We Catch Up With Demob Happy Before Their Headline Show At The Bodega

Why don’t you tell us a bit about your new album, Divine Machines?
We talked a lot about Blade Runner during making the album, it played heavily into the aesthetics of the album and the synthesizers used to write with. Those synths are what I’m drawn to - I love the feeling and sound of that. We put Tear It Down together and it became the centrifugal force of the album. The rest of the album followed into its vortex in terms of style; the rest of the songs share a DNA with that song.

Although it’s a harsher sound, we juxtaposed that with the synths and especially the lyrics give a hopeful and optimistic feel. The whole album is about tackling trauma, and I used these songs to exorcise those demons, I find that quite beautiful having that kind of therapy.

Originally from Newcastle, you moved to Brighton several years ago. How did that change your bands direction? 
Well, we moved to Brighton for university, and it was quite refreshing to get away because in Newcastle, we kept being put on line-ups with other local bands that just didn’t fit each other, and it made from strange genre-jumping between bands. It also led to none of the bands getting any real traction or wider audience. But that’s changed in the last ten years, of course Sam Fender is a shining example of that, unfortunately for us it just was there at the time, so the move to Brighton gave us more access to different types of music and people to work with so it helped us develop our sound.

You guys have played Nottingham a handful of times before, how did you find it?
We’ve really enjoyed it, it was really nice to see so many people come out and support the album for our release shows recently, Nottingham is one of our favourite places to play because Rock has strong scene here, so it makes for better crowds, we love seeing people come down and have a boogie.

For anyone that hasn’t seen you before, what can they expect at one of your shows?
There’s always an element of our crowd who like to get down and mosh and there’s always an element of people who to shake their hips and dance along to the music, and then there’s always a lot of people who like to sit back and enjoy the musicality of it all. We try to maintain that welcoming atmosphere because everyone likes different things and we want to accommodate for that, we’d never expect every single person to go crazy, so I think there’s a bit of room for everyone.

Can we expect anything different on this tour? 
We are playing a lot of older stuff like Haat De Stank and Man You’re Wrong while throwing in plenty of songs from Divine Machines, We've gone for a nice spread of songs. This is the first time we’ve designed a setlist; we have three albums now, so we want to incorporate the right songs but obviously we can’t please everyone with the number of songs we have.

What is the one thing you would say to draw in new listeners and bring them down to a Demob Happy show? 
I think a lot of people mourn the death of rock and roll, I think it doesn’t exist anymore, it’s all corporate, homogenised and boring, all we’ve ever tried to do is be as good as our heroes; so if people love rock of seventies, they’ll love us because we are a proper DIY band and we are trying to do it how it used to be done.

Demob Happy are performing at The Bodega on Wednesday 13 September.

@demob_happy