Interview with Adelaide

Every once in a while a band come along that will completely blow you away and this UK based 5 piece did just that. First listen to Adelaide’s EP ‘Journals’ and I was hooked. We managed to catch up with ‘The Welsh Wonder’ David Williams and find out some more about the band.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
We are Adelaide, a band of brothers with one mission, and one mission only, to change the face of modern music through the eloquent and graceful tones of jazz flute.

2. How did you get started?
The band originally consisted of singer Daniel Nash, guitarist John Lloyd, and drummer David Fee, who were known as Anti-Kid. They were a 3 piece acapella group, replicating songs from such great acts as White Snake, Poison, Toto, Status Quo etc, before deciding to break into fully live music. They recruited bass player Josh Leach in September ’09, before finding guitarist David Williams as recently as February this year. Needless to say, the boys feel they should have stuck with the acapella gig.

3. Favourite music and why?
We don’t like to give typical answers to this kind of question because so often bands write things like “Blink 182” or “Green Day” or “Nirvana” because they “changed my life!” We’re not about that, we have those kinds of bands in our lives, but who wants to hear the norm. So we’re sticking by our guns. As a band, we’d have to say our favourite music comes from the legendary Neil Diamond and our good friends from Finland “Lordi,” simply because those mother fuckers didn’t just change music, they changed the fucking Eurovision!

 
4. Favourite book and why?
We have two, the “How to fly a Boeing 747 for dummies!” as we all wish we were Bruce Dickinson, able to fly our band anywhere we want whenever we want, and the “Where’s Wally?” books, as its been 7 years now, Dave (Fee) still can’t find Wally, it’s awesome!

 
5. Favourite film and why?
“Animal Farm.” Watch it, it speaks for itself.

6. Best experience in the business?
We have several experiences, both individual and shared. For Dan, John, and Dave, it was selling out the Mick Jagger centre in Dartford. It’s got a 700 person capacity, and they rammed it, and still had about 150 people waiting outside!! For me it was being on a sold out tour with Bowling For Soup, was fucking awesome!

7. Tell our readers an interesting fact about your band?
Only our bass player Josh, has actually been to Australia (home to the city of Adelaide). The rest of us are scumbags and only came up with the band name after our guitarist John saw it on a road sign in Kent, fucking classy!

8. Best thing about coming from Wales?
I’m actually the only person in the band from Wales, so I’ll take this one. The one thing I love about coming from Wales, especially South Wales, is the music scene. I tell the boys all the time on how much they’ve missed out on. I remember being 16 and just after starting college; I started sneaking in to Le Pub and TJs in Newport for club nights, and just being blown away by all the different kinds of people you’d find out on a Friday and Saturday. There were skaters, scene kids, emo kids, nu-metal kids, goths, punks and rockers, all just getting on it and having a good time. I was always in bands growing up, so it was awesome to meet more like minded people who were either in bands themselves or  just loved watching them, it just gave you a sense of belonging. When I turned 18 I started going to Metros in Cardiff as well as hitting up the Clwb Ifor Bach, and the Barfly. They were fucking awesome times! Every time I come home I always try and get to Newport or Cardiff to see all my old friends, and with the amount of Welsh talent that’s broken through over the last few years, I’m glad to say that I grew up in it all.

 
9. Who are your role models?
Paul Rudd and Sean William Scott, the small kid that keeps swearing and that kid that was in Superbad. Fucking awesome film!

10. Hardest thing about the current business?
We’d say the hardest thing about the current music business is probably the same thing it’s always been, just getting the initial break that will take your band forward. The music business has changed an astonishingly large amount in the last few years, but in doing so it has also created massive opportunities for any band looking to break. Things like myspace, purevolume, and youtube have only helped people get their music seen by the public, which therefore also means there’s more chance of their music being noticed by the industry. We’re the same as any band, and utilise all these outlets to our advantage, as well as playing our arses off around the country in the hope that the right people sit back and take notice. There maybe more avenues for people to push their music down, but the same factors still apply, you have to be good enough.

Check out the band here www.myspace.com/adelaideuk for a listen to the tracks and tour dates and you can pick up a copy of the bands “Journals” EP on iTunes and right here along with some shirts http://weareadelaide.bigcartel.com/.

Words: Paul Esp