Interview with Pete Devine of Pete’s Rock News and Views (https://petesrocknewsandviews.com)
PD: What type of artist are you?
BD: Jointly we are an odd bunch of juxtaposed characters, making songs that blend our common ground, internal conflicts and at times brutal humour towards one another into a mixing pot that sees us being very honest, supportive, critical and hard working as a unit.
PD: What are your dreams and goals?
BD: Collectively we’ve always aimed for national radio play and festivals be them local or giant. Definitely one of our main goals would be to get on stage at Glastonbury, there can’t be a better gig than that! It’s such an important place for music to see both new and established artists, it would be amazing to get the chance to be on the line up someday. Jools Holland would be a box ticked, so yeah small, baby step dreams and goals… Gotta start somewhere.
PD: Who writes your songs, what are they about?
BD: We all write the music to the songs and I write the lyrics. All tracks have started with a guitar line, bass line, drum beat or vocal melody and we all add our own bits into the mix from there. The songs are mainly snippets of real life and the melody drives the emotion of the words. Sometimes the subject matter is in the subconscious. Spiderman, Inspector Gadget, Ray Liota and The Silence of the Lambs have featured in the words at some point in various tracks……. An old song we wrote was, called Dead Bees…… Not sure what that’s about but my sisters did push me (Ced) into a beehive when I was 5….maybe that has something to do with it.
PD: Who are your musical and non musical influences?
BD: I think our families play a big part in influencing what we do, they have been on this journey with us and supported us the whole time, I guess it gets us out the house. Other influences come from our environment, films, characters in films and TV, people in the public domain, what’s wrong and right with the world. And musically we all have many influences from many different genres of music. We all grew up listening to different music from the beatles and rolling stones to motown and ABBA. And as we got older those influences became our peers, bands we went to see, who’s albums we bought like the cure, stone roses, Bloc Party, editors, maccabbees, foals etc.
PD: How do you promote your band and shows?
BD: Through the usual channels, twitter, Facebook, Instagram. We put together teaser campaigns for each new release to try and drum up interest. Reviews, interviews, radio play, anything we can get on 
really, and good old word of mouth. It’s amazing to see other bands and followers over your socials giving you un prompted shout outs for Spotify playlists, and plugging us. Exposure is king I think when it comes to keeping your band in the public eye, the next trick is doing something interesting enough to keep those eyes on you. I guess we’ll find out with our next release if it’s working or not.
PD: Which song would you like to have written?
BD: Happy Birthday as your song is the back drop of so many party’s and the royalties must be astronomical.
PD: What are some of your pet peeves?
BD: Toast crumbs in the butter. When they change the actor for a character on your favourite show and hope you don’t notice. Kerrang radio out of the blue going digital without asking if my car was new enough to have a digital sterio in it… It hasn’t by the way Kerrang. I guess you mean musically though. There are many people on social media that I (Rob) have met that have been integral in us getting out there since last year (2019) I won’t try and name them all in case I forget someone but they know who they are. But there are just as many people that “want” to work with you, “want” to get you on spotify, can get you in touch with big radio dj’s and magazines, of course they want money up front so they can get the ball rolling, drives me mad, there’s so many people out there trying to take advantage of eager bands and musicians that maybe don’t know any better. All I can say is, stop it, stop it now. Top peeve though has to go to Covid 19 for attempting to wreck our plans for world domination in 2020. We’re not done yet covid!!!
PD: What is your proudest moment in music?
BD: Actually there’s quite a few. Being asked to support some of the latest breaking or established acts. Getting a gig at a venue we’ve been eager to play. I think the best is the recent exposure we have had, that really took us by surprise. We generally try to keep a modest level head about things, but you can’t help feeling a swell of pride when you hear radio DJs bigging up your song. Getting to work with Gavin Monohan from Magic Garden Studios, someone who we really respect, and his enthusiasm about the music is brilliant. We’ve had so much positivity in the last year it feels like we are doing something right.
PD: So what are you working on at the moment?
BD: Apart from trying to promote the hell out of our latest release, “I Need to Win” we’re currently trying alternative ways to write music together without being packed into a small rehearsal room. We’ve been working on some stuff in Bandlab which is a free online editing suite. It seems to be working pretty well for getting our ideas and individual parts down at the moment. Hopefully we’ll be getting back into the studio to record another track soon too.
PD: What music do you have available online and where can we buy it from?
BD: We have to singles out that were released at the end of 2019 and start of 2020 called “Police The Police” and “Glad you Called”, which are available on all streaming and downloading platforms and our latest single “I Need to Win” will also be available for streaming and downloading on all platforms from the 12th of November. Nothing as yet is for sale so get it while it’s free. We do have a merch line in the pipeline which you can keep informed about through all of our socials where we’ll be looking to sell vynl copies of the songs, maybe some t shirts, badges, maybe even a CD if anyone remembers what they are. You can just give us money if you want but I’m not sure how that would look and I wouldn’t want to find out what we have to do for the money.
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