to do as little as possible when I have any time off. Just put myself back on charge in the corner of the living room in a Zara-shaped dock.

Which bands/artists have you seen live recently?

Liam: Cabbage. Best new band I’ve seen in ages. Good pals of ours who have played in various bands before, but seeing this line up blew us all away. They are on with us at Deaf Institute in Manchester and are going from strength to strength. My tip for 2016.

Katy: Cabbage are without a doubt the best band in Manchester, after us… They’re fucking brilliant. We had them on with us in December and we’ve got them on again at Deaf Institute. A proper band of proper nutters.

Finally, what do you think constitutes a nightmare situation for a band when they’re playing live?

Zara: When the sound man has never done sound before and you’ve driven for five hours to find out this fact.

Katy: There’s nothing worse than a shit sound man. We turned up to play a gig once somewhere and the sound man had fucked off before we even got there so we had to do it ourselves. We did the whole gig sounding like Daleks. It was pretty funny, though. I actually remember the shit gigs more than the good ones!

Liam: When you gig, especially a distance away, you usually turn up pissed, the sound engineer instantly hates your guts for no real reason other than their air of superiority, there are no monitors, shit gear intermittently cuts out, you snap a string, you argue on stage… but there are downsides too. You could get a pint of piss thrown at you.

The Tapestry will be on tour from 24th March to 2nd April. For info and tickets visit the band’s website: http://www.tapestryband.co.uk/news/

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut