Q & A with Gorgeous Colours

Gorgeous Colours are a great Dublin five-piece with an unusual plan for funding their new E.P. Meg.ie spoke to band member Tim about their plans, influences, gigging and the rest..

So first off you’re adopting a bit of a different approach to funding your new EP, can you fill the good meg.ie readers in on that?

Yeah, we’re trying out a fan-funding model, where people buy a copy of the EP in advance in return for getting extra stuff (bonus tracks, their name in the credits, that kind of thing). We’re also offering a few other pledge options, such as the chance to join us on stage at the launch of the EP, and the chance to challenge us in a five-a-side football game. It’s a bit experimental so we’ll see how it goes! We put the idea out a few weeks ago via our mailing list/facebook/blog and the response so far has been excellent, people seem really eager to get involved.

We’ve seen other bands do things along these lines and it seems like a really good way to go. From our point of view, it makes a lot more sense than a bank loan and will hopefully let us get the rest of the recording and production done without any debt. Hopefully it also gives our fans and friends a chance to support us and get our music in a way that’s a bit more personal and fun than just walking into a store and picking up a CD.

Are you guys studying/working at the moment? Is it hard to strike the balance between band commitments and ‘life’ commitments?

Some of us are working, some of us got poked in the eye by the recession. I just finished doing a masters degree in literature, partly because I couldn’t get a full time job and also because I’d spent the previous few years doing low paid jobs in order to fund band stuff, and I wanted a break from that. We weren’t as busy with the band last year (our previous drummer left to go back to his native France and it took us a long time to replace him) so I was able to find the time to do it.

It’s obviously the biggest obstacle for pretty much any band – you want to spend as much time working on music as possible, but you still need to pay the rent somehow. We’ve learned to balance things and to plan around other commitments (we’ve gotten a bit more skilled at demoing ideas at home and emailing them to each other for example, which helps speed up the writing process) but our dream is still to do this for a living and to spend all our time writing, recording and touring. Hopefully we’ll get there someday.

Any plans for gigging over the rest of the year?

Yes. Our EP launch will be on October 9th in Crawdaddy and from then on we’ll hopefully be gigging around the country. Obviously we’ll be putting details of all these on our various web pages when they’re confirmed…if people want to be kept informed they can sign up to our mailing list here or “like” us on facebook.

WARNING CLICHED INFLUENCES QUESTION…So what are your biggest influences? Do you all have your own personal passions music-wise or are you all singing from more or less the same hymnsheet?

We’re sort of all over the place in terms of influences – between us we listen to blues, techno, funk, hip-hop and many, many, many other things. We all agree on certain stuff though, and some artists like Neil Young, Dylan, and The Beach Boys will always be influences. We’re always sending each other links to new bands and going to gigs together, so in that way we’ve all shaped one another’s taste.

In terms of more recent stuff that excites us, we all like bands like Grizzly Bear, The Walkmen and Spoon – bands that have a classic sound and are traditional rock bands to some extent, but have also
experimented a lot and developed a style that’s different and unique to them.

What are you listening to in particular at the moment?

Personally I’m listening to a lot of old funk and soul at the moment – Isaac Hayes, Funkadelic, Shuggie Otis. We’ve all been listening to the new albums by Beach House and Caribou, they’re definitely two of the best this year. Dam-Funk and Javelin have some great tunes too. Simon was trying to get us into Endless Boogie too, but without much success…

Finally, every band worth their salt has a mad-gigging story or two, give us one of yours….go on…do it…

I’m not sure if we have anything that mad, to be honest. We’ve definitely played our share of rubbish gigs where the audience consisted of the sound engineer and one or two others: they tend to be the maddest just in terms of the surreal feeling you get, like you’re playing at a church fair.

In recent times the one that stands out in my mind is the one we did in Eamon Dorans with these guys. It was on the same night as the Champions League final so there were approximately three people sitting down the back. The count was doing fake endings to songs, getting these three people (and us) to do call and response, etc. It was pretty unforgettable.

By Kev Donnellan

For anyone interested in getting involved with the Gorgeous Colours E.P project contact details are below..

thegorgeouscolours.blogspot.com/
Email: thegorgeouscolours@gmail.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheGorgeousColours