The winds seem to be shifting in noise rock’s favour. The past few years have been especially kind to the genre in Ireland, where the trailblazing work of Gilla Band has opened the door for a new generation intent on decibel abuse. There’s no shortage of contenders worldwide: Model/Actriz, YHWH Nailgun, Prostitute, Chalk – the list goes on. Yet even in such company, Belfast four-piece Stratford Rise stand apart, outpacing their peers with a combination of technical precision and brute force on their debut EP released this year. We sat down with the band at just their second London show, at the George Tavern, to talk about everything from the “smaller but stronger” Belfast scene to noise rock lineage and moshing to Radiohead.
You’re back in England for a few shows after headlining the Windmill in July, how does it feel to be back?
Rory: Expensive.
Orion: It feels like my wallet has been drained. It’s awesome though, we were really excited to come back cause it is really really cool. I was actually saying to Rory on soundcheck, we’re in London and just being here feels kind of strange. I still don’t have a very good scale of London, it’s a very large enigma to me.
When you played the Windmill, the set was nearly an hour long, which is crazy considering you’d only released a 15-minute EP and two singles.
O: We’ve been sitting on a whole bunch for so fucking long, man. We have this next EP finished, but we’re not really going for chronology with it, like we probably should.We’re trying to group together the tracks we think work best alongside each other, so we can keep the more production-challenging ones together.
We’ve also talked to Daniel Fox from Gilla Band a couple of times and he’s really keen on working with us, sort of thing. So we’re keeping all our really noisy ones for working with Daniel cause he knows how to fit the blocks together. We’re really excited for that; this next one’s probably more guitar-based, more pedal-based for once.
Even the first EP was quite pedal-based – some of the tones on Snowsports are crazy, they remind me of YHWH Nailgun.
O: I saw them recently, I also saw Deerhoof last summer and it’s the most I danced at a gig. It was like the best gig I ever saw and then I saw YHWH – it’s pretty neck and neck, I still haven’t decided.
R: That was definitely the best gig I saw this year.
O: It’s so intimidating to see live, very theatrical.
How does the scene in Belfast differ to London and the rest of the UK?
O: Smaller but stronger – quite a bit smaller particularly with the experimental music kind of thing, but it’s way less populated. The ones that are crawling out of the bucket are very good, though. Like our pals in Makeshift Art Bar are doing very well for themselves – I talk to the frontman Joseph very often.
R: Chalk are fucking kicking it up.
O: Enola Gay are hitting it as well. And then in the less noisy kind of side is Junk Drawer and stuff like that.
What would be different if Stratford Rise were based in London?
O: Would be easier to get gigs.
R: At least cheaper because we wouldn’t have to travel from Dublin or Belfast. It’s kind of a tricky place. Probably better to land good support slots too because a lot of bands obviously leave out Belfast, a lot leave out the whole island.
O: We play Dublin quite a lot. A lot of folks down there really dig us, which is great, because we really dig Dublin and the people there too. But it’s a round trip every time. We travel everywhere by van – we’ve got too much shit for public transport, and I’m still still too stubborn to downsize.
What are some of the band’s influences? The EP feels like an amalgamation of a lot of different ideas, but they come together really effectively.
R: We’re big Gilla Band fans, obviously – they inform a lot of what we do. We listen to a lot of new wave, with XTC being the main one. What else? DNA, James Chance, Teenage Jesus. But we never set out to make something in the vein of, you know what I mean?
O: Usually I have a loose concept. Sometimes there’s an idea for a song before it really becomes a song – like, we want this thing to happen – but there’s no way to describe the sound yet, or to put it properly into words. You just want this kind of event to happen, and then you have to figure out how to articulate it. Because if I went to Tom and Rory with a vague idea like that, they’d laugh me out of the practice room.
R: I think it’s always good to have reference points as a band. If you get too focused on trying to reinvent the wheel, it almost feels like a disservice to all the great music that came before you. That’s not to say you should rip anyone off or anything like that.
O: We all really like the Jesus Lizard, and then we got this crazy offer to support them for two dates, which was so cool. We supported them in Belfast, then followed them down to Dublin to do it again. What really sucked is that after we supported them, we got way more into them. So we basically learned all the songs after we’d already played with them and seen them live.
What’s an artist you’d love to support?
R: Black Midi.
O: I guess, but they’re dead now.
R: It would’ve been cool to support black midi. Gilla Band or YHWH would be awesome too.
I think it would make sense, the energy feels quite similar. I was watching videos of everyone moshing to you at the Windmill.
O: It’s surprising when people mosh to our stuff because we have a lot of annoying fucking stops and little changes in our songs. At least Gilla Band have four or five tracks where it’s like this angry fucking beat is going the whole song and you know you can just go fucking ham – put your fists out and just spin around as fast as you can and hit as many people as you can before they start beating you up.
R: Just casual stuff.
O: I saw a video earlier today of some people moshing to Climbing Up the Walls at one of the most recent Radiohead gigs – a little tiny mosh pit, I thought that was fucking stupid.
R: I heard there were people trying to mosh at the most recent My Bloody Valentine gigs and a bunch of people got really angry.
Words: Noelle Radewicz