Date of Interview: February 2008
In this Stone Gods interview frontman Richie Edwards discusses success, avoiding The Darkness pop crowd and promises that Stone Gods will tour, tour, tour…Is the immediate plan to be putting yourselves out on the road?Richie: “Yeah. I mean, we did a small tour in January which was fantastic. It went really well and we basically just want to continue in the same vein. We’re hoping to squeeze in a support tour in March and then some more of our own dates in May and the June through September it’s off
around Europe doing the festivals. Maybe finish off the new year with another little run round the UK and get to some of the countries we haven’t yet visited. It is going to be a case of touring, touring, touring and getting ourselves playing to as many people as we possibly can.”Is it weird being back to, shall we say, more ‘intimate’ venues after all the arenas and flying white tigers?Richie: “It’s great, actually. I mean, don’t get me wrong – playing an arena is great and playing a festival to 85,000 people all going nuts, that’s pretty cool as well. But this tour we did in January, it really was fantastic to be playing these smaller venues. You’ve got the audience right in front of you, you can see the whites of their eyes and you can interact with them. You get a vibe of how things are going that you just don’t get from the stage of an arena. If you’re up there and there’s a good twenty feet between the stage and the start of the audience, you have no idea what’s going on out there. It’s really difficult to get the vibe, whereas when you’re onstage in a 200 or 300 capacity club, you can see everything that’s going on, right to the back of the room. I think it’s fantastic – you feed off the audience and they feed off you. It’s a far more intense experience and we all absolutely loved it. Just getting hot and sweaty and really feeding off the vibe of the crowd, it’s great.”Do you think Stone Gods can come close to the success of The Darkness? Does that even matter?
Richie: “It doesn’t matter to be honest and it also depends on how you measure success. My idea of success for this band would be for us to be at a level where we can carry on touring and we can carry on making records and if we could maintain that I’d be immensely happy – if things get too big too quickly, things can start to go pear-shaped, y’know? I certainly don’t think we’ll appeal to the crossover pop audience that The Darkness did, the kinda Saturday morning kids’ TV brigade. I don’t think we’ll pick up those fans at all, which to me is no bad thing really. Because once you start appealing to that audience, the only thing they’re really interested in is the next thing that’s coming along, whereas the core rock audience – which is hopefully what we’ll appeal to – is more real fan-based. If they like you then they’ll latch onto you and support you forever and that’s really important to us. As long as we have that core audience that allows us to tour and make records, we’ll be happy.”
So, will anyone expecting a Darkness Mk II from Stone Gods be disappointed?
Richie: “Yes is the short answer – we’re certainly not The Darkness Part 2. Some of the same influences are there but it is a very different beast really. For a start there’s no way that I could ever sing like Justin and his unique voice was a big part of The Darkness’ sound really. Even if we were playing The Darkness songs they’d sound completely different by the time I’d finished with them anyway. But the general sound of Stone Gods I’d say is far edgier than The Darkness was.”
How would you describe Stone Gods’ music?
Richie: “Because there’s four individuals we have a very diverse set of musical tastes and I think that’s reflected in the songs we write. We’re certainly not a one-trick pony. There is definitely that classic rock element in there. There are also folky elements if you will, there’s some out and out metal in there. The album is done and finished and ready to go and it’s a very, very diverse album. There’s a whole range of styles on there and that reflects the way that we wrote, which was the four of us just sat around with an acoustic guitar and a pad of paper, throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what stuck. It was far more about writing songs than it was about writing big riffs and they just took the shapes they took. We didn’t sit down and go: ‘Okay, we need to be heavier than The Darkness’, we just let it evolve as it would. I’d say in essence we are a heavy rock band but there’s a lot of different elements on the album.”
Your debut EP Burn The Witch is actually out today – are you nervous? Excited?
Richie: “Hugely excited actually. I got sent a couple of copies last week and they look awesome. I’m expecting a phone call later and I believe – I read in an email this morning – that it’s actually already sold out. Which is pretty cool. I mean, it’s a limited edition release anyway. We
Date of Interview: February 2008
just wanted to get something out there and get a bit of interest going but I understand it has already sold out, which is pretty good. I should point out, you can still get it by download though…”
Nice plug, sir. You say the album’s finished – do you have a title and release date yet?
Richie: “We haven’t got a title yet. We’ve got a whole pad of A4 of band name ideas that didn’t quite stick but there’s some fantastic album titles on there so we’re going to go back through all that and pick a title. Release-wise it’s going to be this summer to tie in with the start of the festival season. What we’re hoping to do at this stage – and we are still putting the final plans together – is get a proper single release out in May and the album probably in mid-June. That’s the plan at the moment.”
