03-08-09 – Interabang’s BACK! / Epic Road Trippery

Okie dokie! Frickin’ busy week! It entailed…

- Interabang’s Re-release! (New member, new song, New site and New video blog!)
- A YAWA trip to London to speak with a potential manager
- Half finishing the YAWA July video blog (christ there’s a lot of footage…)
- A YAWA gig in Daventry (7/10)
- A massive road trip to Ipswitch and back with YAWA and Sketch!
- Writing my first blogs for primeloops.com
- Two boyinaband video tutorials
- inevitable LOLcat

Brilliant.

INTERABANG’S BACK!

Finally! It’s been like 2 years since we last released some proper Intera content. Now you’ve got a crapload in one go! There’s this video blog:

Explaining about the release schedule,

The spanking new song featuring the spanking new member Sketch: “Friends are Forever and Forever” that you can hear on our myspace.

Then our new website where you can sign up, talk on the forum, earn Interapoints for doing so, then spend those points on downloading songs (like the new one! ) Fun times, guys! Be sure to vote Pie in the Interapoll as well – Scratch is winning at the moment – we can’t have that!

I’m really pleased with how everything’s going, there was an awesome community surrounding interabang back in the day and the hope is that we can get it powered up again! Weekly releases are the best way to do that! So every Saturday be sure to check www.interabang.co.uk to see what’s new!

YAWA do London!

Zak wanted me not to blog about this, but I don’t see any harm in it now we’ve actually had the meeting.

After having nearly 2 hours sleep, Kieran, Jamie and I all woke up at 3:30am on Friday morning, ready to head down to London for our 11am meeting with a manager who was interested in YAWA. This isn’t just a random manager – he is in affiliation with the company “Taste Media” who managed Muse. So yeah – a pretty big deal.

We set off at 4-5am in the Van with Zak taking us down. We had fun times making up new YAWA-isms, such as saying the word “STIIIIILL” every time someone says the word “still” in context, and saying “Fried chicken” with the “fried” being as deep as possible and “chicken” being as high pitched as possible. Irrelevant, but chances are if you ever hang out with us at some point in the future you’ll be slightly less confused when it happens.

We initially went to my homie Ogre’s house in London, hoping to hang out with him for a bit before the meeting, but no-one answered his door and his phone was going straight to answerphone so we had to leave and find a place to park the van.

After looking for several places, we settled on this residential area just outside London, walked to the tube station and took the tube to the station near the studio we were meeting at. We were about a half hour late even though we’d got up stupidly early to avoid such an incident, due to how long it took to find a space for the van.

Though that didn’t matter in the end, since the manager guy didn’t arrive until after 12am anyway. He was an American sounding guy who sounded like he’d seen it all in the business.

He said a lot of things, but basically said that we were doing all the right things – booking lots of gigs, writing better songs and refining our image. It could have been done on the phone, but it was nice to meet him in person. Also, we gave him our EP and a CD of some new things we’ve been working on.

The meeting ended with him telling us he’d listen to the CDs and get in touch late August (he returns from holiday on my birthday, the 24th) to say what the plan is. It’d be ace if he wanted to work with us – he sounded like he had some useful contacts and was capable of doing really high quality recordings in the company’s studio.

But I’m not getting my hopes up. We’ll continue to do things the old fashioned DIY way like we’ve been doing and like he advised – building up hardcore localised fanbases in areas around the UK so we’re able to gig every week, growing the community until the labels and agents are coming to us rather than us going to them.

We spent the rest of the day in London, having an awesome chinese meal, handing out like 50 demo cds in Camden to random passers by (One guy actually already knew us and asked for a picture with the band! That was awesome ) and chilling with one of Zak’s acting buddies (Zak did acting at uni in London for a while) who seemed like a cool guy!

Video Camera + YAWA + One Month = too many lols.

I’ve been compiling July’s YAWA video blog and quite simply there are too many funny bits to fit into 10 minutes. I’ve got like 9 mins of video blog from just under half of the total footage… I’ll either have to do some serious cutting down or make two parts.

Return of the Cardboard Fish

We got to Daventry community center and unpacked our gear, then chilled in the games room where I kicked Kieran’s ass at pool (Not really, I potted the black and white simultaneously which we weren’t quite sure whether that was a win or a loss… we called it a draw.) and played some hardcore foozball – Kieran and Jamie took on the guys from another band on the lineup “I Have Clones” and won quite epically, which was cool

Dissolved In, who were also on the lineup soundchecked for literally about an hour. During that time, we ate pasta (The promoters cooked for us!) made friends with said promoters (there were about 6 people working for the local promo company) – they were all really cool people. One of the guys, Lucas, came up to me and Kieran and said “Cardboard Fish”. To most people, this would be quite random, but both of us looked really surprised and asked him “How do you know about cardboard fish?!”

If you don’t remember, when we played in Kettering early in July, one girl shouted out “Big Fish, Little Fish Cardboard Fish” while we were techno dancing. Turns out he’s friends with said girl and she told him to say it with no explanation of the history of the papery aquatic creature. It’s awesome – people are telling their friends about their experiences with YAWA

Not very many people were there – apparently they had concentrated their promotional efforts on a festival coming up later in the month, and also there was a big thing on at a pub down the road. Which was kinda gay on both parts, but the people that did turn up really enjoyed it.

In fact, we sold more merch that night than in Kettering – we made a bunch of fans and friends that night who really got into the show.

While the other bands were on we chatted to people between watching them and ended the night around the merch stand selling stuff and having a laugh with all our new friends/fans! We also got booked on another night with them since we got on so well. They assured us it would be a better turnout than the night we were on (The place is usually pretty packed apparently) and Zak took a few of the promoters home in the Van, while Kieran, Jamie and I went up to Kettering for a sleepover at Kieran’s place!

Road Trip!

After a fun night in Kieran’s house involving Mock the Week, junk food and more unnecessary YAWA-isms, the three musketeers headed up to Ipswitch, where I offered to pick up Emmie who’d been staying at a friends’ house there.

It was quite an epic journey – we set off from Kieran’s at 8:30am (second early start of the week, not quite as bad as London though.) and got to Ipswitch about 10:30am. We chillaxed at Emmie’s mate’s place for a few hours, then walked to the local venue “The Steamboat”, which we wanted to play since it was named after a boat.

The proprietor was less than entheusiastic, but took our details anyway, saying she’d get in touch if a slot opened up.

We then set off to Kieran’s girlfriend’s house, where he was due at 3pm. 2 minutes before her house, we hit a massive traffic jam caused by a crash. It wasn’t wasted time though – I spotted some young-ish looking people in a car in the lane next to us. I told Jamie to give them a YAWA EP, and he did – I think the conversation went like this:

“Excuse me good sirs, can I interest you in a free EP from my band?”
“Uh… we’re ok thanks, we’ve only got a tape player”
“You sure? It’s free!”
“…Okay, go on then”

They put in the CD and I heard them say “What the F***?!”, before checking out the songs one by one. We parted ways in the jam, but I heard them go past later still playing At Lightspeed, so maybe we gained some fans there!

We dropped Kieran off at Christina’s, but while we stretched our legs she invited us in, giving us delicious foods and we all had a good chat! It was nice to see her outside a gig for a change, gave us a more relaxed environment in which to commune.

Sketch had not had very much sleep in the past few days, and she is very very small (I feel the need to re-iterate this often), so she was exhaused and I suggested we take our leave, thanking Christina for her hospitality.

The hour and a half back to telford went pretty quickly, with Sketch semi-sleeping in the back and Jamie and I talking about video games in the front. I dropped off Jamie, dropped off Sketch, ate her parent’s Thai food (They offered it to me, I’m not that much of an ass) and finally dropped off me at home.

Phew – what a busy few days.

*Authors*

If you head over to primeloops.com and check out the blog you can see my article on “The History of Dance Music” – it’s quite concise, but it’s difficult to fit a whole history into 750ish words. As it is it was nearer to 1000. I’ve got two more blogs to write for tomorrow that I’ll be putting together after this one. I feel like I spend half my life writing these days – which is no bad thing, I enjoy putting together things that people will read and hopefully find entertaining and useful.

Bassssssss!

I also did these two video tutorials on boyinaband.com

Another commission in there – good times! I’ve not been as consistant with blogging due to the crazily busy few days I’ve had, but I’ll catch up on them this week.

Next Week on Dave’s Blog!

A slightly less intense week, though YAWA has a gig in High Wycombe, just above London which should be good! So the plan…

- Gig in High Wycombe
- Releasing the Interabang Animation Episode 2
- boyinaband bloggage
- Two primeloops.com blogs
- Chilling with Emmie and Kirstie

AND THE BLOGLY QUESTION: Do you think the July YAWA video blog should be one concise 10 minute episode or two more loltastic, but less relevant 10 minute episodes?