Heres my interview with The Debris
The Debris are:
Stuart Potts – Vocals
Jamie Harron – Lead Guitar
Andrew Potts – Rhythm Guitar
Richie Jenkins – Bass Guitar
Chris Medina - Drums
How'd you get started in music?
We’re just a group of friends with a shared
love of music who wanted to be in a band and make a racket together. Only Jamie and Chris could play a little when
we started out, so we were pretty much making it up as we went along – very
much in the vein of that garage / punk rock philosophy.
Who are your inspirations or influences?
We each have various influences and
inspirations, but the 90’s revival in guitar music is where we all collectively
found common ground, and really started to be interested in the music scene as
a whole – actually believing we could try it ourselves one day.
Jamie’s mum was in a 60’s beat group and Stuart,
the other main songwriter was heavily into guitar music, playing his dad’s
record collection from a very early age.
Having five members in the band, we have a
wide range of influences from various eras and numerous guitar-based genres;
but the bands / artists we can pretty much all agree on, and who have been a
big influence on us at one stage or another are:
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks,
The Who, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Neil Young,
The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Jam, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, The
Stone Roses, The La’s, Oasis - and there are many, many more too.
What advice would you offer aspiring performers?
Just get writing and jamming and see what
happens. If it doesn’t work at first,
keep going and eventually it will come together. Also, don’t try to write for a particular
audience or trend. Just write the music
you like, be true to yourself and enjoy it!
How do you set yourselves apart from other
bands or singers?
We have never consciously tried to set
ourselves apart or be unique. As with most bands, we just threw our influences
and individual styles together, and this is what came back – which is a true
reflection of us as a group.
It can be very common for bands / artists to
have a similar sound at certain periods in time, whether they consciously set
out to be part of a scene or not. There
is some interesting and varied stuff out there right now, as well as some
Oasis, Arctic Monkeys clones – which seems to be the current trend.
We would like to think we are slightly
leftfield of that, and the mainstream sound as a whole - offering an alternative
to the bulk of what we’re hearing.
Music is a subjective thing though and people
will like what they like, whether it’s totally original, or just a re-hash of
what’s been before. Neither is right or
wrong, and there is a place for all.
Any new gigs or albums in the future?
With regards to
gigs, we initially started out in the mid 00’s where we gigged quite
extensively, playing many of the iconic small venues across London: The Bull
& Gate, Water Rats, Hope & Anchor, Dublin Castle, Borderline, Barfly etc
We then started to
play some larger venues, most notably the 100 Club, Scala, The Garage and
Islington Academy. At this time, we had
a 4 track EP and a set-list of around 10 to 15 songs that we were
promoting. We then got a little
disillusioned with the whole thing and decided we needed to grow up and get
‘proper’ jobs.
During lockdown we
decided to finish what we had started back then, with the aim of completing an
album. On that basis, we have no real interest in gigging at this stage, but we
are writing new songs which will hopefully complement some older ones.
The plan is to
focus on writing and recording for now, then pulling together a collection of
songs that all work well together, fully showing what we’re about.
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