|
 Hyperactive Welsh rockers the Automatic will soon be traipsing up and down the country, headlining the NME Shockwaves Tour with Mumm-ra, the View and the Horrors also on the bill.
“Yeah, that’s going to be quite exciting. We’re treating it just like any other tour. We did a NME tour last year with Boy Kill Boy and Forward Russia and hopefully it’ll be like that,” says drummer, Iwan Griffiths. “When you’re with the same bands everyday you just become friends and just have a really good time. It becomes like a travelling circus, it’s a massive family and it’s really fun”.
After proclaiming that the Horrors ‘suck’ in an interview, is Iwan not worried about the potential fights that might break out?
“It’s kind of like our opinion of their music, but they could brilliant guys so we’re not bothered by the fact they’re going to be there as well,” he says diplomatically.
UK Music tells him that the Horrors retaliated by labelling his band as: “one of the worse bands I’ve ever heard”.
“Fair enough,” he laughs. “Each to their own. I don’t particularly think their music’s that great, but it doesn’t mean we can’t get on. Unless they’re really arsey, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. NME have a habit of wanting to hype everything up just because it sells magazines. It’s more the fact they asked us what we thought. If they hadn’t asked, we wouldn’t have cared”.
This time last year the Automatic (Iwan, Rob Hawkins –vocals/bass, Alex ‘Pennie’ –keyboards, James ‘Frost’ –guitar) were tipped for big things. Their debut album Not Accepted Anywhere has clocked up 200,000 sales to date and they’ve been on the road for most of the year. The release of their anthemic hit single, Monster threw the quartet firmly into the consciousness of the public and into the mainstream. But Iwan says they’ve never considered themselves to be a mass appeal band
“I always thought of us that could maybe play to lots of different types of people, like indie kids and metal kids and they still kind of get what we’re doing. Monster is the poppiest thing we’ve ever done, and I never though it’d be a top ten song, like to five, it kind of surprised me. Also it opened a lot of doors for us. It’s meant we’ve brought in a lot of people that maybe wouldn’t have listened to the rest of our album,” he says. “You can be successful and mainstream. I wouldn’t view it as selling out because we’ve already sold out pretty much by signing a record deal. Ultimately, it means we’re doing well and it means we can keep doing what we’re dong and live of it. That’s the main thing we want to happen is to be able to keep doing this, making music, and by selling records you can do that”.
Then there was there infamous appearance on GMTV. Tired and delirious due to sleep deprivation, they set about trashing the set. They weren’t happy they about being tricked into performing on the show either.
“We weren’t very comfortable with it at all because we weren’t actually told that it was GMTV. If we had known it was GMTV we would have said no, so we were tricked into it. We found out the night before and it was too late to say no, so we turned up and Frost got a bit too drunk, it was very early in the morning, everyone was a bit annoyed. We were planning on f*cking it up a bit, but we weren’t planning on it getting that far. You don’t plan like ‘Oh I’m going to smash a guitar’, but then Frost’s guitar sort of fell off about half way through the song, so he ended up trashing everything and once he started he, quite stupidly, couldn’t stop. It got out of hand, but it genuinely wasn’t something we wanted to be doing”.
Iwan says the band have started some work some new material over the Christmas break and are hoping to start on album number two in the summer.
“We want to just make it sound rawer, make it sound heavier because we felt the first album got pretty poppified and it was quite rushed so we didn’t get to do a lot of the ideas we had. So hopefully we’ll get a bit more time to make it more of an album where you have to listen to the whole album. You know like with some albums, you only listen to one track but you feel like you have to listen to whole album. We want it to be like that,” says the sticksman of the direction he thinks the new record will take. “I think it’ll be more in the rock direction, more in the vein of Foo Fightery type rock, pop kind of thing but keeping in what we do now. We don’t want to be perceived as this pop band which we do at the moment, we seem to be a bit pushed into this corner, but when you come to our gigs you sort of see that we’re a rock band”.
They’ll also be hoping make it big Stateside, something which has alluded many British bands.
“I’ve never been before, so I’m just like looking forward to having this completely crazy experience,” says Iwan. “We’re going to be all over America, because a lot of bands just go there and do a few gigs in New York and LA, but we’re going to be doing everywhere in between as well. I think it’s going to be mental, I’m looking forward to it!”
Their single Raoul is out now and the Automatic will be on tour from the 29th January.
For more info: www.theautomatic.co.uk
Words: Helen Duong
 |
add my address if you hav msn plz ceya dudes