LouderThanWar's James Lowther caught up with Blossoms last month at Parklife ahead of their album release on the 5th August.
Highlights:
Well I think one of your strengths is that you’ve developed such a polished sound.
There’s a band called The Big Moon that we played with in Paris, and when we got off stage they just turned to us and said, “You’re a well oiled machine”. It’s what happens when you tour for two years straight. When you start and you record your first demo, you literally are a garage band. We didn’t have the money to go to a big studio or anything, so we started recording ourselves on an 8 track, so the first tracks we put out do sound a bit garage-y. But we didn’t set out to be like ‘Ooh, we wanna sound like a 60s garage band’ – it was just, we need to put something out so let’s record. And at the time we were probably like, ‘Is it clear enough? We want it to sound clearer’ – d’you know what I mean?
How did you all meet?
Me and Joe have been mates since like school, we met in year 8 on a school trip to Alton Towers, like 11 years ago. Stayed in touch, got into music. I was into music at like year 8, but it’s not something you tell your mates about. My dad got me into music like ‘Waterfall’ by Stone Roses, and loads of Oasis. But music wasn’t a talking point then. Football was still the main thing then. Later teens, me and Joe bonded over Oasis and went to see them when we were 16. I started writing songs when I was like 15. Charlie was in bands since he was 13, he was in the school band playing bass in an oversized blazer. Joe would come to my gigs with my bands. Joe picked up the drums later. Josh – Joe used to date Josh’s sister. That was the connection. He always had a guitar since he was like 11. Josh was in a band at the time, and I gave him first gig then supporting my band, just at a small pub in Stockport and I remember being really impressed by his guitar playing. And it just went from there. We used to rehearse in Charlie’s grandad’s scaffolding yard. And then Miles was just one of those people, we used to go to parties at his flat above the curry house. He heard we wanted a keyboard player so he said he’d play keyboard for us, and that was it, the rest is history. That was quite a long story that, wasn’t it? It’s well rehearsed now haha.
Are there any questions that you hate?
I tell you what I hate, when people are like “Hi, The Blossoms!” – there’s no ‘the’! I hate it when they ask: ‘how would you describe your sound?’
