The Dawn Parade
Interviewing The Dawn Parade might seem like an easy task but when we finally catch up with them at the Sheffield Casbah, we reminisce about the two previous times we've already tried to conduct this chat. Third time lucky?
For those of you not in the know, The Dawn Parade, just like Miss Black America, hail from Bury St Edmunds (what is it with that place?!?) and produce the most beautiful, heartfelt, epic music that you'll hear this year. Made up of Greg (vocals, guitar, leather trousers), Ben (drums and hair), Barney (bass and the pulling of sexy faces) and Mole (scarily brilliant guitar), they've already had two releases this year - 'Good Luck Olivia' and the 'Electric Fence Your Gentleness' EP plus a session for John Peel.
Who are The Dawn Parade, how did you form and why?
So finally, after three attempts, we managed to finish the interview without a hitch, we leave to cautiously carry the dictaphone and tape home, for fear it'll be stolen by small children or something...
The Dawn Parade split in August 2003.For more info on what the members are up to at the moment check out www.thedawnparade.com
Greg: We are four instinctive loners forced to spend all our time in one tiny car, or possibly two and in motorway service stations wasting our lives away on some dream which may or may not come true.
Mole: And any coincidence to Knight Rider is just an accident.
How did you form?
G: I decided at the age of 15 to beat a retreat from this world and took up exclusive residence in my bedroom, my mother used to pass food under the door to me on a tray for about 3 years and when I finally came out of hibernation...
M: One day she just put me under there!
G: Yeah, and that's how I met Nick! So we decided as we were in there we had nothing else to do so we'd form a band. So we went out looking for pals and when we were wandering down fate's dusty highway we came across Ben and then later Barney. That was us, that was The Dawn Parade. We began with lofty ambitions of busking around Europe, and we went busking - this is just me and Nick, we went busking on Felixstowe promenade on bank holiday Monday in Easter one year and we made so little money that we quit busking and decided we'd be the best rock n roll band on the planet instead.
M: We actually made nothing.
G: We actually made a loss because we bought ice cream for these little kids who listened to us out of despair.
M: We were scared they'd beat us up!
Barney: I wasn't there at that stage, I only joined...
G: You only joined when the going got good.
B: I was going to say the going only got good when I joined. My style and pernash...
G: We began with the dream of writing songs that would infuse people's lives with colour and passion and now we really just exist as an excuse for Barney just to preen himself and be put on display to a hungry world.
How would you describe your sound?
G: I'd probably just use really long words that not many people really understood in an effort to confuse the issue so I didn't have to properly answer the question.
B: What was the question?
How would you describe your sound?
G: Barney would describe it by the looks of things in kind of hand gestures that recall the celebrated Australian mammal the kangaroo.
You've toured extensively over the last year - do you think it's important to do that and have you got any fear of burnout?
G: I think it's, I dunno, if you wanna tour, go and tour. No one can stop you doing it. We've not had, we've not got a label or anything like that. We've done it by simply, we had jobs, we saved a bit of money, we don't have lives so we had nothing to spend the money on so what else are we gonna do? None of us have any friends or anything like that so...
Amid protests, Barney would like us to point out he has got friends.
G: He hasn't, he's got no friends at all. He's only got one friend and he doesn't even come to our gigs! Not even our most important ones!
B: He sits with his girlfriend in a fucking empty house. He abandoned me!
G: He is real though, it's only me and Moley that have got friends in our heads. I've got girls in my head, friends in my head, everything.
What's been the highlights and low lights of touring so far?
G: The low light was today, when we spent the entire day in a service station off the M1 on the basis that if we went to Sheffield we'd have to pay to park and if we stayed in Nottingham we'd have to pay to park.
M: I think it was the basis that we had nothing to do in Sheffield.
G: The highlight of anything we've ever done on tour is probably being in Cardiff at the Barfly and playing to 3 people and for some reason which I honestly don't know, it was probably the best feeling of my whole life and I couldn't tell you why. I think it was the most I ever needed to be in a band and needed it to be good and it was, so everything came through, the band came through and that was it.
Who or what are your main influences when it comes to writing?
G: My main influences are, anything which is genuine, anything which has a loathing of phoniness and falseness which runs through it's blood, anything that's intelligent or doesn't shy away from ambition, so things like Douglas Copeland, JD Salenger, I like the Liverpool poets, Brian Pattern, I like Philip Larkin, I like Shelly. Musically I like people like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, anyone that you get the feeling that what they wrote they wrote because they had something they had stuck in their head and they had to get it out and they wrote for that reason rather than they were writing because they wanted to be a famous superstar.
The last EP was produced by Gavin Monaghan, how did working with him come about?
G: A guy basically who's obsessed with our band, a regrettable worm of a human being called Seymour Glass was recording with his regrettable worm band, the Miss Black American's and phoned me up one day on his mobile while exciting himself on the exercise bike from the Magic Garden studios in Wolverhampton to tell me that he loved The Dawn Parade and that we should be hugely successful and that we were the best band in the world and he accidentally mentioned that they were recording with Gavin Monaghan and that he'd pass on our demo. So he did so and there it was, it went from there.
If you could have anyone produce you, who would it be?
G: me personally I have Jim Steinmen who produced Meatloaf just coz he's the most shameless epic producer in the world. In fact I'd bring Richard Wagner back from the grave and have him as our producer.
What about an album?
G: We've got to get a record deal first! The plan is to stay on the road forever coz it's strange kind of heaven, plus it has the bonus that lots of people see you. If you play all right and you're prepared to try and communicate ideas to people and people are prepared to listen, that was really good tonight, playing in Sheffield, that was cool. As even if people were only there because they were drunk and just wanted to dance, that was cool. It was good. We'll just do that and then possibly we'll reach old age still touring in a hired car but if we do then that's what happened, that's the way it worked out. That's a decision that was made a long time ago that we'll be in it to the death and what happens will happen. Somewhere along the line you're hitting your head on a brick wall you realise whether the wall comes down or not is not the point any more. You're fighting against yourself, whether you're going to stop banging your head on the wall. If you can internalise that little struggle then hopefully you're on the right track. Anyone who's in it for any other reason and anyone who potentially's going to quit at some point, well they shouldn't be in it to start with. Let them go and get a proper job with lots of money, have a decent life and have some friends, do all that sort of stuff.
What was it like doing the Peel session? Are you happy you had his support?
G: John Peel has been an angel, he's been our guardian angel. He played our first single which was crap, he played our second single which was good, it was brilliant, it was a great day. We broke down on the M11 as we usually do in our van which subsequently has never recovered. We got there really late, the whole thing was done in a rush, the guy who produced it was brilliant, pleased with how it came out and the best thing about the whole day was that at the BBC you can have free coffee and we'd just been on the road for 8 weeks and had no money and it was a luxury for us if we could afford a tin of Heinz beans instead of Waitrose beans or Sainsbury's beans that night, so to have free coffee all day was great. So I drank about 100 cups so I spent the whole day quite edgy but other than that it was great.
B: We saw that each of the coffee filters cost 85p to use and we just had then free all day.
M: God we got good value out of that deal.
So that's what the license fee's gone on.
B: Then we gave Ben a mega coffee that involved 2 expressos and 8 brown sugars and 8 white sugars...
Ben: And I was so happy for the rest of the day...
G: Safe in the knowledge...
Ben: Happy that I was about to have palpitations while drumming!
G: To us, free coffee means a lot.
B: It means we get to drink coffee.
Ben: I like coffee.
G: Bridge to next question...
What's your favourite Dawn Parade song?
G: I probably can't answer that coz I write all of them and they're like my little children. Choosing my favourite child would be unthinkable.
Well, house is on fire, gotta rescue one...
G: I couldn't...
M: I couldn't answer either, they're like distant cousin's to me...
G: They're like cousin's who get locked in the loft coz they can't quite fit in with normal society so they have to be locked away in shame by a distant uncle.
Ben: 'The Passion'.
G: That's your favourite?
Ben: Well I like them all but I'm quite enjoying playing 'Strung Out On Nowhere'.
G: My favourite to play at the moment is 'The Passion'.
Which one song do you wish you'd written?
B: 'The Passion'!
G: There's nothing that anyone else has written that I'd really like to have written coz it wouldn't be, I don't really like, there's things other people have written that are obviously great songs that I admire for their craft or whatever. So something like 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye' by Softcell, probably would have most like to have written that as it's probably my favourite song.
If you could emulate the career of one band or artist, who would it be and why?
G: Of anyone contemporary, U2 coz they've sold the most records, following them, REM coz they've sold the second most records, so just anyone who's sold a lot of records, The Eagles, they had the biggest selling record, follow them I guess. Don't really want to emulate anybody. What we do is us, so we'll see where it goes. I used to, a couple of years ago, before we really like put our nose to the grind, I had people who I kind of held up as, maybe their first record sold a lot, someone like Guns n Roses who sold 16 million I think it was, first record, or bands like the Rolling Stones who've been huge. But you find out that so much of it is just luck, you know, we'd like to sell the most records of anyone ever. Every band should think that. If they don't then why bother? But for now it'd be great if we had a tour bus, or even a van rather than a car that'd be fantastic.
M: Or a bass amp.
G: We don't even own a bass amp, we don't even own a spare guitar. We'll see what happens. If we end up dying in old age, still playing the Sheffield Casbah on a Thursday night then so be it. If that's what happens then as I said, it was a decision that was made a long time a go. This is what it's about now, proving that you meant it when you said it.
What's the lowest thing you've done or ever will do for money?
G: Probably just having a 9 to 5 job that I was miserable in. The lowest thing I ever did?
(the answer was *slightly* interrupted by Ben crashing into the wall in a shopping trolley)
M: What a way to go...
Name one thing you love that's critically reviled.
G: 'Bat Out Of Hell' by Meatloaf. Moley, what's that one you love on the radio right now?
M: Shania Twain's new song. It's outstanding.
G: Can I jusy say about the first Meatloaf record that I think compared to anything else it's beautiful, an ethical, moral record that politically pisses all over anything The Clash ever recorded...................Were you aware that Greg's bakery have recorded record profits now for four years in a row for their sales of Cornish pasties but only in a small town in Wales?
How do you know so much about pasties?
G: I read it in Bakers World which I have delivered every fortnight to my second home in Penzance.
M: Your crusty loaf?
G: Can I say how much I love playing northern crowds like Sheffield where the people are really nice and they dance to our songs...
M: And southern crowds as well, and the ones in between.
G: Yeah but they were especially good tonight, they were really nice. And it'll be great to be home tomorrow and play a home crowd, that'll be cool. it's been fantastic being on the road for 3 days and sleeping on floors again, I've missed it. Yeah, and it's the best, it's the greatest thing in the world and I'd rather do this than anything. It's great to play to 2 or 3 people.
Final question from Ruth, who's your favourite Mr Man?
M: Mr Tickle by far, my favourite Mr Man. I've got a cup at home with Mr Bump on it so it could be him instead...
B: Mine's Mr Tickle.
M: Which is the one that looks like a small grape?
G: Mr Tiny?
M: He must have drawn the short straw!
Ben: Mr 'I look like a haemorrhoid' man.
G: Mine is Mr Slight Problems With Self Confidence man...