Emerging band Morning Parade may have brought the gloomy UK weather with them to Big Guava Fest, but along with the rain came a whole new world of sound. The band hit the Orchard on stage Sunday, just two days before their new album Pure Adulterated Joy was set to release. Steve Sparrow and Chad Thomas, Morning Parade’s lead singer and guitar player, took a break from jamming out and enjoying the carnival rides to talk to us about their latest work.
The Minaret: How has your Big Guava experience been going so far?
Steve Sparrow: We’re good. We just got here, really.
Chad Thomas: The rides are free! They’re never free. You never get free rides. Normally they’re like 10 dollars a ride, aren’t they?
SS: We went a little bit crazy from excitement. It sounded a little too good to be true, but it actually was true. It was really good fun.
M: Tell me a little bit about who Morning Parade is. How did you guys get started?
SS: When we started out, I knew the bass player, Phil. He taught me to play guitar. We met at school when we were about 11. We played a lot of covers in the school band. Stuff like Muse, The Beatles, The Who, Pink Floyd. We met everyone else after college.
M: You guys are from the UK. What have your experiences been like touring and making music over there versus in the US?
SS: It’s a lot closer for in the UK, so it’s not expensive. But it’s colder and there’s a place called Grimsby, I never want to go there. That’s like calling your kid “Burden.” But what’s different is it’s smaller and a lot easier, but it’s not as diverse.
CT: We kind of know it because we’re there but for us the US is a big new adventure.
M: How would you guys describe your sound?
CT: Frequencies between killahurtz…we don’t know. It’s hard for a band to say that. We have kind of like an amalgamation of influences between us all. So it’s kind of hard to say ‘We’re this style.” Especially between songs. Some songs are different styles. We’re a rock band that plays other stuff.
SS: We have loads of rock sounding instruments with electronic stuff and lots of different things.
M: Who would you say are your biggest influences on that sound?
SS:It’s kind of weird because the more I talk about this the more pretentious I sound, but influences from a sound perspective…You can say “I like a band or a certain guitar sounds” or however, but actually sometimes with songwriting it can be just a conversation with somebody or an observation you make or something like that.
CT: It kind of comes a way out of music. Life influences affect us. We’re into the mod rock scene, The Kinks, The Who, The Beatles, so we’ve always had an English root.
SS: I’ve always liked electronic dance music and the way the rhythms work in that sense.
CT: It can be anyone. A good song. A good song will influence us and it’s any style. The more influences you have in different styles the more you can progress.
SS: This is the worst thing about today. We’re releasing a new record now and some people are like “Oh I don’t like this new record, because it’s not like your old one.” And other people are like “I like this one but not the old one.” But as a band you don’t wanna keep doing the same thing all the time. It gets boring. I don’t want to make the same album again and again. What if the next album we go “Fuck it. We want to make a cock-rock album.” Our fans are gonna go “No! You can’t do that!” We can do whatever we want.
M: I asked a band earlier how they got started playing music, and the lead singer told me that he was actually forced to play by his parents when he got started. Was it like that for you guys or did it just come naturally?
SS: I was in music class at school and there’d be like 30 kids in a class who had keyboards and you had headphones in and the teacher writes on the board you had to play the Star Wars theme tune or something. I didn’t wanna fuckin’ play that. It’s boring. It’s rubbish. So there was a button on the keyboard where when you pressed it it would go, “DJ! DJ! DJ!” I’d do it relentlessly all the time and the teacher would get really annoyed. So they kicked me out to another room with all the other kids who always pressed the DJ button. There was five of us and we all had to learn to play guitar. So that was it. Within a few months of it I was like “I’m quite good at this. This is fun.”
CT: Mine was with my brother. He was a few years older than me and he learned to play the drums and he was in the same school as me. So I was like “If he plays drums I wanna play guitar.” I was just copying him. I was his younger brother.
M: From your “Alienation” music video it seems like you guys have a really strong visual art influence. Do you think artistic visuals can be a strong influence on sound?
SS: Sometimes I think the concepts behind visual arts certainly can. The video was kind of inspired by a french painter called Degas who did a bunch of paintings about bathers, like women. About the beautiful female form basically. Which is quite interesting in this kind of time where there’s all this feminism stuff and Miley Cyrus. It’s a quite interesting opposite way of doing it.
CT: It’s trying to be humorous as well. Now you have social media and everyone’s into their phones and it’s nice to see people in real life.
SS: And then throw paint all over them.
M: Your new album comes out in two days. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
CT: Yeah it’s comin’ out! [both laugh]
SS: It’s comin’ out on Tuesday. It’s called Pure Adulterated Joy. We recorded it in Atlanta, Georgia, last year with Ben Allen, who actually did the Walk the Moon album. He did Cee Lo Green’s, Animal Collective..loads of different people. He sounded like a completely crazy odd choice for us as a producer so we went with him and it worked out to be really really good.
CT: It’s definitely new, fresh from the first album.
SS: It’s definitely different from the first album. We didn’t want to make the same shape twice. We wanted to have more guitars in it, make it louder and noisier. Actually someone said the other day that they hate the new album because it’s really noisy. And that’s what we wanted, to make it really heavy and noisy.
M: If you could work with anybody in the industry right now, who would it be?
SS: I’d love, obviously, to do one of those fucking cool sessions where Dave Grohl hangs out with Josh Homme. He’s just the fucking coolest man ever, isn’t he.
CT: My personal one would be a dueling guitar battle with Dimebag Darrell from Pantera. He’d wipe the floor with me. But it would still be cool.
Selene San Felice can be reached at selenesanfelice@spartans.ut.edu