Hollywood Talk About Their Debut EP

A lot of you have been in other bands in Nottingham so how did you get together as Hollywood?
Will: We've always been circling each other for such a long time, apart from Achille, we've been around, we've known of each other, we've been watching each other.
Mark: Yeah, it's been probably the best part of a decade we've been playing on the same line-ups as each other and it just sort of came together. Will and Ste had a stack of scratchy demos and they asked if I wanted to come in and do a bit of bass on some stuff.
Adam: I heard a demo that they put on Facebook.
Will: And he was like, "who's this?" and I said that it was me and Ste's new project.
Adam: I was like, "can I play in it?"
Stephen: That was the day that we said that we needed a piano player and then very night Adam asked if he could join.
Adam: Then was it on Gumtree that we found you Ash?
Mark: Second hand, used but no scratch marks.
Achille: No, it was Join My Band. The last piece that you needed to complete the band was a drummer.
Stephen: You were the first drummer that I found on the first website that I looked on.
Achille: And you were the first band that I met when I was just looking for people to play music with and I just found these great guys.
Will: And we had a nice interview at Broadway.

What did the interview involve?
Mark: Just seeing if he could hold his ale basically.
Achille: Just talking about the music really, what they were looking for, what I was looking for.
Stephen: Make sure he wasn't a cunt really.
Adam: Can't be arsed being in bands with knobs
Will: I think we all wanted to something a little bit different. All of our previous bands have been quite fast and carefree and noisy and we wanted to do something that broke away from that. We'd all had our fill of that and wanted to do something that we cared about.
Stephen: And also something that didn't have constraints, it didn't have to just be punk or it didn't have to just be rockabilly or it didn't just have to be loud agro. We could skirt in between bits and bobs and that wouldn't be a problem.
Mark: And I think that's evident with the influences as well in the bio that we've got up online - it's Bad Seeds, it's Kyuss, it's Godspeed! You Black Emperor. I'm not say that we sound like any of them in particular but we've robbed our favourite bits from them.
Will: It's very rare that you see Leonard Cohen and Kyuss on the same bio.

How do you pull together those disparate influences?
Will: Just naturally.
Mark: I think without tooting our own horn, we've all been playing a while with different people, different styles, different bands. The music scene in Nottingham is great and really disparate - you can go and see punk gigs, metal gigs, reggae gigs, whatever you want.
Will: Often on the same bill.
Mark: Exactly. It's 10-12 years of going to see loads of different genres every night of the week.
Adam: And everyone brings something different to it - Mark's basslines are quite stoner rock, so that's where the Kyuss thing comes from.
Will: We love making soundscapes.
Achille: I think the main approach is being able to play with textures, with colours, with nuances and personally, this is something that I really wanted to do in music. That made me feel like this is the perfect project for me, for what I'm looking for and this is what makes it work for everyone here.
Adam: It's constraint isn't it? We could all play really flashy stuff all the time but quite often they'll be a whole verse where I'll just play one note and Ste will do the same thing on guitar.
Will: And sometimes I won't sing.
Adam: It's about the dynamic really.
Mark: It sounds pretentious, but it's what the music needs. There are two crucial things for me, firstly that no ideas are off the table, everything you've been humming to yourself at home, bring in and if it don't work, it don't work. There's no egos so it's all good. The second thing is that Ash will record every rehearsal so he takes them away and uploads them to a Google Drive and we all listen and we all share thoughts - "have you tried turning that down a bit?" "have you tried not hitting everything so fucking hard all the time?" There's no egos and none of us are rookies so to speak, we've all learned some restraint and to be open to ideas and suggestions, which works well.

Where did the name Hollywood come from?
Will: It's better than the name that we had before.
Adam: It was my idea but I'm not going to tell you. I'm notorious for bad band names.
Mark: It worked better as an EP title maybe.
Will: Hollywood is what you do when...
Mark: It's a shit brag.
Will: I'm going down to London for the weekend. Hollywood! I've cooked myself Sunday dinner. Hollywood!
Adam: I've just picked up a really good £3 meal deal.
All: Hollywood!
Mark: I had three cups of tea this morning. Hollywood! And it just sort of stuck. Although, it turns out that there are 96,000 other bands called Hollywood.
Will: According to Spotify, we are a three-piece rap metal band.
Adam: Yeah, if to go to our page to play the single, it's not our page, it's a funk band from New York.
Will: This funk band from New York has released this maudlin weep.
Adam: They'll get all the money. Just joking, there won't be any money.
Mark: But we did get hollywood.bandcamp.com, no-one had taken that, but we had to be 'Hollywood The Band' on FaceBook.
Will: Yes, just to be clear, we're not called Hollywood The Band
Mark: Maybe we should be. There's a band, something the horse?
Adam: Pulled Apart By Horses?
Mark: My Lovely Horse? That's it, we're changing the name, we're now called My Lovely Horse!

Tell us about the new EP...
Will: Fortuitous timing - it arrived on iTunes yesterday (12 October) and Spotify today (13 October)
Mark: We just had it mixed at our rehearsal studio, JT Soar, Phil Booth is brilliant, he record us over a weekend. When was that, June?
Will: February.
Adam: It took ages to get mixed but we recorded it live.
Mark: With just a few overdubs. We've been sat on it for a while trying to decide whether we wanted to do a physical release. Eventually, we decided to just get it out, sod it, let's just register for everything on-line, get it out and sort out everything else afterwards.
Adam: And we're recording next in November so hopefully it's going to be bang, bang, bang, bang! We'll just keep putting stuff out when we've done it.
Mark: Well, the whole thing was essentially recorded in a day wasn't it? We did the first day, a Saturday I think, went in on Sunday morning and thought that's all rubbish, let's start again. It's three tracks and we just knocked it all out on the Sunday and then Monday was just overdubs and tweaks. So, when we stopped sucking, we were actually quite efficient.

Is the plan to do a physical release?
Will: For this one, probably not. Because we've been sat on it for a while, we just wanted to get it out, for the next one, we've got the songs.
Adam: Well, it would be nice to have a vinyl but it's really expensive and no-one's got a CD player anymore.
Mark: Frantically trying to work out how to play a CD on your Playstation.
Will: As long as it's there and it's out, that's the most important thing.
Adam: We could USB drive it.
Mark: Yeah, we talked about buying a load of USB sticks because then you can put videos, pictures, you can partition it and lock a bit down so, sign up for the mailing list and get a password to unlock extra stuff like demos. For this one, the songs are done and they're out so it's a bit late to be dicking around with CDs or anything like that.

Having recorded the EP eight months ago, would you say that it's still representative of your sound today?
Will: It's still representative.
Adam: Every song is still in the set.
Will: We've progressed in the way that we write songs, it still sounds like us but we structure things slightly better.
Mark: We play those three songs better now than when we recorded them. The recording process gave us a lot of scope, almost to finish writing the songs in a way because we could be like, wouldn't it be nice if we had this on. Phil Booth was great in that respect.
Stephen: We're recording quite an old song called Piggy so it's not necessarily going to be chronological what we record because that was written back in January.
Mark: But even that one we were refining in the rehearsal room last week.
Stephen: It'll get refined tonight with the new keyboard.
Mark: Yeah, Adam's got a new keyboard.
Adam: A lot kept happening with the old one, bossanova kept coming on.
Mark: I can't remember which song it was but it had a dead atmospheric ending and then that kicked in. It was a glitch in the Matrix! The rehearsal before, Ste tried to saw the demo button off.
Adam: I had a digital piano at home and I've taken it to bits, done a bit of a bodge-job and now it's a stage piano.
Mark: Sounds amazing.
Adam: With exposed bits of wood and the pedal board pulled out.
Mark: It sounds amazing though, we just sound checked at Jam Café and it sounded brilliant.
Stephen: It's a bit risky playing a gig when you've never played the instrument before.
Mark: Yeah but it's worth its weight in gold if it stops Adam having an aneurism every time he plays.
Adam: It was MIDI before.
Mark: MIDI keyboard and a synth and a laptop, so much stress, I don't know how you did it. MIDI prolapse! That's going to be my new punk band - seven members, all keytars.
Adam: MIDI Prolapse & The Horse Whisperers. If you saw that advertised, you'd have to go right? There was that band wasn't there, Hot For Johnny Depp and people just went to see them because of the name.
Mark: I wouldn't even care what they were playing.
Adam: Yeah, people were just like, "I'll go and see that band"
Will: Turned out it was actually Johnny Depp playing.
Adam: He plays guitar doesn't he, he's meant to be pretty good.
Mark: Really?

He's on that Oasis album...
Adam: Be Here Now.
Mark: Is his band not shit though? Oh wait, I'm thinking of Keanu Reeves - Dogstar. Lovely bloke though apparently.

Finally, we'll go round one by one - what is your best Hollywood shit brag?
Will: Stephen's is buying a Sainsbury's bottle of white wine that really compliments the frozen pizza that you just got.
All: Hollywood!
Stephen: I thought that it complimented it very well.
Adam: They asked me what I had for dinner tonight and I said quinoa and salmon.
All: Hollywood!
Mark: To be fair, we didn't even ask you, you volunteered that. That's my Hollywood brag - I know how to pronounce "quinoa"
All: Hollywood!
Achille: I'm going to Paris this weekend.
All: Hollywood!
Stephen: It's usually Adam saying, "I worked in London this weekend"
All: Hollywood!
Mark: Adam loves London.
Adam: I have to go there all the time.
Will: Two arrivals and one morning glory. Hollywood.
Adam: That's going to look wicked in print! It's like a prostitute joke I made once in an interview - that didn't look good in print.
Mark: My favourite old interview joke you've got is where there was an interviewer and he was trying to needle you for being ginger and at one point he said that you probably have a tiny dick. Then while he was trying to introduce the next bit on whatever show it was on, you're there going, "no mate, it's like a baby's arm"
Adam: It was live on TV, got thrown out.
Mark: You were wearing a hat you found in a dumpster on the way there I think
All: Hollywood!

Hollywood are Will (vocals), Mark (bass), Stephen (guitar), Adam (keyboard) and Achille (drums) and their debut EP No More Will I Adore You is available now.

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