Slam Dunk Festival

Slam Dunk Festival 
Words: Lola Tate and Justine Trickett  
Photos: Justine Trickett 

Today it’s sunny and for certain bands who are fitting Slam Dunk Festival in to the middle of a UK tour, it’s the first day of sunshine they’ve seen all week.  Spirits are high and the outside terrace is packed with smokers, drinkers and sunbathers. However, despite the strong social aspect of Slam Dunk Festival, both bands and fans alike are passionately discussing the music, from the established acts to the young whippersnappers building fan bases and causing a fuss. Young Guns open the Fishing For Eskimo stage, not that we find singer Gustav Wood actually on the stage when we run in to catch their set, instead he’s down at the barrier in the faces of those in the front row.  This is a fitting introduction to Young Guns as it’s hard to ignore their Thrice-influenced style of post-hardcore which is making us all nostalgic for the 2003 originals and Funeral For A Friend’s debut EP.  That said, there is nothing dated about their music and it’s great to hear a heavy band with strong vocals who can start our day off with a bang. 

Young Guns Q&A  
Your first EP is out June 22nd, could you tell us a little about your sound? 
Ben (drums): Basically we’re a standard rock band, we’re kind of heavy with melodic vocals but we take a lot of pride in our live work, we put a lot of effort and a lot of energy into our shows – come see us live and you’ll see that!  

The list of people you’ve been working with reads like a who’s who of the British music scene right now, do you feel like there’s suddenly a new wave of great British bands? 
Fraser (guitar): Yeah it’s already happening, if you look at the lineup for today it’s been dominated by British bands.
B: A lot of Welsh bands too. 

Is there anyone else playing today that you’re really psyched to see? 
F: Outcry Collective, they’ve already played. 

Did you enjoy them?
B: They played right after us so we were loading out… gutted. But also Attack! Attack! and Kids In Glass Houses 
F: I want to see The Ghost Of A Thousand 
B: Yeah The Ghost Of A Thousand. There’s loads of good bands.  

Running hot on their heels is one of Young Guns’ recommendations, Outcry Collective.   Sweaty, loud and quite literally ‘in yer face’, vocalist Steve Sitkowski turns the whole of the DropDead room into his stage as he climbs like King Kong onto the bar, audience members and amps.  Accompanying his antics is Outcry Collective’s gritty hardcore, which is raw, urgent and full of jagged guitar riffs and “we’re not gonna let them take us alive” attitude.  They’re daring us not to get involved and as the instruments die we’re left exhausted.  

Outcry Collective Q&A 
Which bands would you recommend checking out today?
Steve Sitowski (vocals): Hexes and The Ghost Of A Thousand, they would be my frontrunners.  Obviously we’re big fans of Young Guns and one band who are from where we are and they’re all lovely guys, and all like twelve years old, is You Me At Six.  I’m a huge fan of the new single Finders Keepers. 

Your sound seems to be similar to American hardcore bands like The Bronx and Every Time I Die, how do you feel about the comparisons?
S: It’s funny, we get that a lot.  I remember when we put out our EP people would come up to us, especially me, and say “oh you really remind me of Every Time I Die”.  I know people might not believe it but I’d never heard of them.  A friend of mine had Hot Damn! and the first time I heard it I thought “oh it’s just full of screaming” but then I listened to it four or five times and I think they’re a fantastic band.  The Bronx is a band which personally I don’t think we sound like but when we get told we sound like them it’s the ultimate compliment. 

Do you have a new record out soon?  What can we expect?
S: Our album is out on July 29th.  We put out our EP which we wrote in about a month and all the lyrics were pretty negative and it sort of reads like a suicide note.  A lot of bands in the hardcore scene seem to do the “the world’s in a pretty bad spot” thing and they do it well but we thought that rather than get told every time we go on stage that we sound like Gallows or Every Time I Die, we thought we’d push [the album] instrumentally as far as we could and put a much more positive spin on everything.  We’ll put some good energy out… whether it goes under the radar or gets put into the stratosphere, it’s just a party album.  

Over on the Glamour Kills stage there is screaming in an entirely different pitch as we are almost mown down by a herd of teenage girls heading to catch the first pop band of the day.  Knowing this is a new crowd, Cash Cash head straight to the shinest, most easily-digestible tracks from their debut album, Take It To The Floor.  Their ‘N Sync/Sum 41 fusion of guitar pop has everyone dancing along from the twelve year old girls on the front row to the guys at the back waiting for the hardcore bands.  There’s not much beneath the surface of their “Party In Your Bedroom” mission statement but Cash Cash are too user friendly and pitch-perfectly accessible not to make it big before their next UK tour.  

Cash Cash Q&A 
It seems there’s a lot of guitar-based pop bands coming over from the US at the moment, like yourselves, Danger Radio, Metro Station and The Cab.  Is this a scene that’s grown up quite organically and do you know each other from back home? 
JP: Pretty much we’re all from the US, we’ve been playing the same shows; we’ve toured with Metro Station, Metro Station toured with The Cab all that wave of bands, they all know each other. It’s a good family; no one’s really competing, everyone likes each other. It’s cool when you get to tour with them because you’re touring with your friends and you get to hang out and have a good time.
S: I think with the music it’s like a mixture from the era of when we grew up. All the bands pretty much go back to pop punk  like Blink 182, but at that time – no one really realised, but now we always talk about it – that there were all these bands like Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync that we heard all the time you know? 

So it’s a mixture of the stuff you heard on the radio and the stuff you heard going out to shows and clubs?
All: Yeah. 

For anyone that hasn’t heard of you yet in the UK, could you sum up the Cash Cash experience?
JP: Basically our mission as a band is that we’re trying to start parties in everybody’s bedrooms whether that’s something dirty or something nice.  What ever it may be, as long as it’s a party and it’s in a bedroom, it’s cool.
S: Yeah and we’re just trying to bring as much energy as possible, get people to dance you know?  Do you guys hear about as many UK pop-punk bands in the US as we hear about US bands over here?
S: I guess we’re kind of sheltered in that way – like I knew You Me At Six were like the biggest band here, but I’d barely heard them. 
JP: You guys have a lot of good dance music here though like Justice, I think dance music is getting bigger in the US, but a lot of people would consider bands like us, The Cab, Cobra, Metro Station to be pretty dancy. But it’s cool to have these kinds of rock genres, to bring out the people who want to dance, that want to rock out or sing and put it all under one big experience.  

 Smack-bang in the middle of a UK tour with The Blackout, The Urgency appear to have picked up a few young fans along the way.  Towards the end of their set a small mosh-pit is brewing but it is dominated by teenyboppers as The Urgency are lacking the raw energy which would draw seasoned rockers and which has made heavier acts today so exciting to watch.  No matter though as their polished performance, which is strangely reminding us of Plain White T’s at Give It A Name last year, makes it clear that they’re heading for mainstream rather than underground success.  

The Urgency Q&A 
For anyone who’s checking you out for the first time, can you tell us a little about who you are and who your influences are?
Tyler (vocals):  The three of us are from Vermont, it’s a state in New England in the North East of the US.  We’ve got a whole lot of influences and I think a few of the bands that brought really brought us together to start playing music together were At The Drive In and Glassjaw but since then we’ve really experimented with all sorts of different types of genres from jazz and classical, to metal, to punk and pop.
Kevin (bass):  Which kinda results in a very high-energy, melodic, yet heavy sound that I think is fun for the audience.
T:  We’re always trying to go places which maybe our peers or influences aren’t really hitting. 

You worked with producer David Bendeth who worked with Paramore, did he bring something different to your sound or just guide what you’d already come up with?
T:  Prior to that we’d never worked at such a high level as far as the sounds that they can come up with in the studio. We’d been recording with electronic drums and simulations and we didn’t get to work in the kind of live rooms that he was able to provide.  It was really cool working with him because he gave us full reign of the studio for a good half a year and just let us rock out for six months and take the best of what we had and record it.
K:  It took a long time to make our record. 

Did you write a lot of stuff which didn’t make it onto the album then?
K:  Yeah.  We must have cut like forty, fifty demos or something.
Ian (guitar):  Yeah and I think we initially came to the studio with about twenty songs and then we wrote more on top of that.
K:  I think we had twenty-three, twenty-five tracks, something like that, not always full songs but we’d write a chorus or something and David Bendeth would be like “hm, it’s not really the right direction” or whatever.
T:  The thing is that when you’re working with a producer it’s a collaboration and at a certain point it’s not just your investment it’s the label and the producer and we’re fine with that, recording what we’re supposed to record.  We can always put out our own stuff on our own and that’s what we’ve always done and we’re going to continue to [do] and if somebody else wants to fund a big-budget, huge sounding record then that’s great.   

Starting late and suffering technical problems doesn’t seem to deter Attack! Attack! from playing a blinding set; it pisses them off to be sure, but that anger bounces off the crowd and leaves the entire room straining at the seams with energy.  Running through a blistering breakneck set where new tracks are received as well as singles Honesty and Too Bad Son, the only thing more exciting than watching Attack! Attack! today is thinking about what they’ll be doing this time next year.  

Attack! Attack! Q&A 
It’s really nice to see festivals like Slam Dunk doing so well.  Is there a reason you can think of why festivals and tours in this music scene are flourishing when other music festivals are cancelling because they can’t sell enough tickets?
Neil (vocals/guitar):  Because there’s lots of really good bands and because a lot of the bands really take the time to hang out at festivals and meet people.  Like you’ll see people walking around here all day, people who you think shouldn’t be wandering around, and getting stopped every five seconds and signing autographs and photos.  And Leeds in particular is a really good place because for some reason the scene has always been really good for this kind of music.  The location is really good… so I think it’s a combination of those two things. 

Your song You And Me is going to be on the next Guitar Hero, could you tell us a bit about how that happened?
N: Basically our manager contacted them about it.  He told us about it and we thought “whatever, it’s not going to happen” then we got a phone call one day saying we’d been selected by the top chiefs to go on it.  I think that band last year The Answer were the first band to have gone through the process we went through, where the track was submitted to the top guys and girls at Activision and they selected it from thousands of others.  

Is it finished yet? Have you tried to play it?
N: No, they’re still busy with the Metallica edition at the moment so we think it’ll be out in October.  They sent us all the full game; the guitar, drums everything we were like “yeah! This is awesome!”.  I’m getting good, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing how many hours I’m spending on it.  I’m getting good at the drums though which is something I’ve always wanted to do, play the drums, I might try playing on a real kit soon.  I think I’m almost as good as Dave Grohl now.  

There should really be a warning before Cobra Starship’s set today, something along the lines of: all fans of serious and/or pretentious music should leave the room now.  Why?  Because Cobra Starship are a party band and in their words, “your motherfucking guilty pleasure!”.  The banter and songs are equally entertaining, with singer Gabe Saporta providing many questionable actions and lyric changes mid-song, and encouraging us to throw up our fangs before their hit “Snakes On A Plane”.  They are a great live band and the amount of people singing along to a clip of Hollaback Boy (their rather crude cover of Gwen Stefani’s Hollback Girl) shows just how many fans they have in attendance.  Not a band to bring your parents to see though, as perhaps there should be a second warning regarding the language and sexual provocations….  We wouldn’t recommend bringing your parents to see the last band we catch today either.  As fantastic as The Blackout are, I know my mother would have an absolute fit if she saw vocalist Sean Smith climbing on top of a stack of speakers and then hanging upside down from the ceiling, ten feet above an astonished crowd.  Earlier in the day the Welsh boys warned us they had a few surprises in store but we get the feeling this one wasn’t planned.  More carefully thought out seems to be the cameos by the frontmen of You Me At Six and Kids In Glass Houses, which sends the audience even more wild than they are already.  Part party band, part rough ‘n’ ready hard rock outfit, The Blackout are the perfect combination of both sides of Slam Dunk’s musical divide and a great band to finish the day on.  

The Blackout Q&A 
Slam Dunk has booked big bands like yourselves and You Me At Six to bring audiences in, but they’ve also booked far smaller bands to give them some exposure.  Are there any smaller bands on the lineup today that you’d like to recommend to us?
James (guitar): I haven’t seen many bands to day, but I managed to catch Young Guns, who opened our stage and they were really great.
Gavin (vocals): Awesome band.
J: They’re like early Thrice. 
G: There’s a Welsh band called Attack! Attack! who we really like, they’re playing, We Are The Ocean are playing right now. I think that’s what’s really good about this festival is there’s loads of up and coming British bands on the lineup and like you said it’s great to get them in front of a crowd like this. It’s a really good vibe from the bands’ point of view because you’ve got all these bands and a lot of them have played the UK; so you’ve already run into, or played with or shared shows with them, so it’s really cool to do a show like this where you know everyone – it’s like a reunion, so generally a really good vibe.  

I know you guys are very active on MySpace and now social networking is such an active part of the music scene do you feel like you’re under pressure to be more like characters than musicians?
J:  Not so much.  We don’t really play up to any misconceptions that kids may have of us, we are who we are, six Welsh guys from… Wales
G:  As opposed to Welsh guys from anywhere else!
J:  What I like about MySpace is it doesn’t put bands on pedestals any more, where they’re unattainable.  We like to talk to and meet as many people as we can who like our music and thank them in person because without them we’d still be in Wales working in a factory. 

You guys have been on tour for a little while now, your album is out tomorrow, how has the new material been going down?
G:  It’s been going well, we’ve [only] been playing five songs because I’ve been to shows where the band’s album’s out and they play loads of new stuff and it’s never the same.  So we’ve been playing things that have been available already like ShutTheFuckUppercut which was a download on iTunes as a taster for the album, the single Children of the Night [which] was out last Monday and a bunch of the stuff has gone up on Youtube.  As soon as we play something live it goes up on YouTube and people know what the songs are like. 

Have you got any surprises for us during your set tonight?
G:  We have one surprise…

Is it anything like last year at Give It A Name festival when you had half-naked girls dancing with flames?
G:  I wish!
J: You could think of it as sexually charged a surprise as the other one but no, we do have something looming…