Hanging With The Bois: Gallows

Gigwise is ready and waiting for what should be an interview with Gallows’ guitarist Laurent Barnard (‘Lags’) and the phone line is engaged. Twenty minutes finger flicking the redial button later and we’re called back. Thinking we’re interviewing Lags, we dive straight into questions, before swallowing the realisation: “Is that Frank?” Much to our surprise, ice cool, man du jour, Frank Carter, has taken Lags’ place. Gallows have just cancelled their Taste of Chaos dates in Germany Italy and Switzerland as most of the band’s suffering varying illnesses; Lags has flu (hence not being with us) and Frank’s brother Steph has been struck down with Bronchitis. An intense touring schedule has clearly taken its toll and Gallows are back resting in the UK so they can ride the wave of the UK leg of the Taste of Chaos and do their fans justice.

When we chat to Frank, despite all the onstage antics, we find him a real bloody nice bloke actually. Instead of the angry, moshing, violent little guy we’ve all witnessed him as at gigs, Frank is quiet, chilled but extremely opinionated. Just a week after his photo adorned magazine shelves in WHSmiths, we ask Frank about the (ahem) NME cool list, which saw Frank come out on top ahead of such bastions of coolness as Alex Turner, the ever twee Kate Nash and smack head Amy Winehouse - which is probably not that hard actually. What does Frank think of the list? He laughs. “I’m indifferent to it to be honest. I’d rather win it than some other dickhead. They took a risk giving it to a 5’7”, skinny, ginger, sober bloke which is quite a cool thing to do but I don’t like the magazine.”

The rag has given Gallows a hell of a lot of press these last few months, did Frank really just admit to hating them? He gladly continues his rant: “Who the fuck has a cool list?! It’s quite easy for them to put us in a mag; in fact, the best thing they’ve done all year is to recognise our band. The New Musical Express has a responsibility to recognise new bands but the whole magazine has got cliquey. ‘You have to go to this place and dress like this’. Hopefully me topping that list will mean they will have to feature other punk rock bands.” We remind him that Beth Ditto was crowned top of the cool list last year, and since then they have not exactly been popping their clogs to promote girl fronted rock bands. Frank laughs.

Gallows have suffered a fair few misquotes from the music press in the last year; the most notorious claimed that Carter had drawn a thick black line marking the life span of the group, allegedly stating that Gallows wouldn’t last five years. “It’s probably one of the greatest misquotes we’ve suffered. Gallows has a sell by date like any other band, but the sell by date will be when we get bored. I’ll be in this band until the band quit! I love this band! I’m not going to quit the band! I get to spit at people in this job- why would I quit that?!”