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John Peel OBE, 1939 - 2004
Early Blues Interview
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Feed Me (from left to right) are: After hearing of the winners of the famed 'Battle of The Bands' competition run by the Maryport Blues Festival committee, and the impressive reputation the band has rapidly achieved in the North West, I arranged to interview the band before their gig at the ever-popular Barrow R&B Club. Alan: How did you all get started as musicians? Jamie: Me and Kiefer have been playing guitar together since we were about nine and we’ve been in lots of bands since then.
Andy: Again, I met these guys by chance. South Quay were playing in Egremont and I went down and thought they were amazing. I saw Jamie playing and knew I wanted to play in a band with this guy. And then they bumped into me and said, “I need a drummer for Feed Me, are you interested” Yes! But all these things just happened by chance. Phil: I started on bass when I first met Jamie about 6 years ago. My dad used to play bass so I took his and learnt. When we left school, we said, why not start a band, and now we’re here. Jay: If it wasn’t for Jamie, we wouldn’t be here Andy: I started playing when I was about three on pots and pans and worked myself up. Just like Keith Moon! Alan: Did you always want to become musicians? Was it in the blood? Andy: It was definitely in my blood and goes back to my grandparents and Frank Hall. Frank was in a band called Necromandus which was managed by Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and Frank still lives in Egremont and I know him well so I was very influenced by Black Sabbath and classic rock. Alan: What first attracted you to the blues? Jamie: I remember listening to the White Stripes when I was about 12 and really liking them, and then I read an interview about what Jack White’s influences were and I kept going further back and the further back I went the more I liked it. Kiefer: And we’ve got the Maryport Blues Festival. Jamie: There’s world class blues bands just in the pubs. It’s a really small town and you get Gary Moore and Van Morrison. Jay: It was never anything I was really interested in until Jamie said they wanted to sing it, so I went and had a go – but I really like it. You can put so much into it. That’s what blues is about, it’s so expressive and passionate and you can put so much into it that you can’t with other types of music. It’s a big release and I like it. Phil: We started off when we were young and we were a covers band, a fairly poor covers band. And then one day, we thought, “Hey, this song sounds good” and it was a blues song, Hoochie Coochie Man I think, and it went down so well we decided to just do blues.
Alan: What does the blues mean to you? Jamie: It’s the origins of most popular songs really. Listen to the really early stuff like Robert Johnson and it’s all there. Jay: To me, its about freedom. That’s how it started, with the slave trade, and it was the one thing that nobody could take away from them. Kiefer: That’s what it is to me too. It’s about expressing yourself Andy: It’s not like having a musical formula. You can express yourself and be completely in your own performance. Jay: And it’s a nice way to depress people. Alan: How would you describe what has been described as your original slant on the blues? Jamie: We take our influences from more than one genre. Me and Jamie really like to experiment with the progressive side of things, like odd time signatures.
Jay: We’ve all got such different backgrounds and influence so that when it all comes together, it gives us a unique sound. Jamie: When me and Keifer were growing up we saw quite a lot of guys playing the same 12 bar shuffle again and again, which can be good, but we just wanted to do it a bit differently. Andy: My influences come from things like Dream Theatre and Porcupine Tree, all the progressive, ancient classic rock bands. Kiefer: That’s the best thing about this, you need to evolve and you don’t want to be stuck doing the same thing every night. It’s so easy to do a 12 bar shuffle but it’s what you do to it that makes a difference and that’s how we define ourselves. People like Joe Bonamassa and Ian Siegal have done their own thing with it. Alan: Who are your favourite blues artists? Phil: Joe Bonamassa Jay: Jamie’s got me hooked on Kelly-Jo Phelps, I think he’s amazing. Jamie: I was going to say Kelly-Jo Phelps actually. Kiefer: For me, it’s people who do something different. People like Matt Schofield. Jay: Janis Joplin. The passion when she’s singing just blows me away. Andy: I like more hard-hitting rock blues like Eric Sardinas.
Alan: Who’s influenced you the most? Jamie: Me and Kiefer saw a gig by The Hoax a few months ago and they blew us away. That’s the influence on us at the moment. Jay: Apparently we were compared to them last year. Kiefer: As far as the band goes, I don’t think there’s anything that influences us. It’s all about our own individual ideas and styles and bringing them together. Phil: The one that blew me away was the Steve Bye band at Newcastle City Hall back in 2005. I was on the front row and it just blew my head off with the sharpness and the dexterity. The whole musicianship, the progressiveness. Alan: The blues has to progress too. That’s what you are doing.
Alan: Are there any particular songs you play that have special meaning to you? Jay: The ones that we’ve written are all very deep seated. I don’t think this lot know what I’m singing about half the time. Your experiences do influence you, even if you don’t know it, and they come across in your music. It’s probably why most of what I write is depressing! Alan: Tell me about the gigs you’ve been doing recently; you seem to be very busy. Jamie: In the past year, it’s been mayhem. Kiefer: In the past few months we’ve managed to break out of Cumbria and we’ve done quite a lot in Leeds and Yorkshire and we’ve gone down really well. Alan: What about London? Andy: We have, but it’s not too great at the moment because trying to convince people in London that you’re worth taking on is hard. Jamie: It’s kinda catch 22 because they don’t want you unless you can bring people but you can’t bring people unless you can get a few gigs. Jay: We're also really excited about the Maryport Blues Festival.
Jamie: Hard. Kiefer: Really hard Phil: If you just take the gigs, we’ve had to push and push and push really hard in the past 3 years just to get anywhere. Around Maryport and Whitehaven now it’s a lot easier because we’re recognised from the local paper but when we go to Leeds you’re nobody to them and they want you for nothing. Jamie: The chances of us ever getting on a major label are really slim because nobody wants to listen to blues music anymore. Jay: I don’t know about that. Maryport Blues Festival gets a huge following. Alan: And there’s a lot more festivals like it around the country that get big audiences. Jamie: I suppose I meant that it’s not as popular. Jay: It is a definite minority compared to the popular music that’s just getting churned out week after week. That’s slightly annoying. Phil: It’s getting more popular with the likes of Oli Brown and the younger generation. Andy: He’s playing at Glastonbury this year and when you hear about people like him who have actually got somewhere with it that gives you confidence when you are young. Jay: Music is constantly evolving and what’s getting listened to now you would never have thought 10 years ago that it would be popular. Alan: I read somewhere that you opened for Sherman Robertson. Jamie: It was kinda lucky that we got the gig because we knew the person who was organising it. It was fantastic. He was really good to us and he paid more attention to us than the older ones. He played to us. He came out and said to us and said he really enjoyed the set. He was such a nice guy.
Kiefer: We knew some of the other people too, like Roger Innes was playing his bass and we’d seen him with the John O’Leary Band. Roger Innes was just as nice. You know, he’s been all over and played with everybody, but he was really really nice. Jamie: We were booked to open for Ian Siegal as well but fate was against us because it was when all the floods happened in Cumbria and he couldn’t make it. Phil: We also opened for The Producers recently in Carlisle. Jamie: That was kinda weird because their music is very different to us. They were really good and we really enjoyed it. It was a good experience for us. Alan: How did you get involved in the 'Battle of the Bands' competition in Maryport? Phil: We’d been in it a few times but we don’t really want to listen to what we did then. Jay: I’ve spoken to a couple of people on the Blues Committee and they said that every year we were getting a little bit closer but we weren’t really there, and this year we were. Kiefer: Me and Jamie entered every year with different bands but to take the prize at the end of it was just amazing. Andy: And to open the festival this year is just going to be amazing Kiefer: I think everyone would like to give credit to all the bands; everyone played absolutely amazingly and the final was hard. Jay: We played that stage at the Youth Festival and we all said that we wanted to be there again on the first night of the festival with an audience.
Alan: Today is the official launch of your first album, 'Blood on the Moon'. Tell me about the making of the album. Jamie: We’ve done about four recording sessions and each time we’ve come away and then a few months later we’ve thought, “Actually, we can do better than that”, so we finally managed to get it all done so that we’re happy with it. It’s twelve original songs and all of them are recorded at The Music Farm in Egremont with Tom Tyson. Phil: Tom Tyson has been fantastic. Jay: The bonus track was a home grown song recorded in a very pleasant basement in Maryport. Kiefer: We did the album over two weekends, one to record and one to mix, but it’s taken a year and a half to get to this point. Jay: We are really happy with it though because we’ve taken our time to get it right. Kiefer: We are really grateful to Emma Bell too, who did all the artwork for nothing and she’s done an amazing job. Alan: Some music are arguably fads that come and go, but the blues is always with us. Why do you think that is? Jamie: Because you can’t get rid of a good thing Phil: It’s built into people. It’s always been there. Pop music is just a trend. Jamie: And you can say that any music, even now, has come from the blues. If you look at even rock music in the 70s it was just loud blues really. Jay: Blues is comfortable though. You could put it on in any venue with any group of people and they will, to an extent, enjoy it. Everyone can associate it with somehow and it might mean something different to everyone but everyone can make a link to it, so I don't think it will ever go away. Phil: We’ve adapted the blues to our style but it’s so versatile. We like to take old songs, rip them up and put them back together in a different way.
Alan: What are your future plans? Jamie: We are just going to push it as far as it can go really. Andy: We think we have something that people will want to listen to so we just need to convince venues to have us now. Jay: It’s just getting out there and getting further afield. Andy: Since we’ve gelled together as a five-piece and felt that, yes, we do have something here, we’ve watched other bands and thought that, we can do too. A couple of us have full-time jobs so it does make it hard but we want to try and push this as hard as we can.
Alan: Thank you very much, and the very best of luck to you all for
your future.
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Jay: I was in musical theatre. I wasn’t a blues boy! I’ve been in
about three different amateur operatic groups and I did performing arts
at college. Then I bumped into the others at a Mayor’s Charity do by
chance
Kiefer: But the audience doesn’t like that sort of thing!
Alan: What’s it like as young musicians in the current music
business?
Andy: I asked him at the end what he thought of our band and he said,
“Yeah, man, it’s a good band. You’ve got a good funky five”
