Interview: NARCS

plasticmag got a chance to catch up with Leeds based rock band NARCS ahead of their Reading and Leeds festival performance on the BBC Introducing Stage. The four-piece group have made a name for themselves in the Leeds music scene thanks to their blistering and energetic live shows, extensive radio support and some stellar releases on Clue Records.

Speaking to dual guitarists and vocalists Wilko and Joe, it is clear their angst-driven and brash rock sound is not reflected in their humble and friendly demeanour.

Being a Leeds based band, what’s your opinion on the music scene in the city?

Awesome. It’s an amazing place to be involved. Before I moved to Leeds I was looking at Glasgow, I was looking at Manchester, both of which have thriving music scenes but there was just something about the Leeds scene that drew me to it, I think it’s the DIY aspect. On a really shallow level, I just like the sound of the bands that are coming out of Leeds. We’re not saying Leeds is the be-all and end-all but it is absolutely fantastic. We might burrow away in the studio for a couple of weeks and by the time you come out, there’s a new band you’ve never heard of before, taking something by storm and you’ve gotta go and see them. The College of Music helps, the courses at the Met help, you get music-y people in Leeds anyway. It’s a cyclical thing, at the moment it’s a really healthy scene and that breeds more good bands coming through. The generation before us like Pulled Apart By Horses, like Alt-J, they kind of set the stage.

How has being signed to Clue Records influenced you as a band?

I think it would be naive to say we haven’t been influenced by other bands on the label. We genuinely love the other bands that are on the label, musically as well as people. We listen to them as you would do any other band. They label’s ace. Scott, who does a lot of work on the label, does the majority of liaising with the bands, he works so hard that you kind of wanna work hard for him. He’s like this inspirational figure for us. Scott’s influence has been to make us feel we should work a bit harder and his faith in us has always been a motivating factor. Clue Records, for us, felt a bit like a lottery win.

What do you think of their new signing, TRASH?

We’ve not seen them live yet, the other two in the band who were unable to make it today have seen them and said they were absolutely blown away by them. Their songs are ace, we’ve heard the new stuff they’ve got coming out, it sounds amazing, it just sounds effortless. Really fresh faces, they’re about 10! That’s what I love about being on Clue, we genuinely do like each other. We look forward to hearing a bit more from them.

What does it mean to you playing an historic festival like Reading and Leeds?

A lot. It’s just ace man. It’s not overwhelming yet but I think it will be on the day. Like you said, it’s probably the first time I’ve thought about it like that, but it is an historic festival, like the bands that have passed through are just insane. While we’re not fame-hungry or chasing the dollar or anything like that, we just love what we do, I know that’s massively cliched but we genuinely do. I haven’t really thought about it in that historical context, maybe now I’ll be more terrified! The people who buy tickets for it, they’ve come to see music that’s good and if you’re deemed to be part of that bunch of bands, that’s a massive compliment.

How do you feel festival performances compare to normal gigs?

We haven’t really done many. There’s only been once where we played a big open air stage and it’s just weird because you’re used to playing smaller venues and clubs and the sound is just all around you. It’s a different way of playing, it takes you by surprise a bit. Because you’re not so much in your little cocoon it’s easy to sort of lose yourself when your sound just disappears out into a field in front of you. But to be honest the excitement of playing a festival is going to overtake any of that. We just wanna put a shift in so we do ourselves justice. I wanna just come away from it feeling like ‘this is amazing’.

Do you feel you have to win over a crowd that might not necessarily know you?

Yeah I think you will do but the majority of times we do gigs you feel like that anyway it’s not really much different to that.

How would you normally plan on doing that?

Just by playing how we normally do. It’s quite hard. We genuinely do enjoy and believe in the music we play. We try not to get too worked up in what other people are thinking. I think if I enjoy it and they’re not enjoying it, it says more about their subjective taste as opposed to how we’re playing. Because we really do, and especially recently, write about stuff we deeply care about, a lot of political stuff, you’re gunna divide an audience straight away. There’s going to be people who are politically against you from the start and that’s just the nature of it. You do that in gigs anyway, you want to win people over. We’re not at the stage where you walk into a room of 200 people who already know who you are. There might be 20 people who have come to see you and 20 people who have never heard of you. We’ll do our thing, we’ll put our heart into it. We tend to work quite hard practice wise and work out exactly what we want to do onstage and hopefully that will pay off. Just the experience of playing this festival and the privilege of sharing the stage with the other acts like Treason Kings and Where Fires Are, we’re all buzzing to play.

Do you stick to a strict set list or feed off the crowd and let them dictate your set to some degree?

We tend to stick to a set list. We do change it before gigs sometimes if someone’s gone before us and done a certain kind of song we’ll think maybe we should start with a different one. We’re terrible for kicking away songs. Because some of the songs are quite angsty, about something we’re angry about at the time, so if that wears off we don’t really feel like we can do that song justice. From the first album there’s only one or two songs we play off it now. Sometimes we think there’s more important things that we want to write about. I think we’ll have a very well planned set for these festivals, unless we have 200 people screaming at us to play a song we haven’t played in two years, it’s going to stay the way we planned.

Do you have any pre-show rituals?

Practice like fuck. It’s rare to play somewhere you can get your head together before you go on, you’re just sort of rushed on. We like to get an acoustic guitar and have a bit of a sing-song, not just for a vocal warm up. While some of our stuff comes off on stage as quite angry, we have a softer side so we like to sit back stage and have a croon. It’s nice to just sit backstage and chill with your mates. It’s nothing like we have a certain kind of soup before we go on or cuddle kittens or anything like that before we go on or recite the national anthem backwards. We try and relax, that’s the main thing, we’re not one of those bands that slaps each other round the face to try and psych each other up, that just happens anyway.

What plans do you have lined up for the near future?

We’ve got a couple of songs that are finished off and recorded, one video that’s finished. We’ll release one after Leeds fest and one towards the end of the year. We’re starting to record our second album, it’s all hands on deck with that. We’ve got a couple of tours in the new year, I think February we are looking at touring again and one a few months after that. We’ve got a big line of dates coming up now, obviously Reading and Leeds is a huge bonus to add on the end of them. It was always the plan to burrow away, write, write and write, try and record a fair amount, pick a few of the recordings and choose an album that makes sense. Which is the concrete opposite to what we did with the first album – we just blasted through that, we had 12 songs and then we picked 10. We’re just looking forward to exploring things a bit more and take a bit more time to get our point across, whatever that might be.

You can catch NARCS on Friday 28th August at Leeds and Sunday 30th at Reading on the BBC Introducing Stage.