Blood Red Shoes
Read a biography of Blood Red Shoes and you’ll learn that their truly visceral band name comes from a tale of Ginger Rogers practising so hard that her pearly white dance shoes became blood soaked after an intense rehearsal. What the biography doesn’t account for is the blood red shoes of the band’s adoring fans who dance furiously and tirelessly, for this, Britain’s best punk rock duo. Their dirty, vampish, enticing rock with a slick of gloss will leave you with your breath stolen, feet throbbing and eyes dilated. Outline catch up with Steven, one half of the band, to find out just how they invoke such a reaction…
So, right back to the beginning; if you hadn’t held your Laura-Mary ransom, would I be researching Lady Muck (Laura’s old band) right now, or is it true that Laura-Mary was going to join circus school?It is true that she was going to circus school, yes. We do make up a lot of stuff in interviews, but that was actually true. Yeah, she was looking at doing that, but I kind of stole her away.
Your previous band, Cat on Form had recently disbanded hadn’t they?Yeah, and her band were still together but they weren’t doing much; they just sort of stopped when we started playing music together. I think if I hadn’t have done that, then I don’t necessarily think she’d have carried on doing Lady Muck, ‘cause that was sort of coming to a close. What happened was they never technically broke up, they just stopped; Laura-Mary used to organise and book all of their gigs and once we started practicing together, she just didn’t organise another one with them and none of the band members actually called up and asked what was happening! It was that sort of set up, so I don’t think they would have lasted much longer, but definitely there would be me in a different band and Laura in a different band, but we’d both be doing a lot of stuff…
And you wouldn’t be the supreme force you are now!Yeah, we wouldn’t have joined forces!
It took 3 and a half years to release your first album – why was it so long in the making?Well, it wasn’t so long in the making, it was actually quite short when we started to actually make it and then release it, but basically we didn’t really feel comfortable with making records. We never even sort of consciously thought about it that much, but for us the whole time we were playing we were touring so we thought ‘OK, we’re going on tour – it’d be good to have a 7” to sell at the show’, so we just kept making 7” singles with different labels that would appear. Then we started to get approached by bigger labels who wanted to do big sort of deals and albums and stuff and we weren’t really ready. We kept chatting to those labels, but at the same time, we kept doing our own thing – we kept touring and releasing little independent 7 inches, then got to a point where we thought ‘OK, we’ve got what we think are the songs that we’d want to put on an album’, so we became more comfortable and it got to a point where it became apparent that now was the time to start thinking about an album. So then we signed to a label to do the album and went in to make it about three months later and then it did get put back because of all this label buy-out bollocks; we finished it in September and then it came out the following April – it was supposed to come out in January but it got knocked back – so yeah, essentially it took so long ‘cause we really didn’t feel like it! That’s the honest thing, that we didn’t really feel like making a record and I’m glad we did because I think the whole time that we were putting it off and releasing 7” singles and touring, we were learning a lot; we were getting better at working together, better at writing and a lot better at playing our instruments, so we were just figuring out what the possibilities were as a band and finding our own identity and I’m glad, in a way, that we waited that long ‘cause I’m so much happier with the record, like, I imagine if I’d made a record only a year into making the band, I would definitely cringe at some parts of it – I’d have definitely thought ‘oh, I shouldn’t have put that thing on there’ and stuff, but I think we learnt enough to definitely feel ready for it.
And you were touring like bitches weren’t you?Yeah, and we still are! That’s just kinda what we do!
Looking at the first album, was it everything you wanted it to be?Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you always find flaws in stuff, especially when you’ve created it, ‘cause you find things in it that it’d take other people 100 listens to find. I definitely see room for us improving and for progress and for doing something more with the next record, but I’m really proud of it and it definitely lived up to what our expectations were when we were making it, in terms of that we just wanted it to sound really aggressive and heavy and capture some of the live impetus, as much as you can get on a record anyway, and yeah, we definitely were satisfied with it.
You split songwriting duties… but what do you love specifically about Laura-Mary’s songwriting style?Well, split’s not really the write word ‘cause it’s not like we do a bit each – we do it at the same time, together. But in terms of her song-writing, it’d be her guitar playing and singing, haha! It sounds like a stupid answer, but that’s how we do it – we just go into a room together and we start playing and improvising until something clicks, then we use it, so it’s not like we write a part separately and then bring it in and say “what do you think?” We do it together so the whole process of formation has input from both of us, y’know; what she’s playing affects how I drum and how I’m playing affects her, so it’s kinda hard to see individually what we bring to it other than the instruments we play ‘cause it’s such a collective venture. I think definitely, when we first began, one of the things I really liked about her and one of the reasons I was really interested in having Laura in the band was ‘cause she used to scream loads and she used to come up with these melodies that are quite different to what I would come up with; if you gave me a guitar line and asked me to sing over it, the way that I would sing it would be completely different to how Laura would sing it and I think I think I sort of learnt from her about that. That was something really, really early on that I was interested in, which is part of the reason why I thought it’d be cool to make some music with her. She still does that now; she finds notes and I’m like “shit, I never would have thought of that”, ‘cause I just usually yell over records. I guess ‘cause I’m a drummer I kind of do rhythmic stuff rather than the melodic stuff.
I read that you said “your songs are tied to an idea that there must be more to life than you’ve been presented with”. With a successful music career and all the attachments that come along with that, do newer songs have a more contented feel?Erm, some of it kinda does actually, which we were like ‘that’s a bit weird’, ‘cause you think that’s not really us – it sounds a bit too upbeat, but we thought if we’re just gonna sit here and talk about how everything sucks, when certain things in our life don’t, then we’d be liars. But at the same time, the general feel of the stuff we’ve been writing for this next album is still very dissatisfied and still aggressive, but certain things have got better for us, like we now have somewhere to live, whereas before it was just the back of a van or a floor when we were on tour and things like that, but there’s still a lot of things that aggravate us and a lot of things that we deal with in our music are things that aren’t immediately fixable by the fact that your band has sold some records or you’ve been able to get a flat. There’s a lot more stuff going on and a lot of that comes out in our music – the stuff that sits in the back of your mind that you think about but don’t talk about everyday, but when you make music, you’re sort of free to get out all these things inside you, so there’s definitely that dissatisfaction in it, but there’s also songs we’ve written that are a bit more upbeat, but still very much a punk-rock sound. It’s not like we’re sitting around making a smiley, happy, the sun’s shining, everything’s great type of soundtrack to you going down the beach; it’s still aggressive and it’s still got a weight to it, but yeah, it’s not songs about having a shit job like it was on the first album, ‘cause we don’t have a shit job! I’m sure there are some bands that would keep on making that same record, ‘cause they think people would like to hear those lyrics, but I can’t pretend about how I feel, you’ve just got to be honest.
So, if forum postings are correct, it was Blood Red Shoes’ 4th birthday yesterday… did you celebrate?Holy shit! You’re right… we totally missed it. I’m gonna go tell Laura that later. But yeah, we totally missed it, oh man, I actually can’t believe it. Right, we’re gonna go and do something tonight to celebrate.
With your baby turning four, is it growing up to be a different character, or the same as the day it was born?It’s definitely a different character, but I think the thing – haha, I’m not sure how far I can push this metaphor – is that it’s different but you can still see the resemblance musically, ‘cause I think all the elements that we have in our band now were there from the start and I think they’ve just developed and grown in certain ways, like, when we started it sounded more trashy than it does now, and it definitely sounded a bit more like a grungey, noisy thing and now it’s definitely got a bit more poppy, but I think the ‘poppiness’ in the songs was always there, like the vocal melodies, but now they’ve come out more now. I think also we’ve got faster as we’ve gone along; our early songs were slower, but now we’ve sped up. I think musically it’s definitely grown, but not so much that you can’t tell it’s the same thing. In terms of obviously what the band is to the outside world, it’s massively different, I mean, we pay our rent out of the band and we tour not just in the UK and a few countries in Europe, but we go to countries all over the world, like Japan and we have a record label with all these people – we have like an army of people around us that do stuff and that’s incredibly different to when we started because that was just like two of us and a mate driving a van. Now we have, like, two managers and a booking agent who has an assistant and someone who does our press and someone who does our radio, so it’s a bit like a corporation or something – it’s like Blood Red Shoes PLC, haha. It’s pretty strange and whenever I think about that I think it seems completely ridiculous that these two people that got together to make music have this team around them doing stuff – it just makes me laugh, it’s so bizarre.
I was going to ask actually, because there’s a very hands-on approach in the band – Laura-Mary doing the artwork, you creating the website… what’s it like when all these other people start working for you? It is strange, but we’re very careful about who we deal with and I think with a lot of bands, their label will do a lot of that stuff and they’ll pick who should work with them, but we don’t do that; we go out and meet everybody face-to-face before they get to do anything, like the people that do our press and the people on the labels and stuff like that, we literally meet them all and we meet different people and we sit down and we go ‘OK, this person really likes and understands our band’, then they’re sort of allowed to do it! But it is strange and we have to be careful with finding the right people that we can trust and it is frustrating because even though in a lot of ways it’s useful delegating tasks to people who are getting paid to do it, they never – and this is no disrespect to the people that do things for us – but they never care about this band as much as we do, you know, their attention to detail will never be as in depth as ours, because for us, this band’s like life and death; when we have a shit gig, we literally feel like killing ourselves and no-one, however much they love the band and they’re part of our band, they’ll never care about it to that extremity, so you’ve got to be careful I guess.
So, to go along with your box of secrets, I give you a box of sentiments – what feelings from your four years working together would you put in there?Er, I’d put excitement, I’d put bemusement, I’d put anger, I’d put surprise, I’d put guilt, I’d put… is expectation a sentiment? Yeah, I’d put that in there.
That’s a weighty box already…It is a weighty box; I think I’ll leave it there.
Ryanair would not let you carry that box on their plane.No, they’d just charge you a small fortune to put it one there – we’ve had that with guitars before.
You’d have to probably open up the box at the check-in and get them out and wear all of those sentiments. You could hang guilt around your neck like a necklace and wear the shoes of expectation.
You’ve toured way harder than many bands leading to exhaustion and postponed dates – with this UK tour looming, how are you prepping yourself for this stint on the road?We’re not! We’re doing it like we did with the festivals earlier this year, which is that we wake up on the morning that we’re leaving and go “oh, shit” and put a suitcase together really quickly before getting in the van. But what we are concentrating on, which I think makes it more fun, is that we’re writing new songs; we’ve set ourselves a minimum of new songs that we’re gonna play each night. Obviously we can’t just play all new songs because people are coming to hear songs we’ve got on the record and as much as we want to push forward, we don’t want to piss people off – it’s not fair, so we wanted to get a good balance, you know. So yeah, we set ourselves a minimum of like five new songs we’re gonna play every night, ‘cause obviously for us, we play our old songs so often that just having those new songs makes us excited and makes the whole thing a lot more enjoyable. I think if we’d have just had the same songs that we’ve been playing for most of this year, I would feel really lacklustre and I think it would feel more of a chore, but having those new songs is the best thing we could possibly do for this tour to keep us excited and ready for it and what that does for you mentally, even if you’re physically tired from touring, just that excitement factor of wanting to see how people feel about those new songs and just getting to play them is the best preparation we can do.
Does this mean we can expect album number 2 to be making an appearance soon?Erm, yeah, yeah, we’re hopefully recording it in January. Because this one got knocked back a little bit, we’re kind of a couple of months ahead of what people think if you know what I mean, ‘cause this album was initially meant to come out in January, so for us, recording the new one in January 2009 is actually a year since the first one although it actually didn’t come out ‘til April so we’re raring to go with new stuff; we’re playing it loads on tour and we want to record it, maybe get an EP out next year or a split single out with someone, then next year record the album and maybe release it in April or May. Yeah, we want to keep it going, keep some momentum and keep writing; we don’t want to be one of those bands who disappears for two years and then comes back to make an album out of nowhere, we want to just keep things moving and keep ourselves excited by it and keep everybody else excited. Unless you’re one of those big radio bands where you can disappear for three years and come back and everybody will remember who you are because they’ll stick you on the radio, then it’s almost dangerous now ‘cause there’s so many bands about and so much going on that to disappear for a long time without making a record, people will forget and we don’t want that. We’ve got a lot of music in us so we’re pushing ourselves to get it out… and get it out fast!
You’re often quite damning about modern bands, which is refreshingly honest, but are there any current bands that you think are actually blazing a trail in the industry?Yeah, Foals. There’s no doubt about that; Foals have done something really fucking cool and the fact they’ve got as big as they have absolutely blows my mind and makes me genuinely really happy because, like, Klaxons go on all day saying “wow, we’re so weird and we’re so different” and it’s just absolute bollocks – they make the most straight up, obvious music because you know, indie-dance floor music has been done since the year dot and to me, it just sounds like Blur but with extra keyboards and done with a synthesiser. It’s not that progressive and it’s not that different, then you listen to Foals and they actually are trying to push it and they’re ready to get weirder as well. They’ve actually just sold out Brixton Academy and I think it’s awesome that they’ve managed to go there that quickly, ‘cause like Radiohead didn’t get that weird ‘til they’d made three albums – Foals have come straight in with something that everyone’s saying is pretty weird is great. I think them and I think Biffy Clyro I really admire because I think they’ve really proved a point; they’ve kinda gone the opposite way to Foals because they’ve taken a while to prove who they are. They got in the top ten recently as well and you look at the songs that are in the top ten – shit like Katy Perry – and when Biffy Clyro are in there you think that is weird music, that’s actually interesting and they’ve come up from an underground scene. I really respect that – similarly to Foals, they’ve taken some really interesting bits of underground music and done it in a way that is more accessible, but still holds some of the fire of that music and kind of the interesting, left-field elements of it, but have taken it in a way much like Nirvana opened up a lot of underground music to a lot of people who mostly just hear stuff on the radio. I think both those bands are doing that and they’re two I really admire – they’re up to something really cool and they’re never ever going on about how they’ve done that; they never slap themselves on the back about it or act like torchbearers or any of this, whereas Klaxons hang around and say how great and weird they are and how that’s really cool, but it’s actually not. All they’ve done is blaze the trail for other shit imitation bands of Klaxons, like Friendly Fires and stuff like that.
You've openly talked about taking down the Twang – if you were to recruit an army of other musicians to fight the Twang, who would be in your force?Biffy and Foals would definitely be in there…
They’re quite skinny though aren’t they…Yeah, I don’t know how physically adept they are at fighting that fight against a load of brummy laddish blokes like the Twang. Who’d be good? You’d probably have to call in a few punk or metal bands for a bit of the beefcake, wouldn’t you?
Maybe. Foals would be good for logistics and strategies though wouldn’t they…Yeah, they’d go in at officer class, like planning it out but not on the front line. I reckon I’d get some bands like a metal band from Brighton called Johnny Truant ‘cause they’d know how to throw a punch or two an er, there’s another band from Brighton called Ghost of a Thousand…
Have they got a bit of muscle?Yeah I reckon they’d know a thing or two about aggression so they’d be good. I tell you one thing, the bands on our side would definitely be louder than the bands on the side of the Twang, so maybe we could just flatten them with volume. I’m not sure if anyone needs to bring down the Twang now though ‘cause I don’t know if they’re actually doing anything…
I know – I actually had a look on their website today in prep for this interview and the last thing on it was posted in March saying “Don’t worry guys, the Twang are coming up with material in the studio…” and that was it!We’re honoured you’re playing in Norwich – I read that you had quite a heavy one in Norwich last time… what are your memories of the night?We’ve done quite a few shows there, but I’m just trying to establish which one was which… there was one where we actually broke up the band; we went out, played, someone got in a fight at the club – not a physical fight, just a big shouting match – then we walked off, then Laura and me had an argument, then we broke up the band, then we passed out in a subway, then woke up and realised we couldn’t find our hotel, then woke up again and actually realised we were outside our hotel, and then we got in the hotel and got some more drinks out. I’d lost a shoe and I went into town the next day and got a fry-up with only one shoe and I was convinced that it was just a joke and that someone would be like, “ha ha, here’s your shoe back”, but no, it’d just gone. I might have even lost it at the club and just wandered back without it – I don’t really remember.
I wonder if this fate will befall you again in Norwich…Yeah, Norwich has always been quite a weird one for us; it’s been intense for one reason or another.
Emma Roberts
Put on your blood red dancing shoes and get along to the Waterfront on the 21st to see Blood Red Shoes in action. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk or call 01603 508050.
