Having just recently released their debut album ‘Leave Before The Light,’ UK based hard rock band At The Sun conclude their first head-line tour at Brighton’s Hope and Ruin. Before they hit the stage though, lead and rhythm guitarists Chet and Kieron discuss the importance of sharpies, how a 12 hour Fifa session turned into a band audition, and the life lessons they’ve learnt from their first tour:
Chet: It’s been the best experience of my life. Especially the sold out London show we’ve just done, The Black Heart, it was the first time we’d had the whole crowd singing along and bouncing, going crazy. Even stuff like loading all the gear in and out of the van, even being in the van just driving was really cool.
Kieron: What’s been great for me is seeing new towns, meeting new people. London was awesome, from pre-sale tickets we knew what we were getting whereas there’s been so many dates on the tour like Manchester where we had no idea what was going to happen, it turned out to be one of our favourite nights. So the best thing about touring for us was the surprises.
Any life lessons you’ve learnt?
Kieron: Always manage your merch properly.
Chet: Every gig we come to we have to reorganise the merch. We organised it before we left, and then Kieron dropped it, so we re-organised it, and then I dropped it, so we just gave up.
Gear as well. We did a refresh of what we owned before we left and I think had we not done that it would’ve been a lot harder to just go to the gigs and set up without too many worries.
Kieron: And sharpies! Way more important than spare guitar strings; for any band on tour, bring sharpies in black, in silver, in gold. People are going to want you to sign random things and you’ve got to find the right pen to do it. Sharpies are the most important thing on tour.
Chet: Eating as well. We ate terribly on this tour. In the first weekend I had a KFC, pizza, and three McDonald's, in three days.
Kieron: I had some Piri Piri chips which were just salt. Salt chips with a dash of Piri Piri sprinkled on it, genuinely couldn’t finish them.
Chet: Craig our drummer is the healthy one. He’ll go to McDonald's and order the salad, and he was not impressed.
You mention that you’re not like other bands that just want to get stuff out there quickly, what else do you think sets you apart from today’s music scene?
Kieron: I think it’s our breadth of our influences and experiences. Our writing sessions tend to have skeleton songs but then everyone will bring in something very different. Our singer Harry has a beautiful, soulful twang to his voice, he did a run in the studio the other day and we were like “alright Aretha,” I mean where do you get Aretha Franklin influences from in music now a days? We do take our time, we took a year to write and record the album, having road tested it as well.
Chet: One thing we like to do which other people tend to stay away from especially in our genre, is being commercial. It’s a taboo word to use, but we actually like doing that because people will want to sing along to it. We write a lot of stuff with a lot of hooks which is the kind of thing we actually like to listen to, so we’re not trying to stay away from that.
Give a quick description of your new album
Kieron: ‘Leave Before The Light’ is an album about escapism, the feeling you get when you’re listening to music, those moments you get where you can escape from your own head and just enjoy yourself. There are a lot of themes throughout of everyday stresses, that people experience, and that’s where Harry will write from that people can relate to. We start with big riffs, one of the things we love, and we wanted to end on that as well.
Chet: The way the album was recorded was in three different stages, four tracks each session. Because it was spread out over a year and half, the way we were writing changed throughout that whole process. You can hear that maturity as well between our early tracks that appeared on our EP (Breathe,) and our later ones as we all started to get comfortable with how each other writes.
Kieron: I think the key thing with this album, is that it’s not a snapshot in time. It wasn’t written or done in two weeks, it’s the living, breathing evolution of us. We finished the last song in a Travel Lodge. Chet finishes most songs in a Travel Lodge.
What are your favourite song off your album?
Chet: ‘Raise Your Glass,’ I just like playing it live. The breakdown is the first time we experimented using different textures and overlapping vocals. It’s one of those songs when we were in the studio and we heard it being played back to us where we were like, “woah, that’s pretty cool.” It’s a punch-you-in-the-face kind of riff, and I like that.
Kieron: Mine is ‘Bite Your Tongue,’ it’s one of them when it starts it just goes, it’s powerful, playing it live is ridiculous. Ironically the song off the album that I wrote the least of! I get to play a little bit of lead on it as well.
Kieron, as the founding band member, how did you go about finding the right musicians for At the Sun?
Kieron: I came out of another band a while back with all these demos and just thought I had to do something with them. I was a bit jaded by music at that point so I hibernated for a little while but I thought I couldn’t not try to bring these to life. I had this idea of good quality rock that wasn’t breaking the mould, but doing something fantastic within it. I picked these guys because of quality, our drummer Craig is just the best drummer I’ve ever heard. Harry came in next, sang just one line of ‘Only A Fool,’ and I just thought, “brilliant, he’s in.” Chet came along, quit his job and went full time music. We planned a rehearsal but I’d gotten a bit drunk the day before, turns out we lived almost next to each other, so I just invited him over and we hung out, played Fifa for about twelve hours, and then he was in the band.
Chet: I swear there was an audition as well!
You talk about AC/DC being one of the primary influences on you as a band, do you think anyone new and modern has what it takes to make the same mark as your predecessors?
Chet: I don’t think anyone can. The way those bands originated was a completely different world back then, it used to be purely organic with touring the world and you’d build your following by just playing loads of gigs. Nowadays technology has taken over massively so you have to be a more Spotify friendly artist and because of that you’ll essentially have a crowd that is into a more diverse range of genres. It doesn’t matter so much because people don’t buy records the same way anymore.
Kieron: I think bands can get huge still. Foo Fighters did it, Royal Blood, Bring Me The Horizon; there’s a question of who are the next festival headliners? It’s still the same bands from back then, so bands nowadays have to be their own entrepreneurs, have to be savvy and grab everything they do.
Chet: Rock isn’t the mainstream music anymore like in the 70s and 80s. You are starting to see a few bands that are “bringing it back” like Greta Van Fleet, The Struts, and those guys are doing really well.
As individual musicians who do you look to as your idols?
Kieron: I am a huge fan of Mark Tremonti, guitarist for Creed and Alterbridge, he just has a phenomenal range of what he can do. Huge Black Stone Cherry fan, love their riffs which you can hear in our music. Hans Zimmer, for the composition side of things with the layers and textures of music.
Chet: Slash, John Frusciante was the reason I started playing guitar when I saw the Chillies in 2004 in Hyde Park, next day I bought a guitar. Max Martin, huge influence on my song writing, I think he’s a genius in his structure of how to write a song. Hendrix obviously, Gary Clark Junior is massively up there as well because I have quite a strong blues influence.
Any interesting pre-show rituals?
Chet: Had a hot dog yesterday. Harry will go in the van and warm up, he doesn’t really like doing it anywhere else.
Kieron: We tend to find ourselves slipping off into our own little zones. I love a little bit of alone time before we go on stage, to get readied and prepared.
Chet: A drink before we go on stage, calms me down a little bit, doesn’t even have to be a beer. No matter how many shows you do, ten seconds before you go on stage you’re still nervous.
Kieron: As a musician I’ve learnt that preparation is key, if you can get a bit of quiet time somewhere in a smelly toilet, do it.
You’ve been played and backed by brands like Planet Rock, have you noticed the difference this has made to your following?
Kieron: We’ve definitely had new people that have heard us through Planet Rock and they’ve let us know. Planet Rock will do one thing and then another station will pick up on that and do something else, but we all know Planet Rock is a massive force in our genre.
Chet: One guy who has helped out a lot is Guy Bellamy, he’s not on a major radio station but in our genre it’s one of those places people will go to listen to new bands, he’s done a good job for us.
Kieron: We premiered our latest video on Planet Rock though and we saw great results from that and we’re also playing Planet Rock Stock later in the year.
You’ve got an impressive line up of festivals coming up, which one are you looking forward to the most?
Chet: There’s a festival we’re doing called Crazy Cowboy Four, and I love the bands we’re going to be playing with. As an actual fan going to watch it is going to be wicked.
Kieron: I’m going to say Love Rocks. Again for the same reason, as a music fan first and foremost, it’s just band after band that we love. We can’t easily get to every city in the country, but we know we’ve got fans from elsewhere coming to this festival so we’ll get a brilliant chance to meet people.
Explain your logo and artwork
Chet: We knew we wanted the phoenix to be on there and as it was our first album we wanted it to be a statement to who we are. We all wanted it to be colourful with an element of graphic art; we all had ideas but none of us could put it together without looking messy. We contacted an artist, Paulina Vassileva, with our ideas and gave her free reign; she came back with an almost done image straight away. Alex came up with the pocket watch idea to spice it up.
Kieron: We’re still quite old school in our views of music, we totally understand Spotify but we still believe creating an album is a piece of art from start to finish. From the songs to the artwork and even on the inside booklet there are our favourite lyrics handwritten by us.
Chet: When I joined the name was already there and we wanted to create a logo that represented what the band represented. The phoenix represents Kieron’s old band that didn’t work that made way for this new and better band.
Kieron: We’ve all been in bands and this is a combination of all the ashes and failures of the bands that didn’t work before.
Why did you choose to do a cover of Rag N’ Bone Man’s ‘Human’?
Chet: We didn’t want to pick a rock song. We wanted to put our stamp on something, if you’ve got a rock song that’s already just that, it’s harder to do. To take an already great rock song and attempt to change it to your own style can sometimes be sacrilegious. We listened to ‘Human’ and just thought the bass line was totally fat and knew Alex would do a great job of that, plus Harry’s vocals suit it so well.
Kieron: We wanted it to do two things; the first was to let rock fans release their inner guilty pleasures. The second was because so many people we talk to say that they don’t really like rock music all that much, but they like us for some reason, and that song is a great way in for them.
What’s next for you guys now that the tour’s over?
Kieron: Album two.
Chet: We’ve got a few demos already that we’re excited about and they’re going to be hard to beat. We’re itching to get back into the studio because a lot of rehearsal went into this tour which put a pause on writing.
Kieron: This has been a new feeling for us because after you’ve played the same songs 5 times every day in rehearsal you go a bit crazy. We’ve found ourselves just jamming a lot and that’s the essence of what we’re excited about capturing, coming up with something right there and then.
At the Sun have a short run of UK festival dates left in 2019, you can see tour dates as well as purchase their debut album, here.
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