Dead! are a pop-punk band from Southampton, formed in 2012. They have just signed to their first booking agent and I went along to their last ever gig as a completely independent band at The Garage in Islington to have a chat and find out more about them.
Seeing as I had only found out they existed two days before the show, I chose to start off with a very standard question:
The Punk Archive: Who are you, where are you from and when did you form?
Alex (lead vox): Hello! We are Dead! I guess you could say we are from London Town now, but we started off in Southampton in 2012. We've gone through a lot of adventures since then in the last two and a bit years: two releases, six tours and over 300 shows!
The Punk Archive: That's huge! To have completed six tours and had two releases as a ‘baby band’ (baby band refers to an artist or band who are unsigned or just starting out in the touring industry. Not a derogatory term!) is a massive achievement in two years! Did you guys know each other before you formed the band then?Sam (bass): Yeah. We all grew up on the Isle of Wight. We were all in different bands there and then in 2012 / end of 2011 the drummer, the other guitarist and myself moved to Southampton to go to Uni, thinking we'd meet loads of new people, loads of new friends and write loads of new songs. That's when we got Alex in who was a friend from back home to come over…
Alex: Friends?
Sam: Acquaintance…
The Punk Archive: OK wait…. So you all grew up on the Isle of Wight, and then you all moved to Southampton?
Sam (bass): Yeah, so we had another guitarist who we met in Southampton, and then we went off touring round the country basically spending every bit of money and time and energy we had just pushing the band as far as we could. We all ruined our Uni courses…
Alex: And relationships!
Sam: And relationships. We lost everything.
Alex: Yeah but we are now slowly making our way up the country. Southampton to London, so Birmingham is the next place we want to live…
The Punk Archive: Wait…. So you actually want to live outside of London? You want to go up there?
Alex: (laughs) no, no…
The Punk Archive: Well actually, London is a pretty hard stick for musicians as you probably well know by this point…
Alex: The thing about living in London is the amount of different people you can meet; Everyone goes to London to make it on some level. You've got all these people floating about and trying to do something that are actually active in the pursuit of their dreams. So something's going to happen somewhere.
The Punk Archive: It is definitely all about the networking! So tell me: you formed in 2012 and suddenly you've done six tours! Sam tells me you are completely independent and managed all of this yourself?
Alex: Yeah! This is actually our last DIY tour because we have just signed to a booking agent. Up to this point for our tours apart from the Fearless Vampire Killers tour we have done everything ourselves: booked the venues, run the nights, booked the support acts: everything.
The Punk Archive: How did you guys finance all of this? Was it part of the University thing? Using your student finance to get yourselves a van and say “stuff it, we're going on tour”?
Sam (bass): We rely heavily on merch. Really we all work really hard at our day jobs. Two of us work in a bar, I work in a Co-op, one of us works at Pret… We all work like 50 hours a week and just put every single spare bit back into the band. We want to make it our job so we put everything we have in now, so even if it didn't happen we can say we tried everything.
It's clear these guys are truly hard working and impassioned about their mission to take over the world with their energetic, raw pop-punk tunes. It is refreshing to meet musicians that understand the sheer scale of hard work needed to get anywhere in the music business.
The Punk Archive: So how does this work? Is it three months solid work then three months touring? How do you divide up your year?
Alex: I wish! It's pretty much like working three months solid, going on tour for a week then coming back to repeat the process.
The Punk Archive: So basically you're using your full time work holiday in order to do this?
Alex: Basically yeah
Sam, who plays guitar, has been running the merch stall and greeting fans at the venue up until this point and has just come into the dressing room to join the interview…
Sam (guitar): Sorry I'm late! Yeah the way it operates is a bit odd because where this is our main thing we focus on this as a career and we are literally building a business from scratch. Music is very important but it's a lot about branding but we enjoy that. We enjoy creating an image, creating a little family. It's the kind of thing where if you can't get time off from your job, you walk from your job. (laughs) I think I'm the one who's allowed to say that because I've lost three jobs in the last year as a result of touring.
Sam (bass): I quite my job just before this tour and as this is the last night I will now immediately be on the hunt for a new job and then do that until we go back out.
Sam (guitar): It is literally just about building a business that you know is going to make a loss for two years. All you have to do is pick and choose where you're going to make your losses, but like Alex said we make a lot of money through merch and we are lucky enough to have a fan base that understands that merchandise is the life blood of bands like us. Some of them will go out of their way to buy a new t-shirt at every gig. They know it helps us to get to the next venue.
At this point I am pretty sure I was sitting wide mouthed with awe. As someone who has been in the industry for a decade I know all this, but to hear it from guys in their early twenties talking about the intricacies of building a business, giving up personal desires and creature comforts for a common goal was staggering and incredibly impressive!
The Punk Archive: Do you guys have advisers in the industry or anything because the business side of it is often quite difficult to comprehend and you guys seem to have a really good grasp of that…?
Alex: We have all had various internships at studios, record companies, management, stuff like that, but in terms of having a sole adviser? No.We have a couple of friends in bands who are really good at talking to us and guiding us, but in terms of industry not really.
Sam (Bass): Dan Weller
Alex: Actually yeah. Dan's been amazing. He's a God-send.
Sam (Guitar): Yeah there are a few people who we have worked with who have given us some great advice and helped us along the way but the biggest thing that's not like advice but fills the same void and keeps us going is that we could not be bothered to just sit around and wait to become another local band that just plays their home town all the time. The whole reason we do this: make those losses, tour, teach ourselves to be DIY promoters, managers, PR and everything else is because we just wanted to go out and do it. I think we've done a excruciating amount of gigs for an unsigned band in two and a half years. I really think we could give some other bands a run for their money, but that's because we didn't want to sit on our arses. We just went out and did it. That's almost the same as advice: learning it for yourself by doing it.
The Punk Archive: Talk to me about Phantom. It's your début music video, and the single from your latest EP...
Alex: We actually got to work with Dan Weller (Enter Shikari /Young Guns) on this EP. To work with him, some of the ideas he put down and how he changed some of the things we were doing was incredible. He helped make Phantom what it is now.
Sam (guitar): It was a weird song actually. We knew it was something good and we didn't want to scrap it but we were having problems finishing it and he just came in and said “just don't change the chords” and suddenly it was a song and it worked!
The Punk Archive: That's what a producer is for, right?
Sam (guitar): Yeah of course! It was funny how it came about actually. We had gone for a meeting with a manager who had approached us and he asked who we'd consider working with and he asked if we'd thought about Dan. We were all merry one night in the pub and I was like "Oi! I'm gonna email him", found an email online and his manager actually got back to us! Working with Dan was like… Looking at the bands he's worked with on his CV and how they've influenced us was a dream come true.
Alex: Plus he's just a really nice guy! A really good laugh.
Sam (bass): Plus yeah, especially for me it was the first time I'd actually felt relaxed in a studio. I'm usually quite conscious about what I'm supposed to be doing. I was really nervous going in: he's an amazing guy and it was an amazing studio. It didn't feel like we were recording. It felt like we were just chilling out and playing.
The Punk Archive: It's very inspiring to meet a band so committed to their art! Now talk to me about what you've got coming up.
Alex: We've got so many song ideas and now we don't have to book all our own tours, we've got more time on our hands to actually do what musicians should be doing!
The Punk Archive: So the next mission is song writing?
Alex: Yeah recording new material. I mean, Phantom is our first video: we probably should have done one a long time ago but that's our first video.
Sam (guitar): We need to do another video.
Sam (bass): We need to do LOADS of videos! (laughter)
The Punk Archive: So are you going to do another video to a track from the EP that’s just been released?
Sam (bass): I'd like to think so!
Alex: Yes.
The Punk Archive: OK. So how long can your fans expect because we've got the EP out now, we've got one video… There might be another video but essentially that's released now, so what's the timescale for your fan base to get fresh stuff out there that they can grab?
Alex: We’d like to have something out before Christmas…
Sam (guitar): Let's say FOR Christmas.
Alex: For Christmas. (laughter)
The Punk Archive: Cool! Right. This is the last night of this tour. When's the next one? Now you've got a booking agent they must be already booking in gigs for you?
Alex: We've got some club shows coming up. We are a small band, we really are but we are rapidly making our way into a big pond. We need to get the hype going. So we've got some club shows coming up and I think some more are going to come through. That'll be really exciting going on stage at 11 at night and coming off at 1am…
The Punk Archive: So you're coming off of this tour and going back out on the road for a club tour?
Alex: Sort of. There are some sparse dates here and there.
Sam (bass): We are doing Nightmare Festival on November 1st in Camden: it's like Camden Rocks but all the bands have to dress up. There are some great bands playing.
The Punk Archive: Is there anything else you'd like to say to your fans before we wrap this up?
Alex: It would be nice to say that this tour has been fucking awesome. It's been our last DIY tour and if any of our fans are reading this interview after coming to any of those shows or is waiting in the next room now for us to go on stage, you guys have been fucking amazing. This tour has been awesome.
Sam (bass): It’s definitely been one of the best tours we've done. Just playing wise, crowd wise… It's been fun.
Alex: Like you said, thank you for listening. Thank you for coming to shows and getting us to the point where we have a booking agent and we can actually do bigger things and do more tours and be in our band!
Thank you to Dead! For taking the time out at the end of a hectic tour schedule before they went on stage. What an inspirational and hard working group of individuals. A to
tal pleasure to talk to.
You can find Dead! on Facebook here:
On Twitter here:
And YouTube here:
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