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On the day before the band embark on their biggest headlining tour to date, Gigwise caught up with Glen Bartup, bassist with the 22-20’s to find out how life on the road with the Kings Of Leon, recording their album debut, and curbing that Stones influence has changed the band.
Last time Gigwise saw the 22-20’s, the Lincolnshire three piece had just released their mini album ‘05/03’ under the kind scrutiny that only the hyped to fuck can feel. Now, five months down the line, the band are about to mix their debut. “We’re just putting the backing vocals on the last bit of the album before it’s sent for mixing,” explained Bartup. “We spent one month in Sawmills Studio in Cornwall, and some in Wembley Studios. We also spent some time recording in Oxford, in a studio. We really gel with the engineers there, so mainly did vocal takes.”
“We’re feeling quite good about the album. We’ve spent a long time making it. It got quite frustrating at the end. We were just desperate to get in and bang it all out,” he explained. “We defiantly felt the need to keep our Stones influence in check. Our new stuffs a lot darker, its much more where we want to be.”
The album was originally planned for release last year. “We were definitely right to wait,” confirmed Bartup. “We didn’t want to put stuff out last year, there was a glut of bands all releasing stuff, and we didn’t want people thinking that all there was to us was a blues influence. We’d kind of lost sight of our identity, but the new album will define that again for us.”
The bands new single ‘Why Don’t You Do It For Me’ will be released On April 5th. It will be the second official release from the band’s forthcoming album.. “We’re not really sure why we chose it as a single. There were five or six songs that could have been recorded , but we chose that one. The album will be out in about three months (June). Martin’s had the title the whole time we’ve been recording the album, but he’s not telling anyone.”
“The video was produced by Paul Kelly, brother of Martin Kelly who runs Heavenly (The bands label),” said Bartup. “It was recorded while we were on tour in January. He came down to the rehearsal rooms and recorded us. It encapsulates our live energy, it’s not brash or shouty, we don’t end up doing cartwheels on stage or nothing.”
The band are scheduled to be playing this years Coachella festival, but the groups love of touring and getting the new material out puts doubt over the groups appearance at the event, as Glen was keen to point out. “We’re not sure if we will be playing Coachella this year, as we could tour eight nights in the UK for that one night at the festival, we like to tour as much as we can.”
Currently headlining the NME Brit pack tour, do the band feel honored to be fronting gigs supposedly defining the best in British music? “The NME tour is just a tour to us,” he explained. “By the time you get your album finished you’re just desperate to get out and tour it. The tour is just a means for us to get out and headline, that’s our main priority.”
So how has the past year changed the band, the three boys from Lincolnshire, tagged as the British White Stripes? “Basically we’ve found that we can spend a month on a bus with each other and not hate each other. We’ve written and thrown away a lot of songs. We’ve made some big changes with our album. We decided what we wanted to sound like, and who our sound was influenced by, like the decision to be less Stonesy. ‘Such A Fool’ pretty much sums up the rest of the album, but we can’t wait to write second record; it’ll be really liberating.”
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