Thursday 14 September 2017

Eight questions with Bare Traps

This Saturday (16th Sep) in London we've got Bare Traps, Parachute For Gordo and Meyou playing at The George Tavern, with a Flash in the Dark DJ set til late. We loved Bare Traps set in Brighton when they played for us at The Alternative Escape and their tunes have been in our headphones since the show - can't wait to have them play for us again! We caught up to learn a little more about the band, get reading the interview below and check out the Facebook event here for more info and tickets for the show!

1. First up, who are Bare Traps?!

In descending order of beardedness: Luke - guitar and delinquency, Sam - vocals and smoulder, Liam - bass and beer, then last and by all means least bearded, Scott - drums, token Essex blonde.

2. How long have you been making music together? What are the band’s biggest musical influences and favourite artists?

In our current incarnation, we've been making music together for ten months. Bare Traps has been knocking around a little bit longer than that, but with two other waste-men that quit the band last year. We mean 'waste-men' in the most affectionate way possible. Now we have two new waste-men. 

Our sound is a mash-up of influences from cool indie shit, like: The Smiths, Bloc Party, Foals; with funky stuff like: Prince, Friendly Fires, Chic; electronic stuff such as: SBTRKT, James Blake, Bonobo; and more obscure math-rock, like: The Fall Of Troy, And So I Watch You From Afar, and Tubelord.

3. We loved having you play a set for us at The Alternative Escape in Brighton back in May - what have you been up to since then? Lots of festivals we hope!

Errrrm, so yeah loads really. We played to an awesome crowd at Fieldview Festival in August. It's a really sick festival with some of our favourite acts of the moment: Clean Cut Kid, Palace, Fickle Friends, and Youngr. We ended up giving a second, impromptu performance in the campsite from the roof of our car in the pouring rain too, which was fun. And wet. The highlight was probably our steel pans player, Rahmel, having to repeatedly pour water out of his pan throughout. Then we played Sundown Festival at the beginning of this month. That was eventful. We snuck on the main stage with Craig David, then nearly got thrown off the site for dropping our trousers in front of security. True story. Headline news though, is that Scott has become a 'flexitarian', which is a poncey hipster way of saying he's a fussy tit.

4. You recently released ‘All In You’ which we think is an absolute tune - anything you can tell us about the writing or recording process for the track?

Ahhh thanks! It was one of those mythical moments where a song seemed to write itself. I (Luke) was just messing around on my guitar before band practice one Sunday morning, and happened to come up with the main riff. When we got to rehearsal, I began playing the riff while we were setting up. Scott asked what it was. I shrugged. We dicked about with it for half an hour, got excited like a bunch of little girls, then voila - All In You was born. The rest is history blah blah blah.


5. You’re playing at The George Tavern for us this Saturday (16th Sep) - what should we expect from the show?!

About thirty-five minutes of music, interspersed with awkward silences, technical difficulties, anxious tuning of guitars, terrible attempts to be funny, futile attempts at asking the audience to come closer to the stage, and bad dancing. 

The thirty-five minutes of music will be sick though. Honestly, our music's awesome. My mum said so and she likes Abba.

6. Who is your audience and how do you connect with fans - all the usual social media?! Any crazy, fun, exciting stories about your fans are very welcome!

Our "fans" are Sam and Liam's friends. That's why we asked them to join the band - so they'll bring people to our shows. Yeah, we use social media. Tinder mainly. At Sundown Festival this year, a fan of ours got me (Luke) to sign her forehead, then randomly, and quite unannounced, showed me her lady garden, which funnily enough had a flower tattooed on it. 

For the avoidance of any issues: the other members of the band, all of whom have girlfriends, were absolutely nowhere near this incident. Nowhere near at all. In fact, I think they'd already packed up and gone home. Honest. 

Liam, I'm still waiting for you to send me those photos.

7. Describe your dream gig to us! Any venues that you’re desperate to play in London or further afield? Any artists you’d love to collaborate with on a performance?

Dream gig has got to be headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glasto really hasn't it?! Errm, London venues? I think we're ready for Wembley Stadium actually. Maybe we could play in the foyer at half-time or something. Would be great to collaborate with Stormzy. He could spit a grimy verse on one of our songs like he did with Little Mix. We'd be worried about ruining his credibility though, so maybe not.

8. As Summer comes to a close and the cold weather sweeps in… what does the rest of the year hold for you… we hope that new music is in the pipeline!

Some new music and some old music actually. I mentioned earlier that we swapped the two old waste-men for the two new waste-men. Well, we thought it would be cool to re-record some of our older tunes with the new guys, which we've done. We've totally re-recorded them; changed the instrumentation in places, used different production techniques - it sounds the tits! We're going to be recording a new single too, so all being well, we'll be dropping a new record before the year is out. We've got some cool gigs coming up too, including our first international show, which will be in the south of France. Got to make the best of that shit before Brexit you know!

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