Canterbury’s very own, Broken Hands, are pushing to new heights in the lead up to the release of their debut album Turbulence, with their last single ‘Meteor’, being playlisted at BBC 6Music and XFM. It’s exciting times ahead for the five piece from Kent, with their album due for release next month and a string of gigs to follow up.

We caught up with front-man Dale Norton to learn more…

First off, where did the name Broken Hands come from? 
Well when we first started out, we all sat around in the front room trying to think of a name and we were watching a western called ‘White Feather’ and the chief is called Chief Broken Hands. We love westerns!

Rumour has it that you guys pull out all the stops at your shows, what’s the idea with the silver land program?  
So Silver Landing Program is a concept that we set up, its a show basically where we cover the whole venue in silver! We thought if we start going out and start playing the show normally it’d be harder for people to understand that we’ve had a change of direction, it’s all to make you feel like you’re in a capsule. We put our light show in there, which Dave our keyboard player runs from stage so everything you see when you come to our show is all controlled by us.

It must take a hell of a lot of foil to decorate those rooms?!? 
Yeah man, with the Electro Works gig we had to cover like 320 square feet of parachutes with silver to start with so that we could put them straight up and it was all just pinned down quickly, but it still took ages. Its a lot of work but the effect at the end of it like when we do a show like that i think it pays off. People seem to coming back so…

It adds quite a unique aspect to the show 
Yeah I guess so, someone said to me that Warhol did a load of rooms in a building, I’m not too well versed in that stuff, but it seemed to work for us. Some people think we’re starting a weed farm in someones venue. But it works for us.

Are there any artists current or past that you look up to as a band? 
I think Pink Floyd were really important to us the whole way through. The one that really hit for us with our light show, which is much more primitive than on The Dark Side of the Moon Tour, but when we put together the idea of putting on a show and a concept, we thought if we could go on and do our own version that would be a great vehicle for us to work in. In modern band terms, we’re really into a band called My Morning Jacket, from Louisville, US. I think we look up to them because they’re a five piece and there’s not that many five pieces in our sort of genre, but they’ve got a real chemistry!

Do you feel bands such as Royal Blood have reopened a door within popular music to allow hard-hitting acts like yourselves to get into the mainstream? 
Ah yeah, we worked with Tom Dalgety who’s the guy who produced that record, he did our new album. When we were in the studio with Tom their album went to number one that week. So it was kind of one of those things, although our records as a whole sound different, but it was really uplifting to know that alternative rock can still be that big. That kind of had a nice underlining sense of hope from day one. So it seems like to us its opened the doors, they’re getting a lot of attention and I think they were probably the start of the 2nd wave, that I’d ever witnessed.

It’s the resurgence!
It is the resurgence, I’ve just been watching Star Wars so that’s in the right lingo.

So your new single ‘Who Sent You’, coming out 2 October, has a deep conceptual feel to it could you tell us a bit about the meaning of the song?  
Basically, ‘Who Sent You’, is the concept of a combination of people physically taking off in planes and psychologically taking off in their front rooms, with help of substance if you know what I mean. Its trying to find the blend and trying to find parallels between that. It’s the paranoias after they’ve excelled highs, its kind of like someone stepping in and tapping you on the shoulder and trying to steer you off the other way. I’m not going to sit down and confess to hearing voices every time I go to sleep but I think there’s people like your Auntie who’s had too many bottles of bubbly and she starts to think its a good idea to start lobbing her heals through someones window. Sometimes it can be euphoria without a substance but unfortunately there’s always a down to an up.

Is there anything or anyone you draw inspiration from that isn’t perhaps directly related to your style of music? 
For me I started getting into deep house because it sounded like the sort of aesthetic that was relevant to what we were doing. You can go to bands like Air and far more electronic acts who touch on all the same sort of themes that we touch on ourselves, but from a different genre, there’s a few bands like Air and a lot of the late 90s deep house stuff was really important especially when it came to adding the synths and other electronics to the record. For me even when I listen back to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, all of a sudden I found the same meaning that I was writing about, in those songs.

When you started recording your new album Turbulence did you have a set out plan of how you wanted it to sound or was it more of an experimental process? 
Well we demoed the whole thing before we went into record it and finish it. All the experimentation, well not all of it, but the majority of it happened before we got into doing the album. Then we started working with Tom, Tom was our filter. We knew we went well over the top on the demo to get our point across, so they needed to be brought back to a point where it was consistent but had more conviction when you listened to it.  He would look at the overview, you need someone to step back a bit and say wait there this is the whole piece how can we get a whole piece to say what we’re trying to say.

How does it feel coming up to the release of Turbulence, being able to finally unleash a full body of work to your listeners? 
I’m well excited, we’ve played together for I don’t know how long now, these boys have been my mates from growing up and we’ve been in different bands together. But its pretty mad that potentially, fingers crossed when we go play shows after that date, that more people will know the songs we play because we’ve been playing these songs for like a year now, well not all of them, we’re not doing the headline 2 hour Bruce Springsteen type set yet.

On the subject of your singles, you have some really interesting artwork for them so far, is there a concept behind them? 
Yeah there is, we worked with a guy called Stuart Ford. We sat down with the whole idea of it and the concept and he brought some of the aesthetics that he thought of. Stuart was kind of like well I think each song could have like a mission statement, so each song has a crest. When you open the sleeve out all those crests that you see like on our SoundCloud, are just 3 of 11.

You’re going on tour starting the end of October, is there any particular venue your excited about playing?
Well all of them to be fair, obviously until Barfly Camden we hadn’t played for a couple of months so we’re looking forward to playing everywhere. I guess the first and the last shows of the tour always kind of have the most excitement but usually in the middle is where the best fruit can be picked regards to performance wise. Venue wise we love playing in Manchester, we’ve got a lot of connections with friends and family, and also Birmingham a lot of my family is from there and London’s the closest date to home.

Could you describe the vibe at a broken hands gig in three words?
Silver. Hot. Strobes.

Are you making any plans yet for after the tour and heading into next year?
More touring! Obviously we haven’t really played a whole lot coming up to the album we’re doing most of the touring after it. We’re going to CMJ, which is after the record comes out and before the tour, which will be nice to go to New York, and just taking it out to Europe really, they’re going to get the record after the UK and so are America. Its kind of a backloaded campaign. So we’re going to see how the people like the music in those places and see how it goes!

Huge thanks to Broken Hands for taking the time to answer our questions, stay tuned for a review of their new album next week…