Interview: Flamingods

17 January, 2013
by: Spoonfed Live Music Team

We have words with South London's premiere jam band...

South London's Flamingods are famous for their cacophonous live shows where anything and everything stands a chance of becomes an instrument and the now fabled marathon jam sessions they threw in their chalet at All Tomorrow's Parties.

This week see's the release of their debut album 'Sun' and the begining of their first ever UK tour. Ahead of their album launch at the Shacklewell Arms tomorrow, we caught up with Kamal, Karthik, Sam, Charles and Craig to talk about the band's origins, their collaboriation with Dustin Wong and just why they take a wok on stage them.

How did you all meet and then how did the band get started?
Sam: Me, Charles and Kamal were in the same year at school back in Bahrain and Craig was in the year above. Craig used to drum in a band I was in and we all listened to slightly similar kinds of music.

How did Karthik come in to the mix?
Karthik: I grew up not very far from these guys in Saudi Arabia…Kamal and I met in London through a mutual friend.

Kamal: Karthik and I met one cold summer’s night…

Sam: Did I meet him that night?

Karthik: Kamal introduced me to Sam at a party or something and they decided to bend me over a kitchen table and spank the hell out of me.

Oh shit, really?!
Sam: I hadn’t even said hello to him!

Kamal: [Flamingods] started as a solo project in my bedroom and then after two ATPs of jamming out with these guys we formed the proper band and took things a bit further.

This is the ATP story that gets mentioned in a lot of press stuff I see for you guys, what’s the full story behind that? What actually happened down there?
Charles: We basically just brought a whole bunch of instruments down for ourselves, just to jam in our chalet with. We had our windows open and people would be coming by and being like 'Hey, this is kinda cool…'

Kamal: It kind of escalated and people started climbing in through our windows to join in on the jam and then it just kept on going until there were like 60 people in our tiny chalet and this just never-ending jam.

And I guess after that it was like 'we’ve gotta start a band now'?
Kamal: [Laughter] Pretty much, yeah!

Given that you started out as sort of a jam band, whats your song writing process like: how do you end up with fully formed songs?
Kamal: Normally it just grows out of an idea. Someone comes up with something, shows it around to the rest of the guys, then we keep adding to it and developing it.

Karthik: It’s really informal though. It’s very organic.

Craig: Sometimes we do just jam on an idea and just see where it goes from there.

Your album ‘Sun’ comes out in a week and your tour starts this week, do you think there’s much of a discrepancy between songs on the album and what they sounded like when you were putting them together or even what you sound like as a live band?
Craig: The point of [Sun] was to get lo fi versions of the live songs on record that’s where we were originally coming from. We’ve been playing so much of that stuff for so long since then that we’ve kind of gotten a bit better at playing the songs now, so they’re probably a bit beastlier.

On the album there’s a collaboration between you and Ponytail member, Dustin Wong, can you tell me a bit about how this came about?
Karthik: About a year ago we were really fortunate to get a gig supporting them at the Old Blue Last, I think he heard us sound checking and then came up and was like 'This is awesome! Is it alright if I get on stage with you guys?'

Kamal: No, no. I asked him…I asked him!

[laughter]

Kamal: It was an Upset The Rhythm show and whilst we were sound checking Dustin Wong told Chris, one of the guys from UTR, that my vocals reminded him of his vocal in Ponytail. Which was really cool. I mean we’re quite influenced by Ponytail, we saw them at the ATP where we formed and we just really loved his music.

He played on stage with us during our set and we kept in touch with him afterwards, and we’d been talking to him about collaborations and stuff for a while. Eventually, I sent him a track and he laid down a solo on top of it in about a day!

You’ve got about four times as much equipment with you on stage now as you did when I saw last year. What makes you choose stuff like a kohone drum, or a toy keyboard?
Karthik: I think I just bought a kohone one day after wanting one for ages and then we started jamming with it and made a song with it.

Sam: The kohone used to be our drum kit, we used to not have a full kit for a while!

Kamal: When one of us buys an instrument we all get pretty excited about it, like kids with new toys.

Sam: We try and use all of these instruments as well, which is why our equipment list is so huge now.

Do you try and work new instruments into old songs?
Karthik: Sometimes, like the wok we use now…

Yeah, what exactly is that wok all about?
Kamal: We used to use a pot, but we battered it to death!

Flamingods' album 'Sun' comes out on the 21st of January via Art Is Hard Records and is availble to preorder from bandcamp right now.

The band play an album launch as part of The Shacklewell Arms tomorrow as part of their UK tour, entrance is free!