Gengahr Interview

Gengahr are a four-piece indie-psych-pop band from London. Having been slowly coming out from under the radar in the last 12 months, they’ve just released their debut album, ‘A Dream Outside’, and announced their first ever shows in Australia for Splendour In The Grass. With so much to talk about, we had a chat with frontman, Felix Bushe.

So, your debut dropped in Australia 12th June! How are you feeling now it’s finally out?
It’s just nice to have it out; we feel like we’ve been sat on it for a while. We finished it in December and there’s quite a long wait and you want people to hear it. People have said kind things about it so I’m just excited to see it in record shops.

You’re actually playing in a few record shops recently…
Yeah, it seems like a thing people do now, especially bands on indie labels.

One recurring thing about you guys is that you draw from classic, creepy horror; how much of this is to be taken literally? For example, did you spend nights watching Dracula from the 1930s?
It’s much looser than that! When I write, I tend to think about things visually and how they play out. When it comes to making the videos, I know how it should look or how the narrative’s going to play out because I write it like a story wit ha beginning, middle and end. I do watch a lot of film and that plays a part, but it’s not just horror, it’s more the mystery and fantasy elements from good films and I think music can have that as well. You can tell stories with songs, that’s something I’ve always been into and enjoyed when other people have done it like David Bowie or Lou Reed.

Are they the sort of artists that influence you then?
When it came to writing music when I was younger, they were my two biggest inspirations, Lou Reed in particular. The style of Lou Reed and the other-worldliness of Bowie – I saw that songwriting doesn’t necessarily need to be directly about the things that surround you, you can take it somewhere else.

Is there a favourite song on the album that springs to mind?
We tried our best to make it a complete body of work; it was a case of trying to capture the beginning of the band and we wanted to make sure that we wrote it over a year so that we could say “This is how Gengahr were after a year touring, writing and working on music” so I’m really proud of it from start to finish. We self-edit as we go along, we had the luxury of spending loads of time in the studio and playing with ideas. We just want it to be a representation of what we’re about and what we can do.

So you were all really involved with production?
Yeah, we decided to co-produce the first album ourselves. We were in a position where we could and we’ve done our own stuff for a while now. The label was really cool about it and we accepted that maybe for the second album we won’t produce it ourselves, but we definitely wanted to give this one a shot.

You’ve toured with Wolf Alice, The Maccabees and alt-J, and you’re touring non-stop throughout the European summer, how much have live shows contributed to your fan base so far?
It’s hard to say because music is so rounded now. Online’s probably been the kindest to us from the start; when we look back to putting our original demos online before we had a manager and an agent, the internet was there for us and people from all over the world were downloading the demos. That’s been there from the start, people being people, liking something and telling their friends about it. Touring is a different thing altogether, especially with support shows because you hope that you’re playing to a receptive audience but potentially you could take some fans home with you – not literally, obviously – your music sinks in and they then go and see you play on your own or listen to your music at home. That’s a battling process, a war zone for all bands, trying to gather fans after a show. And we know that we have to tour and play as many shows as possible. If you look at the bands that have been successful in the last five years, they’ve had relentless touring schedules, and that’s what we’ve got to look forward to if we want to make it work.

You must feel that pressure even more at festivals with people moving around and bands playing at the same time…
Yeah, we did 14 festivals last year and that felt like a good run for us. The stages we were doing were the introductory stages, so there’s not really any pressure, there might be handful of people that turn up because they’ve heard of you. This time’s going to be different because we played Field Day last weekend and we clashed with Patti Smith, which was pretty brutal, so we had one of the big slots on one tent but then on the main stage you had Patti Smith playing, so that was funny! What’s encouraging is when you have those clashes but a load of people come and see us and that’s really cool – either they’ve never heard of Patti Smith before or they really like us!

Speaking of festivals, in-between your dates in Europe, you have a visit to Australia for Splendour In The Grass; is this your first visit or tour of Australia?
It’s going to be the first time any of us have been to Australia, which is really exciting. It’s probably the furthest I’ve ever been away from home – in fact it’s definitely the furthest! We did SXSW in Texas recently and that was our biggest trip so far. That’s one of the nice things about the band at the moment is that we’ve got to travel a lot and see a lot of places we’d never have seen. We’ve done extensive touring of Europe now and now we’re on our way to Australia, and I love it, I think the travelling’s amazing and visit other parts of the world.

Is there any chance you’ll get to chill out for a bit and do a bit of sightseeing?
We might get to, we never really know, we’ll probably have a lot to do but we’ll try and make sure we get to do some bits and pieces. It’s an awful long way to go to not get to see anything.

What sort of things would be on your Australia bucket list?
We have been joking about it but we’re all terrified of sharks so swimming with sharks would be kind of amazing. I’m fascinated by them but also terrified of them, so that’s definitely got to be up there. We often put on David Attenborough documentaries in the van, and Australia’s wildlife is far more exciting than what we get in the UK so that’s one of my biggest interests to see some pretty gnarly animals!

Having mentioned gnarly animals… Did you name yourselves after a Pokémon?
Yeah.

Why?
Initially we were called RES, but there’s already a rapper called RES so we had to change our name due to copyright infringement. When we changed it, we were all thinking of new ideas and everything sounded so pretentious and annoying, just putting two cool words together to make something random. It was pretty dumb anyway so we thought about just picking our favourite Pokémon. We went with it – we changed the spelling of it slightly because we didn’t want to end up getting sued again!

See who else will be playing Splendour In The Grass 2015!