Guestlist

Issue 40 - 2012

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Issue 40 / 2012 INDIE / ROCK 45 www.guestlist.net 7 The Guestlist Network caught up with London-based indie band Tellison to discuss music and dental pain TELLISON These Surrey rockers have been on a roller coaster road to suc- cess and with a sold out UK tour ahead and a new album 'Sinners Never Sleep' expect to see these guys smashing it this summer. Gary Rampling | Gary@guestlist.net done before. You've embarked on this 'Freud Links the Teeth and the Heart' tour across the UK. Do you usu- ally do this kind of thing for singles? I guess it's like a hangover from how the music industry used to work, when we used to actually buy singles. You would go and promote your single, and people in towns would come and see you and the next day they'd wake up and go to Virgin and buy cop- ies of the single. I suppose. What was your reasoning be- hind releasing that particular song as a single? It's quite an odd one in a way. Yeah, a kind of anti-single. It's be- come sort of a weird live favou- rite - it's been going down quite well since the album came out. We'd never done a song like that before. You're obviously playing The Garage right now, which is a real mark-up from what you've Yeah! In a couple of hours, we'll see if that was a terrible deci- sion to have made, but it's nice to feel progression instead of doing the same things over and over again. I remember seeing bands that I love playing these type of places, where you almost feel like they've broken in after hours, and they shouldn't really be there. touring now then I don't think anyone would be interested, and we definitely wouldn't be playing at The Garage. When Wages came out, it ap- peared in a lot of top ten end- of-year lists - not in massive publications, but a lot of blog- gers, real music lovers have latched onto it. How do you feel about that? I'm very pleased. This is a dan- gerous thing to say in an in- terview, but I find most of the knows it's just an opinion, it's not fact. Why not, when interviewing bands, come up with interest- ing stories? Ask probing ques- tions. You're faced with music journalism that just goes round and round, and it does nothing. What about the people that have just made incredible records and then faded away? They may still be alive; maybe their band broke up or they just couldn't afford to have any more practices. To me, these guys are far more heroic because they've actually had to fight. know, if you've got to work a day job then you can never be a full- time musician. If you had to be a part-time jobsworth in a pub, or doing all sorts of bizarre things just to pay your rent, and then you're fitting in playing the guitar and trying to sing and write in the evenings, mornings and breaks, it's difficult to compete. So what's kept you going? Maybe we're just dumb? Stupid? There seems to be something about it, an intangible rightness There seems to be something about it, an intangible rightness of feeling when I play music with other people - for me, that's the thing that I'm like You seem to have been on quite a few tours since The Wages of Fear was released. Do you think that album's helped you, more so than Contact! Contact!? We learnt a lot from the first time round. We made a lot of mistakes, missed a lot of op- portunities. Now we said, 'oh, we fell over that log, so let's re- member to jump when the next one comes along'. That was five years ago, so if we weren't still mainstream music press utterly, utterly devoid of character, sight, people aren't writing about mu- sic. They're just... creating paper. intelligence, story; these So if you had your own Tellison newspaper, what would be your principles? Say something. Obviously you're going to upset people by hav- ing opinions, but surely opinions are there to be voiced. Everyone in- Has Tellison had to fight? Yeah, I'd say so. We sacrificed a lot to do this; none of us have careers, and we're all getting on a bit. Henry [drummer] and I have been playing in a band for 10 years. How does that feel? It feels upsetting [laughs]. But part of the conflict is that, you of feeling when I play music with other people - for me, that's the thing that I'm like, yes, this is so good! Surely if you could make that even a part-time job, you've got to keep trying. Because oth- erwise you'll be unhappy. You'd be like wow, I used to know this great feeling, but now - I'm just an accountant. What's the closest you've come to writing a classic song? I don't know. I mean, it's a weird thing to talk about because some songs at different points in their lives can feel like the best song you've ever written. An example is 'Edith'; I brought my guitar part and vocal line to practice one day, started playing it, and Pete (guitarist) played the riff straight away - the song was written in like 10 minutes. We could play it 10 minutes after we took it to the practice room, and you'd recog- nise it. But going back to your original question, I don't feel like we've written a classic song at all - but we're trying. What hurts more? Getting your teeth broken, or your heart bro- ken? Maybe dental pain. I recently went through one of the heart pains, and that sucked. I'd forgot- ten how much that sucked. But teeth pain... there's something so insidious about it. So brutally true to my fucking life, the day before the tour started, I got the worst wisdom tooth pain, and it's been killing me. every day. Every night I sing, 'I've got teeth problems', and I'm like, I fucking mean it! [Laughs]' I'm taking painkillers Tellison are currently on their 'Frued Links the Teeth and the Heart' tour around the UK. www.tellison.co.uk for dates.

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