From Wales with love...
The problem with hardcore is that it’s such a suffocating genre. After all there’s only so much you can do with two minute, three chord songs before you’re fresh out of ideas. That’s why a lot of punk bands end up evolving out of the model; Black Flag went psychedelic, the Beastie Boys went hip hop, The Refused meddled with techno, and Minor Threat pretty much imploded and decided to try again as the much more tripped out Fugazi.
In the case of Chain of Flowers, the answer was to do an about face, ditch the aggression and make full-on arm waving indie rock. Made up of members of Cardiff beat-down merchants Brutality Will Prevail and Crossover, they’ve managed to recapture the spit and swagger of early goth/shoegaze bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and Jesus and Mary Chain without all of the theatrics and eye-liner and smush it together with a bit of Jawbreaker.
You guys are a bit of an enigma; can you tell us the story of how Chain of Flowers came about?
Joshua: Most of us have been close friends for some years and have played/still do play in other bands together. Myself, Rich and Daniel always spoke about doing something different to what we we had been playing and we eventually found the time to put it into place with Ross, Sam and our old guitarist Nick, last spring. We played our first show with Milk Music at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff and the rest has rolled out since.
I've heard it mentioned that you were all in punk bands before CoF. Why the move to shoegaze?
Some of us do still play in punk/hardcore bands, we all have that background and aside of myself and Daniel going to the same school, it's how we all came to know each other. Our parents/uncles/auntie’s record collections and the years we've all spent geeking out/expanding on them in second-hand record shops have played their part in how we've come to sound.
I wouldn't call us a "shoegaze" band myself but people can call it what they want. We've never had a real blueprint for our sound, asides loud. In all, it's another vent for us, we're just going about it in a way that we haven't before.
Is the Cure reference purely accidental, or are they an actual influence? You seem to be compared to them a lot.
The Cure are a brilliant band and that b-side is a brilliant song, probably one of The Cure's darkest and most vulnerable sounding. But, in honesty, way before this band came to be, I was reading a lecture that Nick Cave gave on "the love song" and in that he referenced the Grinderman song, 'Chain of Flowers'. I think the title just stuck with me and re-surfaced when we'd written enough songs to warrant naming this band.
I'm not denying that there may well be some elements comparable to bands like The Cure in our music but again, we've never set out to sound like a, b, or c. On the other hand, I do think a lot of music journalism is very lazy these days and based upon the assumptions of our name. It could just be an easy line to fill space on a page, but whatever, we just like people taking what they want from our music and if to one person it's that, then that's cool by us.
2013 is already shaping up to be a pretty big year for you guys. What have you got on the cards for the next 12 months?
Our first single 'SLEEP' is out this March. The 7" is available for pre-order now from Fear and Records. We'll be touring throughout March and continuing to do so from that point onwards. We just want to play as much as we physically can.
We're writing at the moment and hoping to record what we're working on sometime this Spring. It feels like we're working towards an LP at the moment but whatever feels right will surface.
Chain of Flowers will be supporting Make Do and Mend at the Borderline on the 15th March.
http://www.flowersinchains.com/
Do yourself a favour and like Spoonfed London on Facebook!
Bored? Here's loads of things to do in London.
Add an event
Review: The Company You Keep
Robert Redford, an iconic face of Western cinema whose influence for decades has weighe...