Tuesday 29 May 2012

We're Only Here For The Banter - The Beautiful Lies


The Beautiful Lies are a Glaswegian four piece, who despite working away on music for a while, have only really just popped onto the radar.  Not that this is a bad thing of course, given that their demos sound like a band who take their music seriously, we can only assume that when more music comes our way it's gonna be great.  Here's this week's 'We're Only Here For The Banter':

Hello, how are you?

Fantastic!

It's the question everyone hates, but could you tell us a little bit about your music and your influences?

I've always thought that music has to be about passion and I think that's what we aim for with our songs.  With that in mind we are probably heavily influenced by The Manics ('Holy Bible' era), Tom Waits, The Pixies, The Twilight Sad, Suede etc.   Basically bands who play like the songs mean absolutely everything to them.  Although we probably don't sound anything like that lot!  We tend to write quite melodic songs with a heavier edge to them.

What's your song writing process like?

Our guitarist (Baz) comes to practice with an idea and we dissect it, play around with it and force it until we have a song.  The four of us very rarely agree on the best route for a song to take so a lot of time is taken convincing the others that I am right and that they should agree!  We're highly critical of ourselves but I think that it always works out with a better song in the end because we've explored every conceivable option. ~

What could we expect to see from a live show?

A lot of energy, we tend to make a lot of noise but there's always a melody beneath it all keeping it together.

If it were all to end tomorrow, what would you say has been your greatest achievement?

Well we've only just started getting ourselves together (we've got the new bass player, Scott, to thank for that) after a number of years of writing songs but not gigging them.   Lately we've became more focused and have pieced together a good portfolio of songs which we're all proud of.

What have you got planned for 2012?

We're halfway through!  I think we'd like to keep writing, recording and playing songs.  If we can start to build a strong reputation for ourselves as a quality live band and pick up some significant support slots then that would be brilliant.

At Scottish Fiction we focus on new Scottish music, how do you as a band view the Scottish music 'scene'?

I think it's fantastic, you hear so many talented bands from Scotland and it really makes you want to get out and see more and more music.  You can walk into Nice 'N' Sleazy's, King Tut's, Stereo or The 13th Note any night of the week and see some cracking live acts.  I've got into so much Scottish music through blogs like this one, Peenko, Kowalskiy, etc.  The fact that there is such a constant stream of brilliant music surfacing on the blogs and podcasts every week shows the depth of talent there is.

What other Scottish artists would you recommend to the Scottish Fiction readers?

That depends on what they're into of course but I heard a couple of demos by a band called Poor Things the other day and I thought they were fantastic as well as the advance pieces of the Plastic Animals EP which should be pretty stunning!  Alongside that we've been listening to loads of Galleries, Capitals, CHURCHES, An Echo, Blue Sky Archives... you could just list great bands for days!  Alternatively Tisoki and Teklo are both consistently releasing brilliant house music alongside guys like Baby Diego, Miaoux Miaoux and Africa.  And then you've got the more established guys like The Phantom Band, their first album is just brilliant, PAWS and The Twilight Sad.   The best thing to do is to just keep reading the blogs and they'll keep you plied with more new music than you can shake a stick at!

Thanks for speaking with us, would you care to share a joke with us?

"We don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here," said the bartender.  A neutrino walks into a bar.

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