Introducing Interview: Crash Club

Having received acclaim from the likes of Louder Than War, Sunday Mail and Kasabian, Scottish dance-rock band Crash Club are fast becoming known for their unique live performances, and have been wowing crowds at Isle Of Wight Festival and T In The Park this year.

With their debut EP set for release next month, we caught up with Crash Club to find out more about their innovative sound…

Hi there! Can you tell us a little bit about Crash Club?
Crash Club are a dance rock band from the west coast of Scotland. We were kinda influenced by seeing bands like Soulwax and Leftfield – dance acts that play live with full bands, but also being inspired by bands in the indie scene like Primal Scream, Jagwar Ma and LCD Soundsystem.

We’ve been gigging for the last 3 years properly, although we’ve been playing probably a wee bit longer, but the last 3 years is when we kinda released what we were trying to do.

With you all being brothers or cousins, how do you find working alongside such close family?
It’s not as bad as you’d think to be fair ha… It’s actually a good laugh. Aran and myself (Neal) will be the only ones that disagree at times but nothing major, we’ve all got something different to bring to the table so think that kinda helps.

Your new EP C.C.101 is out next month, what would you say are its main themes?
Theme-wise, we went in with the idea of making the drums sound like something you’d hear from the likes of a DFA records band, but in general we just wanted to make something to get ourselves and other people dancing or swaggering down the street to the grooves.

With no one permanent vocalist, you instead enlist different session guests to work with – what prompted you to decide to work in this way, rather than just settling for one long-term vocalist?
They do it in dance music all the time, so why not the indie/rock scene? That’s kinda how we’ve thought about it; because the band started off as just as Aran, Sammy and myself writing up in Sammy’s loft, we never really thought about singers ’till we needed to, but now thanks to that, we get to have different singers on different tracks that we love vocally!! So it’s ideal.

With so many different session guests that you record with, how do you incorporate this into your live shows?
The live show can become tricky – sometimes vocalists can’t make it cause they’re out playing elsewhere. But, lucky from start to finish, the set is based on beats, and it makes you dance, the lighting show is majorly important as well, that usually catches the crowds attention, plus it’ s loud… Really loud, haha. So, we sometime just play full on instrumental dance sets.

Have you had a favourite session guest that you’ve worked with?
Everyone we’ve had in has been brilliant to be honest, but the last sessions we did for the first part of the EP were hilarious, some of the the chat and stories that came out were genius.

Your sound is a pretty unique fusion of rock and electro, who would you say are you main musical influences?
Soulwax, Chemical Brothers and Primal Scream during the XTRMNTR and Evil Heat eras, for Aran and myself. Sammy was really influenced by the acid house scene (you can tell when you see his original Roland 101, 202, 303 and 808) and he introduced us to an Iceland act to he loves called GUSGUS.

Have you always wanted to be musicians?
Not always… I wanted to play football at first haha – realised I was nowhere near good or fit enough (liked a pint far too much for that) – and also realised that being a musician was much more fun ha.

Your fans include some pretty big names, including Kasabian – that’s pretty exciting! But if you could work alongside any band/artist, past or present, who would it be and why?
Yeah, we played with Karloff when he was on tour a couple of years ago, and he was very complimentary. Think we catch a lot of bands off guard with our sound. We definitely don’t look like a band that would be playing the music we do, the lads from the DMA’s were really sound when we played with them at Stag and Dagger as well.

Can you describe your sound in 3 words?
Energetic, dance, rock.

And what can we expect from Crash Club over the next few months?
We’ve got CC.101 coming out Dec 2nd, with our biggest headline show to date on Dec 3rd at St Luke’s in Glasgow. Been a very busy year with Isle of Wight festival and T In The Park festival for the 2nd year, so wanted to end 2016 on a high.

Huge thanks to Crash Club for answering our questions!

CC.101, the debut EP from Crash Club, is out 2 December via Samba Hut Records.