Canterbury are a band on the up. They have recently been getting positive press across the board with their poppy brand of post hardcore modern day emo style rock (a description I‘m sure they won‘t thank me for but it does ring true). I met up with the two front men an hour or so before they took the stage at their recent show at the Westcoast Bar in Margate.
PW: So can you introduce yourselves
L: I’m Luke and I sing and play the keyboards in Canterbury
M: And I am Mike and I sing and I play the guitars in Canterbury, well, just one of the guitars. The other is played by James.
PW: Fist off and a most obvious question really. Why name yourselves Canterbury? Have you links to the City?
L: We knew we would be asked this question here of all places being so close to Canterbury. We haven’t ever played in Canterbury and this is the closest we’ve come.
M: We are saving playing in Canterbury for a better time I think.
L: We’re going to say for now that the reason is that we checked an online census and the City in England with the most Luke’s, Mike’s, James’, Scott’s and Bens is Canterbury. That’s the one we are going to give to Margate today.
PW: That’s the thing before I heard your music with a name such as yours I imagines either a progggy 70’s influenced sound or a straight up hardcore din? I didn’t expect at all what came out of the speakers. Canterbury is an odd choice of moniker don’t you think?
M: It’s largely to do with being just a pleasing word, when it’s written down, when it’s spoken.
PW: What about on a Google search, that’s got to be a tricky one?
M: We’ve only just got on there, if you type Canterbury now I think our YouTube video for Set You Right or our MySpace is the fourth entry that comes up now. We’ve beaten the City… almost (Laughs).
L: It’s working towards a sponsorship deal with Cathedral City Cheese
M: And the rugby team deal.
L: They can make us a nice kit. An away kit sponsored by Canterbury.
PW: You’ve been together since school and being so young in age have you found it difficult being taken seriously and because you are still a tight unit a few years down the line do you see peoples perceived opinions about you have changed?
L: I think that depends on the way you act. We’ve now had four years experience and we do get taken a bit more seriously than we used to and of course it depends on how the music comes across as well for instance when you show up to a gig and people are like ‘Who are these little kids?’ but whoever your playing in front of are the important ones. I think now that we have been around for a while and people know of us now I’d hate to think that we are not taken seriously. You can always trump a sound guy by beating them to questions before they ask you and you have a little fun with it that way. We have accepted that sometimes we do get treated like morons but then there are as many times when we get treated seriously as well.
PW: Some of this may stem from the press that you have received in the past. A lot of articles pick up on the fact that when you started out you were not allowed to play live because of school. What is the truth behind that?
L: Well, four of us were in boarding school in Hampshire. It wasn’t that we weren’t allowed to play live but it got in the way, a lot.
M: We had school on Saturday afternoons.
L: Playing gig’s were not the easiest things to do. When you’re boarding you can’t say like, ‘Can I Go and play a show tonight?’ Playing a gig on a Wednesday night and having school at 8.30 in the morning…
PW: Could you still pull it together at all for weekend shows?
M: Every now and then we would play a weekend show and in the holidays we would try and play as much as possible but we never played that much.
L: Instead we just wrote an album, we felt we had one year left of school so we took it semi-seriously and got ourselves a bit of education. We sat back and wrote an album so at least when it was time to play loads of shows we didn’t have just the three songs.
M: We really did just focus on the writing because it wasn’t really an option to be on the live scene at that stage.
PW: So you wrote this album during down time at school and after all the work you guys had put into the process you decided to record it in someone’s living room. It seems an odd and risky choice, how did that come about?
M: Yeah, Scott’s living room. We had the album planned out and we practiced the album and only that, rather than have 20 songs and picking 11 or whatever we had what we knew would work. There were a couple that did get taken out and replaced but we always had that (core). We had to record on a budget and we found this Pete Miles guy who at the time who was freelance. He was mobile and had a van full of gear and can literally make you sound so good.
L: Wherever you are.
PW: That is a good point. From the first listen the album sounds like money as if a huge budget has been blown on the thing.
L: It took 3 weeks and £3,000. There are some records that I wont in any way mention but you here how much money they spend and how shit it sounds as compared not in such to our record but the quality of the production of our record. Cheekily we did it. Why would anyone want to fly to America to record an album? I just don’t know. It’s not a scrappy album and I don’t think we expected it to come out as it did If I am being honest because all we had were these songs that we had been practicing in a village hall before we ever played live and then all of a sudden when we come to record them they sound way more in time than we do, not that we synthesized any of it artificially but because Pete Miles was so on the ball and he knew exactly how to capture everything we wanted to do. It just came out sounding better than we were. So for the next 6 months we basically had to learn our own record. And live we are sort of developing the songs our selves. Now we are 2 ½ years down the line and that’s where we are at now.
PW: So it’s been an age since you completed the recording then? Do you get bored of playing these songs now?
L: I wouldn’t say bored of the songs. We started writing the record between the ages of 16 to 18 and we waited until we were 20 and 21 to release it. Opinions do change but we didn’t grow out of it but we almost forgot it was our record and did other things.
M: we’ve only been playing maybe 5 of these tracks since we’ve been playing around and it does get a little degrading. On the flip side as soon as it was released and you see people knowing the songs that only you used to know.
L: It completely re sparked our love for it.
M: It gives the whole thing a new lease of life and there is not a song on that album now that I don’t enjoy playing live.
PW: I imagine you are tired of talking about it by now but the whole free download thing in hindsight for a new band is such a masterstroke.
M: For the first 2 years after we finished it we did knuckle down and try and get it released and then we thought about paying for a 1000 copies and just giving it out to people in our local scene because that’s how new bands do it. Then our manager found us and luckily we got a booking agent as well and it was they who convinced us to keep it under wraps to see what our options were.
L: A lot of people were thinking where has this band come from? They have this album that sonically sounds like a second or a third album but we basically could not play live.
M: We couldn’t play the record as people knew it; we scared quite a lot of people off.
L: Because we hadn’t been on the live circuit we had no one to release it to. I mean locally we were known and people from our school knew us but we had to wait for a platform in order for us to release it. We didn’t want 20 fans around the country and the record drips on for a few years and you get a miniscule fanbase so we toured for 2 years, built a fanbase of thousands rather than tens and then we released something to them that they could all get at the same time. Our manager was quite reluctant at first about the free download.
M: We didn’t have enough fans to physically release an album to.
L: For me it should be the done thing with a new band, how else can you get as many fans as possible? We can’t charge £10 for a CD when nobody knows who the band is. You can’t expect them to buy it. Saying that we now have released that album for free and we don’t know whether we are expected to release free records for the rest of our lives. There are so many people out there that want an actual CD though, to be able to read the lyrics. I would not want to ever do a release without having a physical copy as well.
M: Films, fair enough. People can pay £500,000,000 for a film to be made. We paid £3,000 to make our record. We paid for it and I would like that money back but we are alright without it. We have an amazing album that we are so proud of out of it.
PW: (As the doors open and a huge throng of people pile into the venue). Well I can tell you that in Margate you would not have a crowd of this size unless you had done the free download.
M: If we had have charged we would have sold maybe 1000 copies by now. That’s great, we would have grossed a bit of income to put towards a new van or fixing the van or fucking petrol. Doing it this way we had 10,000 downloads in two months, released it in the end of October and by Christmas had 10,000 copies out there. Of course if we had sold 10,000 units labels would be snapping us up. I’m not sure of the final figure but it is somewhere between 15 and 20,000 thousand now (05/03/10). We have had this donation scheme as well and people have been coming back and giving a bit of money, £3 here and £4 there. Some have just given a tenner and said fuck it it’s a good album or whatever.
L: The day we put it up we were in Birmingham on the Billy Talent tour and my phone was going crazy with all the people commenting on twitter and facebook. It was so exciting after waiting 2 years for people to have it.
PW: And why the title Thank You?
L: It was always the title; it was the title before we had the songs. I’m not really sure why. I think it was a case of ‘that would be a cool name for an album’.
PW: So what’s with the medical theme, Diver, Accident, Ambulance, Hospital all appear to follow a narrative path?
M: We don’t like to go too far into it because we don’t want to come across and this profound or annoyingly arrogant band but we did write a little story.
L: It was meant to be more fun than say an album that is just a collection of songs. We had those three songs Accident, Ambulance and Hospital which followed the narrative of a person in these situations. So we had these words as titles and when it came to writing the songs we fit the words to each song which is why it flows like it does. It’s there as a clue but fit’s as to what they are about. We came out with this because you asked about it. We haven’t gone around saying ‘We have this debut concept album’
PW: But it is always mentioned in reviews.
L: A lot of people have picked it up. And we wanted to create that (buzz) as well. I can’t ever imagine releasing music that is simply a collection of songs. It means a lot more this way for us playing it and a lot more for listeners working it out. The best albums always have some journey through them.
PW: So now you have reached the next level from local band to getting write ups in the national press and playing on big tours, how has playing with the likes of Cancer Bats, Hundred Reasons and Billy Talent in the larger venues affected your attitudes.
M: We had a period during the summer before the Billy talent tour where we did absolutely nothing and we were feeling like we may never play to anyone new ever again. Then in quick succession we had the Billy talent tour, then the Hundred Reasons tour and then we went out on our own. Our first ever headline tour and I was blown away everyday by the turnouts. Even in a place like Stoke, 100 people showed up and there were people singing along to every song. It was what we had been waiting for all that time.
L: It was an amazing step down though; we had just come from being first on a proper big tour, these little boys in these huge rooms. It was a steep learning curve. Those huge shows were really pressurised. If you fucked up, you fucked up in front of thousands rather than dozens. It was an interesting time last year getting a sneak peek of every aspect of success for a touring band.
PW: Stepping out in front of a huge audience for the first time must have been nerve wracking?
L: We’d played with Enter Shikari and You Me At Six a couple of times so we sort of had been there before.
M: Yet at Brixton Academy when we walked into the backstage area we turned into tourists. Everybody had their phones out. The balconies that never have anyone in them, I’d never seen them from that side of the venue.
L: And there is an evil security woman that’s always there and you could just flash her a pass and you were inside a room where only rock stars go. It sounds really corny but it was an absolute dream come true.
M: It was weird to go to the merch stand and see your t-shirts for sale, 100% dream come true. A massive live box was ticked. At the same time though it kinda feels like we earned it. It felt like we had been working towards that and we weren’t thrown in at the deep end. And of course playing venues that size you can grab yourself an instant fan base. And it was the middle of that tour that the record went active online.
PW: So what about the future, has a label picked you up or do you want to continue down the online route?
M: It’s only our friend really who put out the physical copy. He does work on an A&R desk at Atlantic records but he runs the Friends Vs Records label. It does have Universals distribution so we kind of have a foot in the door but it was nothing like ’Here is a load of money guys, I’ll put this out”. He is a really cool and hard working guy but it’s not like it’s label backing really.
PW: So you really are in the same sort of boat as you were previously in the fact that you don’t know how the next record is going to come out?
L: Definitely, yeah. We have this single, Gloria coming out on April 5th which is going to be a free download as well. We have been plugging this away to get on music TV and it’s on a couple of channels already. This should take us up to the summer time. I would like to be able to do a DVD of our story, it’s a fun tale.
M: As for being picked up, there are certain things a label can do for you. One of which is to be played everywhere which is the side of a record label that we really want. But they will pay for billboards and advertising in return for people paying full price for your album but what we could really do with is money to keep us afloat.
L: If I didn’t have to work a job I would be able to focus 100% on the band. After every tour I have to walk back into Tesco’s and it is the most depressing 9 hours of anyone’s life. So for that reason and I will completely unashamedly say it. I would love to get signed.
After the interview the band proceeded to rock the house. Mark in particular was completely chuffed with the turnout and reaction of the Margate crowd proclaiming the gig as his favourite ever show to the young sweaty throngs piled in front of him. I personally was on the fence with them, they are great at what they do but what they do isn’t really what I like. Saying that though, the guys managed to win me over. The song Eleven Twelve in particular is still stuck in my head today. What was most surprising was to find after an absence of Margate gigs for 4 years now there is still a crowd out there, hungry for live music. The future looks very, very bright indeed.
