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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Hyde & Beast
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 12 August 2011
Having first met as cohorts of Sunderland’s tight-knit music scene, The Futureheads’ drummer Dave Hyde and ex-Golden Virgins sticksman Neil Bassett came together as Hyde & Beast over a shared love of vintage soul and psych-rock sounds. The duo self-produced and mixed their debut album ‘Slow Down’ at Neil’s Sunderland-based studio, averaging a prolific a-track-a-day pace.
Hyde & Beast will launch ‘Slow Down’, set for release on 15 Aug through Tail Feather Records, at London’s The Social on 17 Aug. Looking forward both to this and a slot at Split Festival, as curated by his Futureheads affiliate Ross Millard, Dave was brave enough to run the interrogative gauntlet that is our Same Six Questions.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
We have known each other for years and have both spent time drumming in two Sunderland bands (The Futureheads and The Golden Virgins). I’ve kinda evolved and moved onto playing guitar. Beast hasn’t evolved yet and is still stuck behind the kit, although he has now developed opposable thumbs.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
We simply wanted to make an album that we would want to buy and listen to. Very selfish, but we succeeded in that we are both very happy with the outcome. We never meant to make an album for public release, just some songs for our own fun. Anything can inspire you to write though. Neil’s studio in Sunderland kinda inspired us in a way, it’s very dark and there aren’t any windows! All the walls and carpets are burgundy – like being in a womb! It’s easy to lose track of time in there, and the studio seems to have a bit of hocus-pocus and wizardry about it. I don’t think either of us would be surprised if we discovered that it turned out be built on the site of an ancient burial ground or something!
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
It’s all a bit of a blur really. We spent a day on each track starting with just a tiny seedling of an idea, and we would just water it and see where it took us. We shared song and lyric writing duties, although it felt like the songs wrote themselves. To be honest, it wasn’t really like songwriting at all. More like a cross between growing a plant and practicing voodoo.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Mainly stuff from before 1976. The Velvet Underground, The Band, T-Rex, Beach Boys. More modern stuff would include the likes of White Denim, Dengue Fever, Tinariwen and Colourmusic.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. It really is an album meant for headphones, there are all kind of strange instruments and noises hidden on there for you to discover. We were looking at the original session files recently and there’s a track labelled “vibro cymbal”; we don’t really remember what this was and it sounded nothing like a cymbal.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
We’re looking forward to playing more live shows. For live gigs we expand outwards into a six person band and it’s a fun carnival-type experience. I guess we just hope people have as much fun listening to the record as we had making it. We also want to start recording again soon as we have a hell of a lot of new little seedlings to plant. We don’t want to write the songs too far in advance before we go into the studio again as we find it’s better to just record them as they are being played for the first time.
MORE>> www.hydeandbeast.co.uk
