The Beat Surrender

When I was youngster and started watching football at Leeds, it was still standing (that’s terracing rather seating to the people who don’t understand anything to do with football talk). While I spent many a happy and more commonly unhappy day on the Kop, I also used to on occasions stand on the Lowfields Terrace.

So imagine my delight when I found a local band called Lowfields, even more so when I actually liked them as well, in fact liked them so much that i’ve booked them to play The Northern Monkey on the 7th September.

I caught up with Peasy (Vocals / Guitar) and Kyle (Vocals / Bass) for a quick chat about their forthcoming plans for 2010….

What have Lowfields been up to in recent months?

P – We’ve been touting ourselves about, trying to get as many gigs as is physically possible in advance. It’s worked perhaps frighteningly well as we’re staring down nine gigs in three months – a lot for a band comprising two shift work types, a student and a full timer really! I had also been crudely constructing a new guitar in my spare time, from nought but snow. Unfortunately, it melted. The electric wiring was a nightmare anyway…

You are looking for gigs at the moment, give us a tacky sales pitch as to why someone should book you?

K – Because we play energetic, crowd pleasing sets, comprised of songs that feature the time signature changes, breakdowns and solos that hallmark a quality band but are kept in check by ‘pop’ sensibilities. Well that’s what I tell them anyway. We then get another member of the band to ring the promoter 5 minutes later and vigorously slag us off – reverse psychology, you see.

P – It hasn’t failed us yet.

What are the best and worst gigs you’ve ever played?

P – I can DEFINITELY say without a shadow of a doubt that our first ever gig was the worst one…
K – Ahh yes…The Crimea Tavern in CasVegas, the less said; the better.
P – Let’s just say the police were involved by the end of the evening and it was due to a lot of people who, despite being in a live music venue on a gig night, did NOT want to hear a band playing originals. Moving swiftly on, the best would have to be our Oxjam gig at Superna. We just seemed to be able to do no wrong that night! We covered ‘Panic’ by The Smiths after about 3 attempts at it the rehearsal before and somehow nailed it ha. Very cool gig.

Tell us about the name are you big Leeds fans or is there another reason behind it?

K- We’re all fans and Pease said “It’d be nice to link our name to Leeds United in some way”. However, none of us wanted to come up with anything too “Leeds United Till I Die” for fear of never getting gigs…well…anywhere. We were listening a match on the radio and a commentator said something like “playing the ball in front of the East Stand, the old ‘Lowfields Stand’” and it just clicked. It’s also an anagram of ‘Field Owls’.

P – And Field Owls are something all too often overlooked in rock music these days…

Who else do you rate in the Leeds area?

P – Without getting too ‘arsey’ or whatever… There’s a lot of bands I’ve heard and they’ve done nothing much for me. There are a lot of bands that sound like they’ve heard one specific band and then went and wrote their own songs in that style. Everybody starts somewhere and there’s a lot of great bands doing something all of their own out there I’m sure, but being limited like that is not really anything we’d want to do. I have to say that I came across Moody Gowns recently and really like what they’re doing. I’ve listened to a fair bit of Just Handshakes lately on Myspace, too – they’re a great band! I love Wild Beasts if they count as local, too. Sorry for ‘rocking the boat’ or whatever, but why lie?

What are the main influences on your sound?

P – When I write I genuinely try and write something that gives me the same feeling I get when you hear your favourite song, you know? It might come across funny or whatever, but I really make an effort not to sound like any one band or reference point. I really admire any band that tries to do something different, so influences are bands that I doubt we’d really remind anyone of – Wild Beasts, Radiohead, Dirty Projectors etc. More obvious ones would be The Cribs, The Strokes and We Are Scientists maybe? Though I write most of the skeletons of the songs, Lowfields definitely get their sound from the sum of all our parts working together. Feel a bit weird being so serious about all this…

K – Yeah, we sort of take an idea in the practice room and expand on it with bits that we think would fit; James might say ‘I want to expand on my guitar line with some echo’ and it’ll sound like something by Metric or Ol might put a huge beat behind a previously quiet breakdown and it’ll sound more like Biffy Clyro.

P – Definitely the case! I take a bare bones idea or just a song I wrote acoustically and we take it in all sorts of different, more exciting directions. We really don’t like the idea of being predictable with every song. It can drive me mad sometimes, coming up with an idea I really like only for it to be a bit too like one of our others – then we try it and it’s totally metamorphosed into something else entirely!

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