“Richter, richter, richter, that’s all you seem to talk about anymore,” complained meg.ie reader Fakey Fakerson. Well we’re almost done with our Richter special. Enemies are another Richter Collective band, musically positioned roughly halfway between the shouting of Jogging and the dancing of Not Squares and they are, of course, playing Le Chéile this Saturday. We spoke with guitarist Lewis..
So, forgive the obvious question but how did you guys get together?
Basically Eoin (guitar) had been writing some music for a while under the name New Man Eoin( NME = Enemies) After Oisin (drums) convinced Eoin to turn it into a band, the four of us went into our studio and started writing songs
What are your main influences? Do you have fairly similar musical tastes?
I think we have a good few bands that we all collectively like but our music tastes do differ quite a bit. I guess if we were to pinpoint some influences for enemies it would be Tortoise, Japandi, Toe, Pinback and maybe a few others that I can’t remember right now
You’re part of the indie label, the Richter Collective, you guys seem like a fairly tightly knit group of bands, that must be a big help?
Richter Collective is a very nice label to be apart of. It seems we all the bands carry each other, When one band starts getting attention it kind of has this knock on affect. It has done wonders for us anyway. I look forward to seeing how the label & bands grow over the next few years
I’ve been following you guys on Twitter lately and you’ve been flat out playing gigs, any particular highlights/low points/downright surreal moments?
Things have been a little hectic for us lately in terms of gigs, You see our bassist has an intense college course for 9 months of the year so we try our best to do as much as we can with the three months we have. The highlights so far for us would have to be, releasing our debut album, touring the UK and France and peoples lovely reaction towards the album. Our low points include our van breaking down, getting towed in Paris and getting a hefty speeding fine AND nearly missing our ferry home, The highlights far surpass the low points, I hope things stay that way.
And you’re off to Japan for a week in September, how did that come about?
Well we were lucky enough to tour Japan last year thanks to our japanese label mates “TOE”, they brought us over for a two week tour and now with the release of our album we have been asked to come back again. We are all very excited to be going back
