“I can’t claim to be as Irish as Julie, but my mum’s family is predominantly Irish and I spent almost every significant holiday just outside of Belfast for the first 15 years of my life. My grandparents lived in a pretty big house and a fair amount of my mum and her sister’s possessions still remained in the attic from that era.”
“I was probably around 3 years old when I discovered their vinyl collection. The records were a pretty decent cross section of what I would now imagine a teenaged girl in the 60s to have been into. There were your standard early Beatles albums and singles, a small collection of Monkees, through to the slightly less cool Cliff Richard 7-inch singles. I’m told I was impossible to get outside as I locked myself away in the attic systematically going through the records on an old gramophone player that they’d hooked up for me.
Very early on I can remember listening to With The Beatles. I thought the sleeve was the coolest thing ever. Over the next few years, my Dad started introducing me to slightly his more ‘proggy’ and experimental collection. I think there were at least 3 copies of Dark Side of the Moon doing the rounds at one point along with some early Genesis and even a Tangerine Dream album in their somewhere. I defy anyone not to get excited about the first 90 seconds of Dark Side. It was like nothing I’d ever heard and has to be one of the greatest starts to an album ever.
Vinyl has definitely had a huge influence on me musically. My tastes, writing, and production styles are symptomatic of someone who was educated by the Beatles and Pink Floyd. I love a melodic layered approach but with originality.
Both groups put a lot of thought into the sleeves and general artwork of their records. I have struggled with the idea of downloading music simply because I’ve always loved having something physical to read through or look at to learn more about what I’m listening to.
That being said, the convenience of downloading and the fact that you can learn everything you want and somethings you don’t about artists through the medium of google has been difficult to ignore.
But I’ve always tried to think of music as not just one song but as a body of work that would make an album as a whole and I hope people will see that through our work.
We hope that our single Take ‘Off Your Suit’ gets everyone excited about the EP we are planning for the Autumn.”
—Matt Harris, lead guitarist, Julie Hawk
