We grew up…in Brighton and Italy. Sanch and I met when we were snotty nosed teenagers wearing baggy jeans and pining over Cameron Diaz in The Mask. Alan and Thom are Brighton boys.

It all started when…Sanch and I had been jamming for a few months playing around with ideas and I went on holiday to New York. I met all these awesome people who were really creative, positive and proactive about everything they were doing. As soon as I got back to London we had a chat and decided to invite Thom down to help us write a couple of tracks with a view to recording them as soon as possible. After that it all sort of snowballed. Alan jumped on board in January last year when Johnny Truant split after initially talking about managing us.

If we’re not playing music you’ll find us…I’d like to say getting drunk, starting fights and generally causing trouble. You’re more likely to find us angrily tapping away at our keyboards ill-advisedly ranting about things that upset us on our blog. Either that or getting drunk, avoiding fights and generally whimpering away from any impending trouble.

We can’t perform unless we have…something to tease Thom about. He once applied to some website to become a rent boy which kicked everything off. Any time there was an awkward silence during shows we made sure people knew about his secret ambitions. That joke got boring fairly quickly though so sometimes we make things up just because he’s too shy to protest.

Our three dream festival headliners would be…Cursive are collectively probably our favourite band and they are incredible live. It’d have to be a small festival though because you wouldn’t want to lose the intimacy Tim Kasher shares with his disciples. I’d say The Hives are still one of the best live acts around based on sheer charisma and I saw Frightened Rabbit recently who blew me away. They just left everything they had on stage so they could headline the closing night.

You’ll recognise us by our…facial hair. Definitely too much facial hair going on in this band. It’s unhygienic.

We wish we hadn’t…become involved in a bar brawl with coked up meathead bouncers and bar staff at one of our shows in East London. Sanch wound up being arrested and we lost some gear. Nasty experience. Regardless of who’s at fault if you get involved in anything like that the police take sides with the venue because it makes their job easier.

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt it’s…shop around when dealing with promoters. Too many promoters put on groups of artists who have nothing in common, expect the artists to do all the promotion for them and don’t even cover the cost of transport. They tend to walk away with a tidy profit at the end of every night. Arseholes.

Give us 10 minutes and we’ll cook a great…Thom allegedly used to be a chef but selfishly he’s never made any food for the rest of us.

Buy us a drink and we’ll…probably not buy you one back. We’re not very nice like that.

We’re not really into the whole folk scene but we do like Okkervil river and Frightened Rabbit who are both absolutely awesome.

Our next release will be…a mini-album/longish EP called ‘Equidae’. It’ll be out at some point this summer if everything goes to plan.

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Kick Up The Fire – Cocktails and Gold – download

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