Just 4 days before the release of The Balcony, I sat down with lead singer, Van McCann, to talk about the debut album, touring, crying and NME. It's a three-part interview so watch out for the continuing pieces.
Interview by Connor Willis (@connorpwillis)
Connor: Right, let’s start
off with Reading and Leeds.
Van: Yeah mate, best place to start.
How did that feel for
you? I know a bunch of lads and I were there at the front and we all started
crying!
Really?!
Yeah, it was pretty
emotional. Wasn’t it?
Mate. I came off stage, right. Which one was you at? Reading? I came off stage there and our lawyers and that were crying. Our management were crying, I was nearly crying. I was doing an interview after it for a video and I couldn’t finish because I was so whelmed up because it means more than anything. Other bands don’t get it like how we get it live. Seeing that many people like you who were buzzing and I’m just thinking “no way man”. I came off stage at Leeds and I was sick. I couldn’t control myself. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. 3 days after that I still had the shakes. People don’t understand if they weren’t there. The only people that can actually understand is you. It’s not just a job, it’s a band to us. We had nothing about a month ago. We have worked so hard for it and like Larry was just saying, back to the job centre if the album doesn’t sell – that’s what it will be. It’s what we have done for the last fucking 6 years. So many people saying ‘you’re going to be nothing’ or ‘you can’t make anything of yourself’. When I got kicked out of school, they would say ‘you’re daft, you’re a dosser’. They pretty much just vanished me. To now play to 6,000 people and have that many people waiting outside the [Festival Republic] tent to get in, this is what I got in to music for. It means everything to me.
I saw you at Barfly
last June, and to see the difference between then and now. Would you say
Reading and Leeds was a turning point in your career?
Yeah. Well, T In The Park was good because Scotland, we’ve always done alright there but you know “the Scottish crowd”? We never got that and then T In The Park came a long and we were all just shocked. What the hell was going on? It was just crazy. Absolutely crazy. So that, that was a bit smaller than Reading and Leeds but Leeds and Reading were just mental. I think a lot of people came because of word of mouth. People saying “I’ve heard a lot about this band. Let’s go and see them.” And I like the fact that we maybe had 1,000 people there who knew us and then 2/3,000 people who didn't actually know that much about us. I like that. It’s kind of, when we do our own gigs, it’s just a matter of going out there, enjoying it and smashing it but you have to go that extra mile when a few people are in the crowd and don’t actually want to like us. It was just insane, I can’t express how much it meant to us without physically looking like a dick and crying my eyes out on stage.
At Reading, Catfish
and the Bottlemen seemed to be the band that everyone spoke about in the camp
sites. It definitely was the case at ours anyway.
Oh Really?
Yeah, everyone just
kept telling everyone “you need to go and see these”.
That’s even more amazing. Nobody has said that to me yet and I’ve been in those campsites. We couldn’t afford to go to festivals so we used to sneak in. We used to buy one band and cut it then put it through the fence. To think people were in the campsites telling people to see us, is amazing.
There was one guy
running around by our camp shouting to everyone that they needed to see you.
That is genuinely amazing to me.
There was a group of
about 30-50 people who just went all together as a group to see you just
through recommendation.
Larry!! Have you heard that? At Reading, everyone was talking about us in the campsites and there was a guy running round telling everyone about us and then a huge group all went together. How mad is that?
That’s amazing mate. You don’t see that anymore, do you? I’ve noticed that people tweet at the end of ours gigs “that was one of the best gigs of my life!” and “that was better than seeing Oasis in an arena or stadium” but they have millions of pounds for light shows and that, we’re just scruffy little kids playing with gear that barely works. I’ve had the same guitar for years and cost about £100. So fucking mint when you can go out and give it to someone and then just know that the only reason people were at that gig is because people were talking about it. Not because magazines have said “go see this band” or whatever. Nobody at Reading and Leeds; NME, magazines, TV, nobody said to their audiences that we were the band to go and see and it really wound me up. Apparently they don’t want to say anything about us. Just because we’re not paying to get in magazines or bending over to be popular, doesn’t mean we’re not worthy and the fact that people like you guys and people around that campsite were saying “come see this band”, that means more to me than anything money can buy – you know what I mean?
Are you more proud of
what you’ve achieved because you haven’t had that exposure? You’ve had Zane
Lowe and a few other DJs supporting you but not much else.
Yeah, definitely. The thing is with radio, the head of BBC Radio 1 come see us and I can see them in the crowd singing our lyrics and it’s like, they’re not playing us because it’s ‘popular’. Like they’ll play One Direction because that’s what the kids want and that’s what Radio 1’s job is at the end of the day but they play us because they like us and that means so much to me. The head of Radio 1 flies out to our gigs and he comes to watch us and he gets drunk with us. He’s a normal guy. I can’t afford to give him anything though, but I can’t give him enough credit. All I can say or do is, if we sell a couple of records, I’ll give him one of those discs. It’s just amazing. It’s so fucking funny. We love negative press, we don’t actually read press really but we get people to send us the negative stuff like our mates. NME wrote “twatfish and the cockmen” in their magazine, so we pulled up outside our local shop just after we got a sleeper bus for the first time. It took up like 9 parking spaces, we all got off the bus, went in to our local, read this paper all in a huddle – about 8 of us – going “look at this! We’re in the NME man.” It’s fucking funny. If they’re giving us shit, we prefer it. To us, you know when you used to draw dicks on a board in school? And you would get told off by the teachers? Then all your class would laugh and think you’re dickheads, we’re doing that now but on a massive scale. You know what I mean? We’re normal lads. We’re not stars. So the bands who are making loads of money already, there is no desire to become something. Like they think if what they’re doing doesn’t work, they can just start another project. But with us, like Larry said, it’s over. If it’s going to end, I want to be the one that ends it and I want to end it because we gave it everything. I’d hate to go and bow down and just kiss NME and be on the front cover all year. If the album flops, I want to know it flopped because people gave up on it and luckily, it doesn’t seem like they are. I’m fucking well excited man. It’s unreal.
Interview by Connor Willis (@connorpwillis)