Wednesday 15th August 2012
Camden Underworld, London
Burn the Fleet and Adelaide both play well to the small crowd, but it’s easy to see it’s early days still for both of these bands. There are a few fans in crowd (some more obviously related to the band than others), but they’re relatively new here and they’re mostly unknown. The small crowd watch, but nobody seems to really know what’s going on.
The night still feels quite young by the time the final support rocks to the stage. Flood of Red are used to playing all other the country and London is no exception. The crowd receives the band well and they play well despite a recent line up change (guitarist Calum Doris had just announced his departure from the band). They seem to accumulate more gismos and gadgets with each tour and this time we’re treated to a pedal controlled flashing light on the second drum kit.
They play as well as expected and chuck in some new noise for their fans, a sweet show and a sweet end to this tour for them.
Night Verses take to the stage and there are no more than 50 people in the room. This does not stop the band from going at it tooth and nail. 110% from every band member has the tiny crowd mesmerised and they play with a band who feel like they’ve been around the block a bit. Except as a unit we’re told this is only their 14th ever show together and most of those have been on this small UK tour for the US band.
If they can rock this small venue that much, imagine what they could do to the likes of festival stages? (They did recently play Hevy Festival).
A thoroughly enjoyable small time gig where good music was showcased and no fancy effects were needed. This was just pure rock at it’s best.
9/10
Introduce yourselves to the UK and tell us what you’re all about
I’m Douglas, I sing for the band Night Verses. And I think what Night Verses is all about is kind of being stoked to make music, to push the bar for ourselves and as musicians, and tour the world.
Tell us about the moment you met the band and everything fell into place
I had moved from New York which is where I lived. I had lived there for the past 10 years. A couple years ago I had moved to California, to Hollywood; to kind of get away from things that were happening in my life at the time. I moved away unexpectedly and left behind a whole bunch of stuff and whole bunch of loved ones. But I kinda needed to do it to regroup and clear my head and I didn’t really wanna have anything to do with music at that time but I had a mutual friend of the band and myself who was like “you should come to this show that I’m putting together, there’s a band that I think you’ll really like”. I didn’t wanna go at all. I didn’t really wanna deal with it. But I went and the band wound up being Night Verses and they were instrumental at the time. And it was a really cool thing that I went because I wasn’t expecting to go and my mind blown by these 3 dudes. And now here we are. We pretty much met by chance I guess and I’m happy it happened.
You released your EP ‘Out of the Sky’ for free earlier this year, why did you do it for free?
A lot of people ask us that and it’s kinda like hard to give a specific answer because there’s obviously a bunch of reasons why. But I think the main reason for wanting to do it was we just wanted to show people that our first initial thought of coming out; introducing ourselves, isn’t to like make money or anything like that. Obviously the band becomes a business and stuff like that. But I think what we wanted people to see, what we wanted people to focus on, for us, is just the fact that we’re just dudes that wanna play music and we’re trying to make something different for ourselves and we just hope that people enjoy it. I think the main reason is probably just that, you can still be a band and still do it for the right reasons and not always think about money and that business side of things, or getting on certain things to look cool or whatever. We just dudes who like playing.
What was it like performing at your first UK festival together at Hevy?
It was cool. It’s cool cause we were the third band on that day. It was the ‘hangover day’ which is what everyone tells us. But we don’t care. It was fucking awesome. It was really nice to just hang out. It was such beautiful weather. We had a few friends from back home. It was really cool to just be in that atmosphere with everything and just kinda know that it’s a nice start for the band and be like this is our lives, this is what we wanna do for the rest of our lives and we’re enjoying the weather in another country. We don’t care if it’s a couple hundred people watching or we don’t care if it’s thousands or if it’s ten people. It was just nice to wake up that morning and play on a main stage, which was very nice and we thank everyone for that. It was just super cool to be a part of it I guess.
How have you found your first UK tour and the crowd responses?
Amazing. Obviously they’re not the biggest shows yet, but it’s really cool to see the growth of it. And it’s really cool to see more and more people talking about us when they leave the show. Not every show has been like the most packed but just to know that there are kids singing along and kids watching and stuff like that. You can tell something’s building and that’s all we wanna do. We just wanna build it up from the ground up because as people we like to all work for everything. It’s really cool to play in front of 50 or like 100 kids our first tour; which is more than expected. It’s all we could ask for, that makes us so happy. But to be able to go home and check our social media and see people responding to us right away and being like “it’s the best gig we’ve ever seen” or whatever. A lot of people were having the same reaction which is kind of above and beyond what we thought people were gonna even think. We just want people to enjoy. But for people to say it’s something new and refreshing. There’s this whole thing where we’re getting comments like “Your show is the best show we’ve been to in years”. It’s pretty rad. That’s all we wanted and it’s happening beyond what we expected.
How does it differ from the shows back home?
Well the shows back home have been really well also. They’ve gone close to selling out. We’ve only done three back home, but I think the difference would probably have to be that it’s not as over saturated over here with bands doing it for the wrong reasons. Again we just do it for ourselves, so it doesn’t really matter to us. But it’s nice to come here as a new unit together and do things together as a family and a band, then go back to the states and have the experience we’re having under our belts to like attempt to do what we wanna do there. Basically everywhere is looked equally, but we’re just doing it strategically to where I feel and we feel that it’ll just go in the direction we want to shape it and mould it by the way we’re starting out.
What’s next for the band?
When we go home, we have a New York show in 2 days. Then they fly back to California where they live. Then I fly back there. We have a Cali show. Then we’re figuring out writing a record which we’re pretty much figured out with everything. We have a bunch of labels we’re talking to, But no matter what; the machine keeps turning and it doesn’t matter whether we’re touring, figuring out a label or demoing new stuff for ourselves. Everything is just happening all at once and it’s just not stopping. I can’t say exactly what specifically, but everything is being taken care of.
If you could go back to any era, what would you pick and why?
I mean it’s crazy because the historical part of me that wants to go way back in time, but then there’s the punk rock culture of me that’s a huge reason why I love coming to the UK is because of all that. It would’ve been nice to grown up with the resistance I guess, the punk rock kinda vibe which I grew up on years and years later. It would’ve been nice to actually be a part of that. I’d probably chose that. Then if not, I’d like to see what was up with like dinosaurs and stuff. I don’t know anything about it but I’d be stoked to go there and be like “wow this is fucked up. There are like birds that are the size of airplanes”. I would wanna somehow go back in time and figure out I could go forward in time. I’d probably go to the future and I’d go to an underwater world where I could live with sharks. I’ll just go everywhere. World class hyper-traveller.
Images courtesy of: Sarah Ireland
