Interview: Captain Dangerous

Photos: Ralph Barklam
Interview: Jared Wilson
Tuesday 27 December 2011
reading time: min, words

"I made the mistake of getting drunk and inviting the whole bar back to mine. I hadn’t told my girlfriend and she was upstairs in tears being comforted by Dick Venom"

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Introduce your band…
Jamie: Our bassist Mark is the most perfect human being alive except for two things; he can’t whistle and he’s really crap at reversing his car. Our violinist, Rob Rosa, is obsessed with bums and mum jokes. Adam has a penchant for vile cheap wine. 
Adam: Miles carries a pedal board around that is bigger than a dead body. Jamie falls asleep everywhere – it’s amazing how he can turn up to a party and be asleep in the corner less than twenty minutes later.

The launch party for Forgive Us We’re British at the Rescue Rooms was one of our favourite gigs of 2011…
Adam: It was for us too - we hadn’t played many Nottingham shows for a while and we wanted to have a big blowout. So we played as a twelve-piece with a full string section and got really good support in with Cecille Grey and Dick Venom and the Terrortones. We had a great afterparty at The Maze and there was also an unplanned after-afterparty at my house. I made the mistake of getting drunk and inviting the whole bar back to mine. I hadn’t told my girlfriend and she was upstairs in tears being comforted by Dick Venom; which is just one of those things that should just never happen.

You’ve been played on TV recently, including twice on Hollyoaks. You ever watch those programmes?
Adam: I quite like Hollyoaks.
Jamie: I absolutely hate any kind of soaps. Adam has terrible taste in TV programmes. His favourite show recently was Gavin Henson’s The Bachelor.
Adam: I also watch The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea and a fair bit of reality TV; I say this genuinely and without irony. But we got on there after we got a publishing deal, there was a blanket agreement for our song Everything Beautiful Reminds Me of You, which has since appeared on Hollyoaks, Fresh Meat, Grey’s Anatomy and an ITV football advert.

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Do you get paid much for things like that?
Adam: We’ve not had our royalties yet but I’ve been told that it should be a decent amount of money. It should help to pay for the album and the campaign around it.

When can we expect an album?
Jamie: July next year. We’re in the process of recording one with Andy Wright of We Show Up On Radar, who is like our sixth band member really. Previously recording has been a hassle, but he seems to know more about how we should sound than we do.
Adam: Recording is the one thing we have been slow with over the years, so it’s nice to be busy with it now. We’ve also got a stop-gap live album lined up called Live at JT Soar. We’re planning to release one free acoustic track a week for fifteen weeks. So if people want to compile it themselves they can – and if they can’t be arsed they can buy the album off us instead.

Tell us a little bit about your labelmates...
Jamie: Us being labelmates with Baby Godzilla is a bit like Oscar Wilde being mates with Hilda Ogden from Coronation Street. It’s really sweet that they look up to us, but you can tell that the only reason any of them got in a band was so they could be on the same label as Captain Dangerous.
Adam: Hot Japanese Girl also just want to be like us. But perhaps not as much as Baby Godzilla do. I think Will Robinson just picked those two bands because they have people in them who he can make look a little bit like each of us.
 
Ah, Will - tell us a bit about him...
Adam: He throws the best parties and has the best ideas for gigs. He’s changed the landscape for gigs in Nottingham by doing crazy genius things and is the first person I know who started putting twenty bands on the same bill and forcing them to talk to each other. I’ve made so many friends because of that man…
 
Do you feel like Notts has something right now?
Jamie: Yeah - it’s a boomtown! We’ve played a few gigs in London recently with highly-repped female singers who aren’t a patch on Nina Smith, and with quirky combo’s
who can’t touch We Show Up On Radar. I think we’re all just hoping that once a few more like Liam Bailey and Dog is Dead slip through then the rest of us will start coming through nationally.

Captain Dangerous on Soundcloud

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