When I was a lot younger, I did some work with St. Jude’s, but then we went on a ‘Red Band’ tour across the United States, and we went to a bunch of hospitals and had the privilege of meeting kids who are suffering or going through these different situations.
When I was in my former band Downhere, I did everything I could not to remind people of Freddie Mercury, but it became almost hilarious how many people compared me to him to the point where it felt like it was working against the band when we tested singles at radio.
I got fed up with being in bands. I spent a couple of years touring the country in a smoked filled band, doing lots of drugs and being really unhealthy.
I’ve got an article where my mum says that I used to run home from school to watch the Stones on TV. Right from when I was at college I wanted to be in that band.
Aesthetically, we were enormously successful. Economically… there was no success. It was all about music of the future and unfortunately it was a band that didn’t have any future.
When the band would leave the stage, and then the audience would just take over, and keep the groove goin’.
The band and I really enjoy working for people who enjoy the music. I haven’t made a bazillion dollars doing this. I do it because I love it. I did it for free and will do it for free in the morning.
I agree with the rest of the band, that a truly synthesized sound isn’t really what I would want to go for.
For any band that ends up becoming really big, yeah, hard work has something to do with it, but a lot of it is just pure luck.
You have to keep going. The main attention is for us to stay alive and stay a band. You only really become very successful when you stick together. Just keep going and reaching bigger and better.
I first started actually playing guitar when I was eleven years old. I had some neighborhood friends who told me they were starting a band and needed a guitarist. I told my folks, and by the next day I had a guitar lesson set up with a local teacher.
I used to play the piano in the band, and so there’s some horrendous scenes of me playing the keyboards.
The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.
‘Red Band Society’ is inspiring, funny, and an uplifting story that makes you want to make the most of your life, love and live to the fullest, and that’s a great message.
In a way, it’s my way of dealing with, finding closure with Grateful Dead music, and giving thanks in a way to Jerry and Bob and all the guys in the band for making up this wonderful music.
Also, we’re all actually different blood types and we have one represented by each guy in the band.
It’s a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can’t do.
I’ve always been in love with that Delta-flavored music… the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.
After wrestling with myself for six months, I began medical treatment. During that time I started a band with some friends of mine called Jack’s Car, but that didn’t last.
Often, I’ll do a quick workout in my hotel room consisting of exercises for the legs, glutes, abs, and arms with my own body weight. Also, I always have a jump rope, a medicine ball I can inflate, and a band in my suitcase. It’s a great kit to have for travel.
We’ve never been a religious band, but the media wants us to be.
You can feel the drums, and you can feel the bass. So, being able to feel the music through the floor, it makes me feel like I’m a part of the band and not just the only person in the room who doesn’t really understand what’s going on.
Hopefully people can look at our band and see that we’re a heavy rock band. We’re definitely not a metal band, but we’re a band that focuses on meaningful lyrics and melody.
Well, I started out as a musician, so when I was about 10 years old, I was already in a band.
We were a very popular live band in London, packing in 6,000 people a night, and the record companies that came after us wanted us to be the flavor of the month.
I pretty much built a band out of the most incredible guys I could possibly find. I didn’t really want a six-piece band, but it just ended up being a six-piece band because these guys are all awesome.
Sharon went on to play classical but we actually went into totally different instruments which was lucky for the band because otherwise we’d all be playing the same thing!!
One night all the James Brown band was playing on stage and I look in the back and I could see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards trying to get in the club and they couldn’t get in cause it was to crowded.
The music speaks for itself. You either like it or you don’t, or you’re somewhere in between. That doesn’t change whether I’m in the band or not.
I wasn’t really terribly familiar with the Beatles when I met George. They were just emerging. They certainly weren’t as big as they became later on. I just knew them as a pop group, and that’s all. I was keener on George as a man and a person, as opposed to someone in a band.
Mainly I was able to perform with music – I played the French horn, I would sing, and I was a drummer in the pipe band. So I think it was a way to show off.
Men are going to go out on the road and they’re going to find other women. So if you really want to save yourself a whole lot of heartache, do not fall in love with somebody in a band. Just don’t.
I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t have a headshot. I didn’t even know if anyone would know where to find me. I just went back to highschool and started playing with my band.
When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band – or at least in a Pixies cover band.
Joining another big time rock band was the last thing I was looking for, but as the tour went on, I really dug playing to a lot of people, the band sounded great, and just being out there again, got me over my depression and so I decided to hop on board.
Our story is in two halves, as the band’s career up to Freddie’s death was 20 years, and 20 years later, our music is as popular as it was then. It’s a sort of everlasting… income.
I’ve been through Hell with some of the members of my old band, and Hell is highly stressful.
When we started the band, it was because we were waiting for a sound that never happened. We got tired of waiting, and we decided to just do it ourselves.
People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the band’s existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. I’m sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared.
While I was into many different types of music, and played with many different local groups, I really didn’t have a band to call my own until Dire Straits was formed in 1977.
I’m kind of claustrophobic… It’s not even like enclosed spaces. It’s like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can’t get out.
But I remember feeling as a producer I felt like the guy who called the caterer and got the band; I had to work the party while everybody else was having a good time.
The rest of the band were basically friends, So it was me following them around and begging them to let me be in their band for two or three years. And they finally let me in on the harmonica, actually, and then the keyboards, and finally the guitar.
I didn’t have any expectations of what my family life would end up being like. But I’ve been very blessed in my life to have a wife who loves me and supports me and is able to be in my band and travel with me.
Mick says, Would you join the band? I say to him, Mick, you know I’d be there in a New York minute.
As good as I am, I’m nothing without my band.
We’re all continuing to grow up and get better as musicians, and the chemistry as a band continues to deepen.
A band like Depeche Mode would go out and record them hitting a trash can with a steel rod or something and recording it. And that would be one of their sounds of the drums. I love the creativeness of that kind of really raw sampling.
A band’s only unique thing is its chemistry, especially if none of you are prodigious players or particularly handsome. The one thing you have is your uniqueness, so we hold on to that.
The band is built on fire and venom, as is the energy that goes into racing – but it is a completely different discipline. They are very similar in a lot of ways but poles apart in others.
For a band like us tracklisting is a massive, massive task.
For me, it’s always this constant battle and search when I’m out on stage as to where and when do I really open myself up to the people that are there. How do I let myself feel present in the space, and how do I allow myself to get into the music and interact with the band members.
The creative part for me is making songs, and that’s what I really love the most, and that’s what I’ve always done for every band I’ve ever had.
I opted out of the band.
I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.
