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“It looks like anything but the coliseum” exclaimed bassist, guitarist and vocalist Joe Reeves in a weakened Geordie accent, on being asked what he thought of tonight’s venue, the Coventry Coliseum. Shitdisco are coming to the end of their UK tour supporting The Rapture and will spend the rest of March at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas; “Aye it’s gunna be weird, I’ve never been before, I can’t wait to see how we go down there.” So from Coventry and Middlesbrough tomorrow night, to Texas the day after, these lads sure get around.
Shitdisco have been on a constant tour for nearly an entire year, playing a variety of venues and Gigwise asks which ones are the best? “We love gigging all over the UK really, especially Glasgow, London and Leeds, but Paris was amazing…We had all been before separately and thought that they would never get us…we thought the Parisians would be very snobby and we had low expectations but they went crazy, they loved it!” Their penchant for Paris does not really surprise Gigwise; surely four lads who met at art school would be united in their love for the Louvre. Gigwise enquires how the band began.
“We met at art school in Glasgow and that’s where we class the band as a whole as coming from. There’s me an Joel who are Geordies, then there’s Jan who’s nearly Scottish as he’s from Berwick and Darren is from Leeds…we were all foreign to Glasgow and it took us ages to be accepted.” So how did they come to be accepted and how did the band become inspired to be Shitdisco? “We began as a band by accident. We started properly after we graduated in 2005, but we had been doing stuff together since 2003…we played in train tunnels and portakabins as well as house parties. We try to recreate that atmosphere at our gigs…random remixes of our songs…we’re believers in fate.”
Shitdisco have done things live and on the spur of the moment at a lot of gigs to prevent a “routine, same-old performance”. “We try to push the boundaries and be open minded."explains Joe. "We want to be creative and use an uncomfortable energy to step out of the ‘luxuries’ of a normal band.” One example of this is their insistence to still play house parties, just like the good old college days. For instance after a Rapture gig in Leeds the other week. “God we had lasers, strobes and smoke machines…While we were playing I could see a portrait of Liam and Noel from Oasis straight opposite us….they were folding their arms and giving us a menacing stare as if they disapproved! The house was destroyed by the time that we had left!”
Gigwise certainly won’t be inviting the lads around to our office anytime soon, its disorganised enough as it is, unlike the offices of other certain music magazines who seem to pigeon hole every band into a scene, "I like the NME, they’ve done a lot for us, but when bands like The Rapture came out in 2003 it was all punk-funk, and we got labelled as that for a while, now since 2006, we’ve all been re-categorised to New Rave! It’s just another scene innit.” So do Shitdisco resent this? Or are their similarities between such bands? “There’s a lot of similarities between us all, we’re all interested in rave but we use it in different ways. I mean for us it’s more the ethos of rave culture over the sound.”
This ethos can be seen in their love of remixes, no matter how strange or silly, pass it on to Shitdisco and they’ll give your mashed-up music a listen to. “We’ve put on remix competitions for our songs and there’s been some great stuff…there’s been a lot of bedroom stuff, but there’ve been some interesting ideas.” There was such a good version from a fan in France that they are prepared to work together to create an album track.
So, Gigwise wants to know whats new with Shitdisco? “We’ve got the new single 'OK' coming out after the new album, 'Kingdom of Fear', so it can get more radio play because we’ve only ever had one single out really. The constant touring has really put things off on that front for a while.” 'Kingdom of Fear' was recorded at the end of last year and the group “can’t wait” for it’s release. The upcoming album release will even prompt a change in Shitdisco’s setlist for their next UK headlining tour in April. “Yeah we’ve changed the setlist for the new tour, we’ll be playing the whole album." Joe tells us. "We changed a set in Portsmouth last minute for the first time and the shake-up, the risk- it paid off, it just worked.” However, as the band later told me sometimes the change doesn’t work, “Once we played the last song at the start and got so confused we ended up playing 'I Know Kung-Fu' about five times!”
'I Know Kung-Fu' is one of the songs that will face an edit on the new album, along with 'Disco Blood'. “We were happy with, we’ve played them from more or less the start, but they were only ever recorded as demos. We had mixed them ourselves and we were really inexperienced, they were done in our rooms and they never had the ferocity that they had when played live, so we just re-recorded them along with the rest of the album. The tracks have matured along with us.”
So, a maturer and more experienced Shitdisco, now with an album and new single in hand are set to have a good year. They will be playing the Leeds and Reading festival as well as Glastonbury - miss them at your peril!
