In our latest Band Spotlight, we talk to Daniel Mawer from Hull post-punk fivesome La Bête Blooms about new music, his city’s music scene and the band’s main inspirations. Nice.
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S] Talk us through the new material, and how you’ve developed as a band over the last year?
As soon as our guitarist John joined the band it became natural to us to progressively get louder and heavier, especially because his amp is always turned up to 11 in practise, there was no way we could ever get him to turn the volume down so all we could do was buy earplugs and turn the volume up ourselves!
We work with a producer called Matt Peel who’s definitely helped us develop, his affection towards fuzz and feedback are obvious in his production, and our progression into heavier stuff made it a good match for our next EP. The past year I’ve used writing as a cathartic exercise, it’s been really helpful.
The whole EP felt like I was getting a lot of stuff off my chest and I hope the songs replicate that better than anything we’ve done before.
S] What are your biggest challenges as a band right now?
I consider us pretty lucky to work the way we do, we’ve never had any pressure from anyone to do anything but be ourselves, so our challenges are minuscule in comparison to hundreds of bands in The UK who currently hold some sort of spotlight or pressure from any industry.
We’ve always been outsiders looking in, and I suppose that’s a challenge in itself, because we want to feel like we’re always reaching a bigger audience, but to do that with only a basic understanding of how the industry works, and without any management, often means spending a lot of our own money, and the pressure we put on ourselves to exceed whatever we’ve done before means spending more each time which is sometimes tricky to explain to family and friends when they fancy a holiday abroad and you’ve spent your last penny on recording!
Thankfully we’ve been insanely lucky to not only have The Adult Teeth Recording Company work with us, but now Warren Records too, who with funding from The PRS Foundation have helped developed a team of people that are looking after us!
S] Talk us through the inspirations behind ‘Breaking In’?
Since I can remember, I’ve always made really rash decisions. I basically have moments of madness, like an out of body experience, I’m not sure whether it’s a panic attack or that a red mist clouds my judgement, either way I often end up doing something completely ridiculous and thoughtless for no reason whatsoever. Usually an hour or so later I think to myself ‘why the hell did I do that?!’
I do it so often that it’s easy to write about, an animalistic instinct that has me doing something insane, in this instance, breaking into someone’s house!
S] Visuals seem to be important to the band, you put a tonne of effort into your videos etc – it seems like a bit of an art project as well as music, is this accurate?
I’m so glad you think that, we love putting visuals to what we do, it’s important sometimes to help get the bands point or emotion across. My only problem is I don’t have an artistic bone in my body, I’m utterly useless, thankfully we’ve used artists and videographers like Matt Molson, Josh Moore, Jake Machen, Sadie Bryant and most recently Jazz Harbord who’ve helped us massively.
Jazz recently finished our EP artwork, its so fun working with her, she understands (or at least pretends to understand) the mindless rambles I come out with when I’m trying to explain what we’re looking for. I feel like we’re making strides with artwork and videos, and it is becoming more of an art project then ever before which, when you’re working with great Hull artists is a really exciting and fun thing to be doing.
S] What do you think of Hull’s music scene right now?
Hull’s music scene seems better than ever right now, we’ve got some amazing bands and artists, probably the best group of musicians the city has produced in a long time!
The city is isolated, it doesn’t have a lot of links with other cities or into the music industry, and I think that’s been detrimental in the past, a lot of very talented bands have been and gone in Hull, without playing more than a handful of gigs out of the city because for whatever reason trying to get an opening slot in a venue 45 minutes away seemed an impossible task when there’s no links there! For bands starting out, Hull can feel like a glass ceiling where there’s no where else to go once you’ve played every venue.
But thanks to a lot of hard work from promoters, organisations and labels working in Hull, bands are breaking through into the industry’s consciousness for the first time in over a decade, and hopefully more will thrive for the city in 2017 as part of our city of culture year.
S] Who are the bands that LBB is championing from the area, and beyond?
Our personal favourites are Life, and The Hubbards. Mez from Life has always been massively supportive of us and I can’t thank him enough, the band are undoubtedly one of the hardest working acts I’ve ever come across.
The Hubbards are insanely talented, it’s utterly baffling to me that they’re not all over Radio 1, the singles they’ve released speak for themselves, fingers crossed they’ll continue on and eventually get the recognition I think they deserve.
Hull has its own noisy collective of bands who are really inspirational, Vulgarians, No Nothings, Lumer, Dead Hormones as well as a few others. Not forgetting bands like The Fronteers who are doing really well at the moment, as well as singer songwriters like Jack Conman, there’s a lot of good stuff about.
S] What are your biggest plans for the rest of the year?
‘Breaking In’ is released at the end of October and then it’s onto releasing the EP, we can’t wait for people to hear it, we recorded it in February so to finally have it out will feel like a big relief.
S] What advice would you give to other emerging bands coming out of Hull?
When we first started in Hull, there really was no pressure but of that of which we put on ourselves, so we could do whatever we wanted and be really rubbish for as long as we liked, we just loved writing and performing so much, the rest didn’t – and still doesn’t – really matter.
If you have a passion for anything, just go out and do it, don’t worry about what other people think, as long as you’re nice to everyone along the way, then there’s really no negatives to be had from getting up on any stage and doing something you love.
