Introducing Interview: Sleepy Heads

Sleepy Heads new track Big Bad World will be revealed at 00:00 on Saturday morning here on Gigslutz. Ahead of its debuting we caught up with Ben, Tom and Alex for an introducing interview, where they explained the close knit dynamics of their four-piece.

BP: It’s easy really, guitarist is my brother, drummer is our cousin, and Al’s played in bands with us for years.

AJ: I’m surrogate family.

TP: Years ago Ben was playing in bands with his mates, I was looking for a band and found Alex on the internet, so I went and auditioned for Alex’s band…

AJ: And out of all the auditions he was the best out of one.

BP: It’s worth mentioning though that we are all stupidly good mates now too. It had just never occurred to us at that point that brothers should play in bands together. Never successful is it…

SW: You’ve got no Gallagher-esque fall outs planned then?

TP: No none of that. I’m not saying we’ve not had practices before where there’s been a full on bust up…

AJ: Me and Will tend to just sit there when these pair are like that.

TP: We’re family though it’s not a case like friends where we could fall out and never speak again.

BP: The best part of it though is with him being my brother he’s honest with me, if write a song and its crap, he’ll say ‘that’s crap’ and we move on.

TP: Honesty is definitely not an issue.

 

The upcoming track displays more diversity in their song writing process. With a flowing melody accompanied with prominent riffs throughout, it displays even more maturity than previous single Sideways which was officially their first as a band. They updated us on how the writing process works for them, and where inspiration comes from.

TP: Being completely blunt it’s all Ben really.

BP: I write the songs, demo them and then the rest of the band will learn it and add bits in you know, like they’ll say I’d rather play this part this way.

TP: Yeah we’ll change bits about to suit how we want to play them.

The writing is different with every song really, I’ll have a certain melody or lyric in my head and I just mess about with that. I really don’t have a process. I like just sitting at home or in the studio and playing abut with these to see where they go.

AJ: We’ve been just jamming before and Ben will take away a chord progression that he liked and demoed it. That’s what happened with ‘Wait On You’.

BP: Exactly. Wait On You, the biggest part of that song is the chorus but we had the lead riffs and verses before the chorus, it’s just a messy process.

SW: Do you take any inspirations for your sound from elsewhere?

BP: Well we were all sick of hearing the same sound every gig really, so we decided we wanted to do a jollier sounding thing with the guitar, like The Vaccines or The Strokes. I wanted us to have a laugh while we are playing the songs.

AJ: We have quite an eclectic mix between us with music

BP: We say Vaccines and Stokes are two big influences musically but if we got a stereo out now we don’t necessarily listen to indie music, we listen to lots of ‘70s stuff really.

 

Sleepy Heads base is in the small town of Cannock, Staffordshire. They spoke about their desire to play on all the big stages, and how being outside of a city can help or hinder that.

BP: I’m all about festivals. I’d love to play all the big festivals, have a good summer playing all of the big ones, Reading, Glastonbury, Y Not. That would be great.

AJ: Oh yeah to play all the major festivals would be great, especially Glasto. That’s always got to be seen as the main one, that would be the dream.

TP: Personally too I’d love to go abroad and play some like Mad Cool, Benicassim. If we could get interest overseas that would be a huge achievement I think.

AJ: Venues wise too I’d have to say CBGB, just purely for the history of the place.

TP: It’d honestly be a dream for me one day to play a headline slot in a sold out Wolves Civic Hall. That would be a milestone. Everyone there who’s followed us, all our families. That would be hard to beat.

SW: Do you think you miss out on some of that being from a small town?

TP: It definitely makes it tougher, you can feel shut off from what’s going on in the cities, and you have to try to break into something. We’ve had people tell us to latch onto the Birmingham scene but we want to stay away from that to be honest.

BP: You’ve got to be honest and we don’t want to pretend to be a Birmingham band. If anything we’d feel more of a Wolverhampton band because we spend lots of time there, we record lots of stuff there.

AJ: I’m actually from Wolvo myself, too.

TP: We definitely feel more towards Wolverhampton than Birmingham, but at the end of the day we’re a Cannock band.

BP: It’s just tough when you see what’s going on when you play somewhere like London, and think ‘we don’t have any of this going on where we’re from’. All you can do is make people care and hope more people will care too. We need more honesty in music, I write stuff about what happens to me, not about big cities. I mean we’re a product at the end of the day, but I’d rather be playing stuff we like to people who enjoy it.

TP: We have an ambition to do something new and different. We don’t want to be a flavour of the month and by pretending to be something we’re not that’s all we’d achieve.

BP: Sometimes it’s tough missing out on cliques, but at the same time we’re not going to get picked up, grouped together for a tour and then dropped like most bands seem to now. We’re just making songs, we don’t want to be grouped in with anyone else or have an affinity with other bands, we’re just Sleepy Heads, come and watch us.

 

SLEEPY HEADS NEW SINGLE ‘BIG BAD WORLD’ WILL BE DEBUTED SATURDAY MORNING AT 00:00. KEEP AN EYE ON THE SITE AT MIDNIGHT TO BE AMONG THE FIRST TO HEAR IT.

 

BP: BEN PHILLIPS (VOCALS, GUITAR)
TP: TOM PHILLIPS (GUITAR)
AJ: ALEX JONES (BASS)
SW: SAM WRIGHT (GIGSLUTZ)

Sam Wright

Sam Wright

Music Journalist, formally at MOJO Magazine. Black Country born, now mainly covering Birmingham and North-West England
Sam Wright

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