This Town Needs Guns

have been making powerful indie rock from the UK for six years now, and they recently came to America for the first time on a tour with their labelmates Native. Inforty.com writer Matt Sokol and radio station 88.7 WHNU DJ Jon Scranton interviewed the band before the show and got them talking about writing their first album, why song names don’t matter, and capturing their current bassist with a giant net out of the ocean.

Jon: My name’s Jon Scranton, I’m interviewing This Town Needs Guns for radio station 88.7 WHNU. I just want you to introduce yourselves.

Stewart: I’m Stewart and I sing.
Chris: I’m Chris and I play drums.
Tim: I’m Tim and I play guitar.
Jamie: I’m Jamie and I play the bass guitar.

Jon: And where are you guys from?

Stewart: We’re from Oxford, in the UK.

Jon: And how long have you been playing music together?

Stewart: About four or five years now. Although Jamie only for the last two years.

Jamie: Hi.

Jon: What are your influences as far as other bands or styles of music?

Stewart: Mainly Native.

Chris: We only like Native.

Stewart: We just listen to Native records. They’ve only got two so it gets a bit boring after a while. But it’s still pretty good.

Tim: No it doesn’t, it never gets boring.

Jamie: I listen to Native mainly while I’m showering. I have an iPod pouch that stops water from getting into the iPod so I take it into the shower with me and listen to Bobby’s (singer from Native) sweet sweet shouty… experience.

Matt: Let’s pretend now that Native aren’t sitting right next to us and try that again.

Jamie: But that’s true! But really lots and lots of different stuff. Tom Petty…

Tim: No!

Jamie: No, but I do like him though.

Tim: The Mission Impossible Soundtrack.

Jamie: 28 days later soundtrack. That’s good

Stewart: Yeah, we all kinda like different kinds of music, so these guys are into Smashing Pumpkins and Lemonheads and things like that which I can’t really stand. And then I like moreso Dan Caballero and math rocky stuff. We all like that math rock stuff as well.

Matt: Do you think that all the styles come together into a unique thing with you guys?

Tim: I think we just steal from a lot of places. No, I think that happens.

(band laughs)

Stewart: I don’t know, I think you can hear our influences in some of the songs.

Tim: Well that’s different from “we steal a lot of things”.

Stewart: Well no we don’t steal stuff.

Jamie: I once stole something from a shop and it was worth twenty p.

Stewart: I’m not sure if they know what twenty p is.

Jamie: Twenty pence. Uh, cents. Well I was seven, and it hasn’t found itself into any of our songs. I have stolen before but yeah, that’s it.

Jon: You came out with your debut full length album here in the United States in 2009 through Sargent House, do you want to talk about how you wrote and recorded that album?

Stewart: Uh… Tim?

Tim: Uh… Chris?

Chris: Um… yeah! (laughs), We wrote and recorded it, I think we wrote it in a couple of months actually from what I remember. And then we recorded it over four weekends so it’s all a bit rushed. And we’re trying to take our time with the new stuff now and really try and get it as good as possible.

Stewart: But we still like the record. I mean we’re pretty proud of it, we enjoy it. But it was a bit of a rushed process so it was all done in about five months, with writing and recording. Our old bass player, his wife was pregnant, so he had to kinda leave the band to be a dad, so we had a finite space of time to do something with him. Because at the time we thought well this could be the last chance we have to record anything, so we wanted to get something down. And then Jamie was a friend of ours…

Tim: Still is, to this day.

Stewart: Well… anyway, he was known to us as an awesome guitarist in another band from Oxford, they’re called Horava. He still plays in Horava but we kinda poached him to play bass for us as well so it’s good.

Jamie: They got a massive net and came to my ocean when I was asleep at the bottom of the ocean, and they dragged me out to sea, threw a bass at me and I started playing. I dunno, it was quite difficult at first because the bass was covered in water, but once it dried off it was okay.

Jon: Are you guys working on any new stuff? Have you worked out any songs for a new album, perhaps?

Stewart: Yeah, we’re in the process of writing and I’d say we’ve got like seven songs that we’re working on at the minute. A couple of them are finished and the rest are kind of in progress. I think we’re all just waiting to try and find a sound or whatever that we’re happy with so it’s still quite experimental at this stage and just trying out as many different ideas as possible.

Jamie: Yeah, going off from what Stewart’s saying we’ve been talking a lot about doing a kind of experimenting of percussion at the moment, and we’ve also been talking about finding different guitars for different sounds. I’ve been thinking about getting a new bass guitar and how it will effect the dymanic or sound, things like that. And Chris, sort of the drummer, Chris over there, has been using woodblocks now and switching around his drumkit to find more comfortable positions, and maybe once you’re more comfortable with the instrument that you’re playing the creative process is easier because it goes from your mind through your hands and you don’t really have to think about playing so much because it’ll be easier. Because you’ll be comfortable with what you’re doing. So, that’s kind of the thing that we’re looking at at the moment is just finding a bit more of a comfort with the instruments and seeing as we all benefit.

Stewart: There’s a few sofas we’re looking at buying as well, just for the studio. Just to get really comfortable.

Jamie: And we’ve also got some sedatives…

Stewart: Some scented oils, incense….

Jamie: A masseuse named Flan.

Stewart: Be more comfortable, basically, is the message in all of this.

Matt: Do you think the next album might have a theme, like Animals?

Stewart: Comfort is the theme of the next album.

Tim: And camoflauge.

Jon: All the song names are gonna be scents, nice smelling things. I dunno if you could think of that many though.

Stewart: Aloe Vera… No, I’m struggling already.

Jamie: Prim Rose.

Tim: Creasote.

Jamie: Barbados seawater. Muskrat semen. They’re all there, you know. The big players in the scent world. See we’ve been hanging around with a lot of labradors recently just to see how they react to scents and getting a lot of good ideas from chocolate labradors.

Stewart: I think with Animals is it wasn’t really a theme as such because the only thing that we’ve always maintained I suppose is names don’t really matter. I mean we’re called This Town Needs Guns, it’s the most stupid name I’ve ever heard. It’s good, people remember it, that’s great.

Jamie: Well to be honest it’s not as bad as Cradle of Filth.

Stewart: Yeah Cradle of Filth’s probably worse. But yeah it doesn’t really matter what songs are called.

Jamie: As long as it doesn’t offend people.

Stewart: We don’t like to offend people.

Jon: How did you come with that name, This Town Needs Guns?

Jamie: Boxing contest in Tacoma.

Stewart: What did we say we were gonna say?

Jamie: There was a boxing tournament, and the Oxford boxer Jerry Edwards he had really thin arms and he wasn’t very good. And we just throught, at some stage in the next ten years Oxford needs a boxing legend who has more muscular arms. And obviously arms being called guns, we just felt like Oxford didn’t have enough…

Stewart: Muscular boxers.

Jamie: Yeah. This town needs Muscle, it’s a bit homoerotic.

Chris: It wasn’t quite as catchy, we didn’t go with that one.

Jamie: It’s strange what happened to Jerry though. He was a dutch man with inflatable shoes, and he went running one day and popped his clods. Sorry.

Stewart: That was terrible. That was the worst.

Jon: So is this your first time here in the US?

Stewart: Yes. It’s not my first time visiting, I went to Seattle a few years ago, but it’s our first time playing shows as a band.

Matt: Do you like it here?

Stewart: Yeah, it’s quite good. It’s really hot right now.

Matt: The best country you’ve ever been in?

Stewart: No…

Chris: It’s up there. It’s been amazing so far, yeah.

Stewart: It’s been fun.

Jamie: It’s in the top ten.