This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist Interviews
Q&A: Bad For Lazarus
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 10 December 2009
Forming less than a year ago, Bad For Lazarus are a four-piece band based in Brighton, delivering their own brand of garage pop. The band consists of bass player Jimmy Diego, drummer Steve Waits, guitarist Maud E Licious, and guitarist and vocalist Rich Fownes – who has also played with UNKLE and Nine Inch Nails butis best known as the former frontman of 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster. The band’s wide range of influences are clearly present in their sound, taking in everything from punk and hardcore to Motown (Buddy Holly and The Beatles are also influences apparently). With their first single ‘Old Rats On A New Ship’ out now on Shit Chic records, we caught up with Fownes to ask the Same Six.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
Nirvana were the band that turned me on to wanting to write my own music. I thought having any formal tuition was ‘laaaaaame maaaaaaan’, so was insistent on making a-tonal clangings for about four or five years. But I wouldn’t go so far as to classify it as music by any measure.
Q2 What inspired your latest single?
I wanted to write something nearing hip hop, beat-wise. When writing with 80s Matchbox ‘phat beats’ were always instantly disqualified, so it was definitely an exercise in stretching my wings.
Q3 How do you go about creating a track?
I used to play the guitar, searching for something that looked interesting, like a classic muso arsehole. After several years, I finally learned it’s about one simple hook that you should be able to hear in your head. Somewhere I heard ‘production is the art of subtraction’ and the more I write the more that’s affirmed. As much as it’s a cliché, it is true that the best songs seem to write themselves.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
For this band particularly, I try to mix the character and pop swing of artists like Buddy Holly and The Beatles with the play-like-every-gig-is-your-last ethic of characters like Cedric Bixler or GG Allen
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Gutted.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
For it to be really, REALLY good. Obviously.
MORE>> www.myspace.com/badforlazarus
