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 Following the success of their first EP, ‘We Carnival’ and still riding on the achievements of current single ‘Wow’ London five-piece Vatican DC have put together enough material for an album to be released in the Autumn.
They are particularly gifted at delivering no-nonsense, straight for the jugular punk numbers. I am talking quality punk here!
The excellent song writing and their captivating live performances, pumped full of nervous energy didn’t go unnoticed and Vatican DC was requested to open for The Prodigy on their 2005 tour.
The quintet achieved a lot in a very short period of time.
Totally aware of their good fortunes and not wanting to suffer from a case of ‘too much, too soon’ they decided to take some time out, revise their position and write an LP.
Today, in a London pub, I meet up with Steve, writer and front man, to get the low down on the DC in 2006.
 Florence: You’re working on Vatican DC’s debut album right now, what kind of release date do you have in mind?
Steve: We’re aiming for end of August, beginning of September.
It’s better to release something after the summer is over. Right now people’s attention is elsewhere....festivals, the World Cup...
We need to maximise interest in the band and pick the right time when people’s ears are more receptive!
Florence: ‘Wow’ is the current single, and to me comes across as a ‘stand alone’ track so was it written as a single?
Steve: We were writing for this album last summer and up until Christmas. We started recording in January and ‘Wow’ was one of those tracks that came together very quickly.
It was always kicking around as an idea ever since Daniel Lindegren and I began working on it during the summer. It seemed to be a song that had something but it wasn’t until we teamed up with our producer that it ‘grew’ into a single.
That was one of the enjoyable thing about making the album. Four or five tracks started as ideas and we didn’t really know how to finish them or sometimes we didn’t really know where they were going until we got to the studio.
For ‘Wow’ we had no vocals even though we’d already written the backing track. Some vocals we tried were not sitting very well then Daniel wrote some different vocals. So good that when Eddie Temple Morris [XFM radio DJ] visited the studio on the off-chance, just to say Hello to us we played him a rough demo of the song, not really finished or mixed and he put it on the radio two days later!
This song was standing out from the very beginning.
Florence: As Eddie TM been your guardian angel?
Steve: Yes absolutely! 100%!
The man is amazing and also Liam Hewlett [Prodigy].
They didn’t have to but they really pushed the songs and made things happen.
We toured with The Prodigy which was absolutely fantastic and it’s great for the band to get the confidence to play big crowds.
Thanks to Eddie telling people “listen to this band” we’ve had ‘single of the week’ on the Lauren Laverne show and with Claire Sturgess.
There is so much bullshit in London but Eddie TM is like an island in the middle of a sea of bullshit!
He’s under a palm tree with his turntable and he’s sent us a life raft!
Florence: Things happened very fast for you and there is a direct link between your initial success and the way you put the band together.
Tell me more about that.
Steve: Daniel and myself started the band three years ago.
It was just the two of us for six months and we released a limited edition single, ‘Pink Hotel’, which managed to get a decent review in the NME.
Our first goal was to release something and see if it could get played on the radio. So that was very exciting for us and of course it generated a lot of interest in Vatican DC.
In terms of our first song being released as a single, getting good reviews and being played on the radio that was fast as we’d only been together a couple of months at that stage but of course we had to build on that and to be serious we had to get a band together.
It’s all very well banging out a few tunes in your bedroom but you also need to go out and present yourself to the public.
Our worst nightmare was finding a good drummer and on the first couple of gigs we used a drum machine....as many bands will tell you: ‘a band is only as good as its drummer’, and in London there is a lot of competition for the best drummers.
Anyway after spending a while looking we find Tal Amiran but then we had a change of bass player, as things didn’t quite work out, so getting the right chemistry within the band was actually more difficult than sitting around writing new songs!
That was a big learning curve!
Florence: Going back to your forthcoming LP, would ‘punky’ tracks like ‘Antisocial’ and ‘Nice Friend’ be included or are you trying to move away from that sound?
Steve: We’re still finalising tracks to include on the album but ‘Antisocial’ for instance was on our first EP and never released as a single but has come through to date as one of our most popular track with radios, in America and over here. A lot of people love that song but we need to make sure that it sits properly with the rest of the album as we’ve kind of moved away from that punk sound.
We’re moving towards something more melodic and with more pop sensibilities to the songs but at the same time they are some harsher tracks as well so we just don’t know yet.
We need to show that we are not just a ‘one trick pony’.
We have a really wide range of music taste we’re keen to incorporate in our writing.
If you look at bands like The Clash or The Damned, they may have started as heavy punk but they clearly were influenced by Jazz and Reggae...
Florence: Are The Damned and The Clash reference points for Vatican DC?
Steve: Absolutely. At the time we formed the band we were really into The Clash but also a lot of 80s music like Wire, Fugazi, Sonic Youth...
we really love that East coast American sound.
Right now I like The The. I am really interested in people who can tell stories set to a song and make you feel that it’s real. A real snapshot of an era.
A lot of bands now sing good pop songs but I don’t believe that they’re
really capturing their ‘time’, capturing the ‘moment’.
I think that a lot of music in the late 70s and 80s was just so of its time, talking about things of that period and I find that so much more invigorating and alive.
That really gets people interested and maybe that’s why you’ve got movement like Punk and New Wave.
Florence: So with an LP to promote are we expecting a lot of live dates?
Steve: Yes! We’ve just signed up with a new agent and we need to get it right.
We started off quite quickly and realised that we’d go out and play with only seven or eight songs and we knew that we had to write more, rehearse more as we felt that we were running before we could walk.
We were quite hyped up but felt that we couldn’t deliver on the hype as we didn’t have enough material.
We needed time to settle down and realised that if we wanted to do this properly we had to make the right decisions and take the right steps.
We’ve changed a lot of the team around us, we’ve got a new manager, new agents.
This time around we want to get a couple of singles out, keep on playing and ‘grow’ a following, get more radio play...
All the bands I am inspired by, The Clash or The Pixies, are bands that nobody really cared about when they first came out.
They had to build over albums and albums, and I think that this slow built could also help you last longer and make for more fans loyalty.
That’s the way it happened for Queens Of The Stone Age and The White Stripes.
Sometimes you will be told that such new band is the best band of all time and six months later they’re gone and that’s not good for the industry and it’s certainly not good for these bands.
It’s important not to get carried away and desperate.
We want to stick to what we know and believe in what we do and keep on building and hopefully people will appreciate that and stick with us.
Florence: On the 5th of June you were playing in Paris...
Steve: We’ve had great feedback from the States on ‘Antisocial’, great feedback from Spain on ‘Wow’, ‘Pink Hotel’ did really well on radio in Paris, people come to our gigs from as far afield as Poland!
We have a sound that doesn’t just appeal to the city of London, we seem to get a lot of interest from the rest of Europe and beyond, places like Hong Kong, Australia.
So we’ve got a big tour starting in September.
Florence: You really need to capitalise on your wide appeal.
So how did Paris go?
Steve: The venue, La Fleche d’Or, was so different from your standard London venue. Almost like a film set, something out of Mad Max, quite crazy and the crowd was really up for it, jumping and clapping, demanding an encore and that was quite refreshing compare to London where because of the number of bands and competing scenes sometimes it’s hard to get a reaction out of the audience.
You have to work really hard and earn your stripes which is good because it forces you to perform better and better.
Paris was a fantastic experience and we’d love to go back there.
Florence: What do you listen to right now, as far as your contemporaries are concerned?
Steve: I really like the Futureheads.
I first saw them at the Barfly in London, two years ago with only fifty or sixty people there but they just blew me away. It was so fresh and raw with a kind of nervous energy. At the time I knew that they had the kind of integrity to move things forward. Their first album came out and even though it wasn’t a massive seller it still pushed the right buttons with a lot of people and The Futureheads have managed to get a second LP out and I think it’s really great and it shows a band with a level of maturity where they just don’t think about what’s happening the next minute but they’re looking at things long term and I think that they will get there.
Anyway...I also really like a band called A Mountain Of One who have just released their first 12” and it’s doing really well. They’ve got some great stuff. Some of it reminds me of Talk Talk and some of it sounds like a ‘Blade Runner’ soundtrack but the best song I’ve heard recently is ‘Life Is A Pigsty’ by Morrisey and it’s like The Smiths again, something out of ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and it’s really great.
I still listen to The Fall as to me it’s always contemporary music. I saw them live twice last year and I think that they’re absolutely brilliant.
I like The Arctic Monkeys and I really believe that they have a lot of potential and more than just an indie thing going on.
Of course without The Libertines there wouldn’t be any Arctic Monkeys.
I’m also into Brian Jonestown, Spiritualized...I like a lot of different things but I’m not into all the ‘popy-indie’ stuff out at the moment which I find really boring or The Raconteurs as I don’t think that it’s clever enough.
The new Nelly Furtado single is very good and it proves that you can write a great song in any musical genre.
Florence: Totally unrelated question, Vatican DC is a very strong sounding name for a band but how did it come about?
Steve: We were looking for a name just when America was about to invade Iraq and we first thought of Washington DC.
I looked at the way The States reminded me of the Roman Empire and the way the Empire kept on spreading its influence until it cracked and crumbled on itself and somehow I saw a parallel between that and America. I was comparing America’s influence to the influence that Rome had. It’s pretty much a metaphor, a snapshot of how we felt at the time.
It’s nothing to do with religion and we’re certainly not a political band.
We’re not trying to make a point with that name.
Florence: What’s your message to the world?
Steve: Stop being so spoilt.
I think that the world is too selfish.
Words: Florence ACHERY
www.vaticandc.com
www.myspace.com/vaticandc |
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