Performing their selection of stadium rock and upbeat, raucous anthems, covers band Dr Strangelove shook the walls of weekend hot spot, Chambers, after three consecutive nights at the venue. The boys from Merseyside had no trouble blending into the frenzied and vivacious atmosphere, lending Jersey’s most sought-after night out location an extra boost in energy and character. Speaking to frontman Matt and drummer Frank, they talk highly of the small but thriving island:
1. It’s not the first time you’ve played in Jersey. What’s been your favourite thing about the island so far?
Frank: It’s become a bit of a second home.
Matt: It’s our 9th time here.
F: My favourite artifact I’ve taken home is from when I found a Batman and a Joker that someone had hand-painted in the War Tunnels, which had nothing to do with the War Tunnels but I’m a huge Batman fan so I had to get them. So since then I’ve been in love with Jersey.
M: I’m going to be a big wet blouse and say that my favourite thing is the people. We’ve made friends over here we’ve been here that many times, like our extended Jersey family.
2. What are your favourite individual songs that you love to play every time?
F: ‘Shoot to Thrill’s’ always good but we never play that here.
M: I enjoy anything by Queen.
F: We’ve got ‘Hammer to Fall’ and ‘Fat Bottom Girls’ in the set now, and they’re relatively new.
M: Anything that’s new tends to be more exciting, because if you do stuff every single weekend it starts to become second nature.
F: We have what we call the Tourist Set when we come here. We usually have to play the most commercial stuff that we have.
M: If we wanted to we could do a 10-minute blues jam, but Chambers wouldn’t enjoy it.
3. There’ll always be certain songs you have to play to certain audiences. But if you had free range to play whatever song you wanted, which song would that be?
F: Anything off Master of Puppets. Any Metallica, but I don’t think we’re going to get any Metallica in the set anytime soon. We used to do this funk medley, and in the middle (Matt) would start singing Enter Sandman over Lenny Kravitz, and you can’t help but find it hilarious! But you’d still be doing the Freddie moves and the Hetfield ‘yeah!’ at the same time.
M: If I could put any song in the set it would probably be ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden. We could probably do that in certain of the venues we play at home, as sometimes we can go full metal but other places we kind of have to play commercial rock and stuff that people can dance to.
F: I wasn’t the first drummer in the band, and these guys were telling me they were always getting told off for playing Pink Floyd when they first came over.
M: We did. We played ‘Money’ here once and the manager told us that he enjoyed it but could we not play it again.
4. How do you find the Jersey crowd compared to those in the UK? M: We get quite a mixed bag out here, because everyone that’s stood directly in front of us is a lot younger.
F: It’s like there’s an isolated vibe here, no one’s got any weird hang-ups or anything. So whenever you play certain places back home, if it’s bad night you’ll know it’s a bad night, just in the atmosphere. I’ve never met anyone in a bad mood here, ever. Everyone here is just really happy, maybe because you’re all in the middle of the water it cuts you off from everything.
M: We’ll get quite a young crowd in front of us, but then you would’ve noticed last night an older crowd along the sides and at the back. I quite like that split because they’re the ones who stay all night at the sides and then you’ve got the transitional ones who are just there for a drink and a dance and don’t really care who we are. Usually audiences depend on venue and where you are.
5. How did Dr Strangelove come about in the first place?
M: What’s the simple version of this story? Jeff, who is one of our guitarists and I, met ten years ago at an open mic night when he was looking for a singer for a previous band. We did that for a year or two before I moved from Merseyside to London, and then when I moved back we started looking for a new band, which is Dr Strangelove. We knew Carl, the other guitarist, through other open mic nights and he was about the best guitarist around, and he also knew our bassist so we got him involved. We were looking for a drummer for quite a while, and eventually settled on a guy called Lewis who we all knew, but because he was in another band we didn’t want to rob him.
F: Obviously we’re not the only great band back home, so we find it such a compliment that anyone would want to bring us out here, nine times in a row.
M: We usually come over three times a year; April, August, November.
6. Where does your band name originate from?
M: From the 1966 film Dr Strangelove.
7. How did the both of you get into music as a child?
F: I actually had a birthday a few weeks ago and my mum always tells people that when I was two years of age I knew all the lyrics to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Sometime in the nineties she recorded me on cassette tape just around the house, and you can hear me singing along to Queen, so it started there. I was always around Metallica and Nirvana, my brother was into that. It’s just always been normal to me.
M: Frank and I share a common love of Queen. It’s a similar thing to me, I was raised on 70’s and 80’s rock so it was natural that I would then follow. I remember ‘Queen; Greatest Hits’ on my dad’s cassette player in his Vauxhall Cavalier, and I could sing that album in track order front to back. You always start listening to your parent’s music and then as you get older you start getting into music your parents never liked.
F: My moment was hearing ‘Fade to Black’ by Metallica at my dads, because I’d never heard it before. My whole experience of Metallica was just 90’s Metallica, so when ‘Fade to Black’ came on it was like an epiphany.
M: This is embarrassing, as a teenager before my mum got home, I would crack on an album I liked, blasting it and singing every word seeing if I could hit the notes and probably did that for two or three years every single night when I got home from school. Sooner or later someone was looking for a singer in a band and I was like ‘oh, I’ll have a go.’
8. Where’s been your favourite venue to play?
F: Our hometown venue is called The Swinging Arms, a bit of a rock pub and the town is a bit of a shit hole back home but it’s our shit hole. That’s where we get the warmest reception.
M: We’ve had some good nights in the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the Hard Rock Cafe Manchester has been alright the first few times we played. There can be a mixed crowd in there because you get a lot of tourists, sometimes it’s rammed and sometimes it’s dead.
F: We’ve been relegated to acoustic sets in there now, they’ve stopped doing full bands sadly.
M: My favourite’s probably the Cavern Club. I just love the prestige.
9. Are you solely a covers band, or have you considered writing originals?
M: We’ve considered and we have a selection of ideas that have been shared amongst us that we’ve promised we’ll do something with someday. We’re all quite busy because we all play in multiple bands, some of us have full time jobs, so it’s finding the time to sit and write.
F: The thing is, we’ve never ever practised either. Never sat in a rehearsal room jamming out things so it’s only when we’ve got something important coming up or want to get a few new songs in that we manage to fit in a day to get into a room together. There’s no reason why we can’t, I just think we are a bit lazy as well.
M: I think it will happen. It’ll just be one of those where we take five years to do three songs, like a Chinese Democracy 2.0.
10. You’ve just mentioned some of you have day jobs, what are they?
F: I don’t have one.
M: I’m a solicitor. A lawyer by day and a singer by night. Kind of like a shit Batman. I’ve also got another band which I split my time with, which is just a Led Zeppelin tribute.
11. Do you have any funny stories of drunken audiences?
F: It’s usually Carl to be honest. We’re all so buttoned down in our ways, except from Carl. We can’t trust him with anything and we have a joke where we need to have a Carl switch on the mic in case he says something horrible. He’s got no filter.
M: Carl is 90% the personality of the band. Funnily enough this story involves Carl. I remember I let a girl up on stage once, and the criminal rule is you must never let anyone on stage because they’ll never get off again. So I let a girl dance on stage for one song in the Cavern Club, she got down for a bit but then she got back up, and then a lad followed her. The next thing I knew I had this couple who were basically grinding on each other, it got a bit out of hand, or a bit in hand. After politely trying to ask them to get off, nudging them and trying to direct them, one of them stood on Carl’s guitar peddle so he literally launched the pair of them off the stage.
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