The Drums Interview

2010 has been an eventful year for The Drums, at the start of the year they were highlighted by NME and Clash magazine as ones to watch. In the summer they were regulars on the festival circuit, playing at Leeds, Reading and Glastonbury as well as embarking on a tour encompassing Europe, America and Japan. I chatted to the extremely polite drummer Connor Hanwick while the band were on their way down to London to play a couple of gigs at the tail end of their mammoth tour.

For anybody who hasn’t heard of the band how do you describe yourselves?

I guess that’s a good question, I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t go around telling people to listen to my own band but I guess we are a pop band. We are a rock and roll band in the traditional sense and we are a pop band in terms of our accessibility.

It’s not really been the ‘in’ thing for a band to come along and say, “we are a pop band” so its quite refreshing for a band to do that.

We certainly don’t try and hide anything, whether or not it’s the cool thing to call yourselves that. While we are making music we certainly aren’t concerned about what the hip thing is right now. We are just writing pop songs, if you listen to our record its very traditional rock and roll, partly in the vain of the Zombies while also being very pop driven.

Its been a whirlwind couple of years for you, you have just been blasted into musical culture, have you been able to process it all yet?

For the first time in the last couple of weeks we have felt like that. We did a tour in America in September and that was a really big part in making us sort of detach from the past year and a half and look forward. I think we needed to detach like that in order to understand where we are musically, understand what sort of band we are, all the things we have actually learned in the last two months.

There was quite a lot of hype surrounding the band, did that put lots of pressure on you?

More than anything most of it was annoying. It’s great that more people hear about you, but is it better to have more people hear about you when they hear about you with preconceptions or negative connotations? The word hype goes in the same category as the word pop, if you call someone a hype band or a buzz band it doesn’t normally bode well for them. If they are actually a good band they won’t have a problem transcending that, so it’s sort of an annoying word.

Do you think you have come out of that now and proven yourselves as a really great band?

I think our record did that. We were hyped but then we put out our record and we are about to work on another record so to me that sort of means that we have superseded the hype in a way. I don’t think there is as much hype or buzz around us now people have accepted the idea that we are part of the musical world and are out there.

You have done some amazing gigs this year, are there any that have really stood out?

Yeah definitely, going to Reading and Leeds was a big one for us. A lot of my favourite shows where the smaller ones, we did a show at the Barfly in Camden in August which was one of my favourite shows.

What’s in store for next year?

After this tour is done at the end of December we will take January to write the next record, and then after that we will do some touring in America, come back to Europe, Japan, I don’t see us touring as extensively as this year, it seems as though at that point it would seem counter productive.

Considering you have done so well for yourselves what advice would you give to bands trying to make it?

I don’t know, probably tell them to stop trying to make it. When bands intentions are clear, I mean sincerity is contagious and I think people can read it. When your band is just trying to make it as a band I don’t think its ever going happen, well it has, bands have made it from ulterior motives other than music but I would just say if you want to have your music heard, care about your music. Care more about your music than you do NME or whoever.

Published in the Metro and Yorkshire Evening Post