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 The
Sunshine Underground story really began six years ago when the four- piece,
comprising of Craig Wellington (lead singer), Daley Smith (bassist), Matthew
Gwilt (drummer) Stuart Jones (guitarist) made the move from the quiet town of Shrewsbury to the more happening northern city of Leeds.
“Basically
our drummer went to university in Leeds just
as we were getting the band started, we’d only had a couple of rehearsals
really then he left. Then we tried to find a replacement but it didn’t really
work. The only way our band worked was
with us four in a room together. It made sense to get out of a town where there
weren’t any real possibilities for a young band anyway,” recalls lead Craig. "We
had no idea there was such a good music scene in Leeds.
We only really went there become we were bored of our home town and our drummer
said it was good. We met a few promoters a long the way and it just seemed to
happen at the right place at the right time. The good thing about Leeds is that is the diverse range of bands and they’re
all really different”.
Things
are going well for them. They’ve just completed a tour of Europe and are
currently touring the UK.
“It
was good. It as a tour of Germany and Amsterdam which was quite surprising because
we weren’t sure how we were going to go down, but there were people that knew
us and the gigs were quite important so it was good,” says Craig. “This time we
had a real tour bus, but there’ve been a few missions to get to gigs on time. I
think we’ve worked for it put it this way!”
They’re
also preparing for the re-release of their single Commercial Breakdown which originally
was not widely available.
“We’ve
got a good package for it. We’ve got B sides and a new video etc,” explains
Craig. “It was our first single release
and we didn’t really make many copies of it as well, but it did better than we
expected so it was always in the pipeline that we were going to re-release it
again in the future. It’s just label stuff and you have to do it”.
Their
debut album Raise The Alarm was released back in August to critical acclaim.
However, as Craig would tell us, the writing process began three years ago and
was recorded in Brixton.
“We’d
been doing this album for three years really but we threw everything out two
years ago and started again It took a while to find the sound we’ve evolved
into. It’s like what one person likes
the other person hates I think we’ve thrown away three times as many songs as
we’ve kept because no one else wants to play them!” remembers Craig. “It was
recorded over a few stages. We’d done
Commercial Breakdown ages ago, like a year ago, and we did Put You In Your
Place around the same time, as well. So it was just a case of remixing those
tunes and then we went to Brixton for a couple of weeks and sort of lived in
the studio there for a couple of weeks to write the rest of it. It was just fun to put in loads of different ideas. You kind
of realise what the songs are about. You’ve been playing them live for so long
and then you get into the studio and you realise how good the songs actually
are. You ‘re able to weigh them up in the studio. We’re always thinking up different ways of
singing and I’m always changing the lyrics before we’re putting them down as
well. We had a good energy in the studio and drank a lot of red wine.”
Craig
reveals that the band are looking forward to writing new material which they
been barely able to do with their hectic touring schedule.
“There’s
four quite opinionated people in the band as well it hard in a way to write
music, but the end results are always really good. It is basically just four or
five people just throwing stuff around the place,” he says. ”I just want to
carry on doing want we’re doing. Obviously we’ll have to step up a level to be able
to do that but hopefully the future holds a few more albums wicked gigs”.
Commercial
Breakdown is out on the 30th October.
For more info: www.thesunshineunderground.co.uk
Words: Helen Duong
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