Gig Reviews
Thy Catafalque
Stengade, Copenhagen, DEN - 6/4
Album Reviews
Oceansize
Previous Nextauthor PP date 01/11/07
After some initial set up difficulties and over a two hour wait, I finally managed to get everything sorted to interview Mike Vennart, the vocalist and frontman of British experimental rock band Oceansize. After the casual introductions from his and my side, he apologised for the inconvenience and told me that they tend to improvise a lot when it comes to doing press on tour. For example, the original time that I had agreed with the Danish promotional agency wasn't suitable for Vennart, as he apparently must eat exactly three hours before playing a show in order to sing properly. And he wanted to see Brett Anderson from Suede, who were playing at Store Vega just a few hours before Oceansize were scheduled to play at Lille Vega. Mike's quite an interesting character to meet. For a mainland European, he seems like an atypical Brit that we get to see in so many TV shows, the snobby, arrogant one with a very 'proper' accent. But despite the appearance (which he also upheld during their liveshow, by the way), he was fairly open about a lot of topics, slagging off The Mars Volta, NME and Kerrang! in the process.
RF.net: Any expectations?
Mike: Yeah! Well we got friends who are in a band called Amplifier. Do you know Amplifier?
RF.net Of course.
Mike: They always tell us that it's fucking good down here. Plus I just got to see Brett Anderson [Suede] for free as welland I like Brett Anderson, I think he is really fucking cool
RF.net: No? Well, at least people are more familiar with your material, I would imagine, because you are more established over there and you haven't had that many records released over here yet. How does that kind of filter through to you as a band?
Mike: Umm, I wouldn't necessarily agree. We haven't played in Copenhagen obviously, but we've played all over Europe, and we've played pretty much the same size audiences as we do in the UK. It always used to be different in Europe, it'd always be a lot bigger crowd than in the UK, but now it's just balanced out, but we still prefer playing in Europe definitely.
RF.net: How come?
Mike: Well, you get treated better. You get better food, better beer and all that kind of stuff. Often there's even an ironing board, that really helps me. [PP points behind him at an ironing board] - exactly! There's no washing machine though, that's been bothering me all day really.
RF.net: No? It's just red? It's not just your version of the Black Album, just in red?
Mike: I just think red is a very fiery color. It's very aggressive, but it's not morbid. I think that white has a purity to it, black has a death vibe. I think red is just soft. It can mean lots of different things. It can be angry or it can be sort of celebratory. I don't know. It's very old, anyway. I think that we just wanted a plain cover this time, we were just sort of sick of trying to find different fucking monsters and things like that, it's just like "God, pick a color!"
RF.net: So, you've just released it two weeks ago, and you say it might take two months or one year. Does that affect you as a band playing those new songs live, with people who might not prefer those as much as the old ones?
Mike: Yeah well.. I mean.. the kind of stuff we write.. it's so complicated. Something grates at you, and you think, for example lets take a song like "Only Twin", the way that that song starts, and then you've got piano, and then vocals start, and you think you know how the song's gonna go, and then the drums come on and completely turn the song on its ass. And I think the fact that the song doesn't go the way that your brain expects it to go, I think that's just a classic example of us just pissing people off, because it's not what they know. I don't know what I'm talking about. But I think that it just flaunts tradition, really. People don't like it because they're not used to it.
RF.net: So when you play those songs live, what actually goes through your mind?
Mike: Umm.. "Are you singing in tune?", "Is that guy looking at you funny?", "Is his guitar still in tune?", just shit like that. Sometimes I'm a bit caught in it, and I remember at Manchester when we played, I was too busy thinking about what the songs actually mean and that's a terrible thing to do. It's hard, if you start thinking about what certain things, where they came from, it just fucks with you and you can't sing it properly. It's really annoying.
RF.net: Like improvisation or what?
Mike: It's total improvised. Somebody will come in with the bare bones of a riff that they've maybe not even finished writing, and we'll take that, and jam on that for maybe twenty minutes, and out of that twenty minutes there will maybe be four or five variations of this unfinished riff. So you just store all this stuff, just log it, and put it away. You do that for about three months, every day for three months. You'll probably have about forty different ideas. From those forty different ideas you start stockpiling songs. It's not rocket science, we just sort of glue things together, and hope that they'll work.
RF.net: So have you ever thought about doing that jamming thing live, if you've ever seen The Mars Volta do it, they sometimes change their songs completely?
Mike: Yeah, that's exactly why we don't do it, because The Mars Volta are just fucking terrible. I don't know, it's not the 70s anymore if you know what I mean. There's no time for watching someone play a drum solo or a fucking slap bass solo. Put that guitar down and get out!
RF.net: A lot of those are very different I think compared to the sound that you guys have. So they don't actually directly influence you?
Mike: Yeah, I can't say that that's everybody's favorite band. But that's who we are all kind of listening to at the moment. And something to be celebrated is the fact that we don't all like the music.
RF.net: So how come you came to have this very close relationship that the phrase implies?
Mike: It's quite strange. As we were forming our band in Manchester, they were forming their band. I don't quite remember how we met, but we played them one of our rehearsal tapes, and they were like "this sounds like our fucking band". And we'd never heard of them, and they'd never heard of us. And we just became really friendly after that. They're really good guys. We don't really feel affinity with many bands, you know, you feel that you got something that you got something in common, or you could play together a lot. And we just like hanging out, they're just around the corner from us now, so we see a lot more of them.
RF.net: From the UK, we see these kind of bands coming out like Lostprophets or Bullet For My Valentine who released like one record, and BOOM, they're all over the place. Do you ever feel the frustration that you guys...
Mike: They'll go down even quicker than they went up. And I tend not to listen to them. Those kind of bands are the product of a major label mentality that's fueled by a fucking gaping hungry media. The magazines in the UK are the most corrupt in the world. You can buy yourself a front page cover. So really it's money that runs the mainstream music. Which is obvious. It's something that used to really get me down, but I've grew up quite a lot and I couldn't give a fuck anymore because, you know, it's not gonna do a band like us anything getting into the fucking NME, because everyone that reads the NME is a fucking asshole. You've got to be an idiot if you wanna read the New Musical Express, you don't give a fuck about music. You care about shoes and fucking haircuts, and what fit jeans to wear.
RF.net: I think it even applies here, I mean they release all the Kerrang, Metal Hammer and everything over here, imported.
Mike: It's terrible. It's got worse, as well. Do you know what they do now? Kerrang! started doing this, I don't wanna slack Kerrang! off because they're always very nice to us. But the NME, when you get your album reviewed, and the reviewer gives it whatever mark out of 10 he wants to give it. The editor then reserves the right to downgrade that album depending on what his tastes are. So for example, our album got a 9, because we know the guy who wrote the review, and the Editor has obviously just decided that "Well, I don't really like Oceansize, I'm not gonna bother listening to this fucking record. It says Oceansize on the front, it's probably worth just a 7." So that's what we got. But you read the review and it makes us sound like one of the best fucking bands in the entire world.
RF.net: And Kerrang! are doing this as well?
Mike: I believe so. In order to give an album five stars, you have to ask permission.
RF.net: I've noticed that. For example if your name is Funeral For A Friend, you get five stars for everything you release in Kerrang.
Mike: It's a fucking blow job. It absolutely... I can't let it annoy me anymore. But one day, I'm gonna meet the editor of the New Musical Express, and he doesn't realize this, but one day, we are gonna meet, and he's got to answer my fucking questions.
RF.net: Well I looked around the promo material, and nothing where I looked listed his first name so I thought maybe it might have been an Alias or something!
Mike: [laughs]