Gentleman’s Dub Club Interview

With eight individuals on stage, Gentleman’s Dub Club’s live shows are riotous and energetic events mashing up dub, dance and reggae. Whether playing in a small club in Manchester or before a festival crowd, lead singer, Jonathan Scratchley, reveals why they always have to be on their A-game.

So Gentleman’s Dub Club, your live shows are fun aren’t they?
Well, they’re fun for me!

How do you prepare for a gig?
Personally, because I’m the singer, I’ve got to warm up my voice, warm up my body. I’ve realised that as I’ve got older, warming up the body is increasingly more important. Other than that, just a cup of coffee!

With eight of you on stage, is it important to bounce off of each other?
Literally [laughs] Yeah, in lots of different ways. I think that’s a real advantage of being in a band. I’ve performed before where it’s just me and it’s a really different vibe. We’re so lucky that we’ve been going for 10 years and there are six of us who are exactly the same people as we were 10 years ago. They’re my best friends in life so it makes it such an enjoyable experience and really pays off when we’re on stage and writing music.

As such a live band, how do you approach recording in the studio? What was the recording process for ‘The Big Smoke’?
It was really lovely, actually. We’d had a fairly tumultuous time recording – it’s difficult to translate what goes on on a live stage to what happens in the studio, because naturally people are listening to it in a different environment and there’s the energy that comes from being in front of a crowd that doesn’t come when you’re just in front of a stale studio environment! So, there are issues with it. When writing ‘FOURty FOUR’, we realised this formula for working: we come together in a room with lots of ideas from various minds and times, and we play them as a group with a good sound system. We play and play and play until we all feel that they’re structurally correct and musically right, and then we’ll go away and do the detailed recording process. And that’s a really different approach to what we used to take when we’d sit down, write, record in separate parts and then knock our heads against the wall because it wasn’t gelling together!

So you rehearse the album before you record it?
Yeah, big time. We did a Rodigan session in Maida Vale, and we played four tunes, three of which we’d been gigging for a little while, and when we listened back to them, we were like “These are better than the album!” It’s an amazing environment there and a great kit, but we realised that playing in front of a crowd and getting a response made a big difference.

So do you play around with the tracks on stage?
Loads. But it’s funny – sometimes we never talk about it. You all just do what feels right and that’s the real advantage of knowing a group of people and playing with them for a long time. One of our biggest tunes, ‘Emergency’, we recorded one way and performed it that way for literally five years, and then last summer we just started doing it a bit differently, and we haven’t even spoken about it! I just think that’s amazing!

You’re playing at Horizon Festival in Bansko ski resort in Bulgaria. The festival looks mental with thermal pools, underground raves, hot tub cinemas and ski slopes; will you have a chance to immerse yourself in it all?
I imagine I’ll immerse myself in a big pile of snow! The plan is to go out for a few days. I’ve been to the resort before so I fancy going as long as the weather’s on point. It’s really great skiing – a lovely place to spend time. I’m not very good at skiing because I’m tall – but I try!

Do you know what you’ll be doing for the set yet?
Between now and then we’ve got Christmas, a little tour – I’m not 100% sure what we’ll do, but the chances are we’ll be playing a lot of songs off ‘The Big Smoke’. We craft our sets depending on what we’ve got in front of us. With the gigs, we can decide that we wanna promote the album because people have paid to come and see us specifically and we can be a bit more relaxed, but when we go to Horizon, we’ll turn up, look at the venue, see what time we’re playing, and decide a set based on those factors.

Do you have to up your game at festivals?
Constantly. We play more festivals than anything else so we have to up our game otherwise we fall on our arse. It’s so much to do with energy that we can’t allow ourselves to become complacent or assume that it’s gonna go well. Regardless of what type of show it is, we have to step it up. We had a Facebook message from a girl saying: “I came to your gig in Manchester and I’d fallen in love with the band, I was so up for it, and then I came to see you in Liverpool, and I was a bit disappointed.” I was like, “Oh, I’m sorry about that”. And we started to discuss why that might be. And the Manchester gig was mental – they’d sold the club four times over capacity and they all had to get inside this one room. It was literally a dangerous environment! But because of that, it was incredible! We battled through the crowd in this tiny room, played a really heavy set, and it was pure energy. She obviously thought that that’s what we did. So she came to the next show – and it was our album tour! So we were slower, playing our songs properly and the crowd was different. At the end, we came to a nice amicable agreement!

So, do you review gigs?
Well, you’ve got to be careful about that, haven’t you? There’s a right and a wrong time! Now, I can say about a show last week that I did actually forget the lyrics during a chorus, but if someone came up to me and said that straight after the show, I’d knock ‘em out… Like, no! But we don’t really know what happens. For the time that we play our sets, I barely have enough time to sip some water, so I have no bloody idea what happens! Basically, what I’m saying is, we’ve not got much of a system in place [laughs].

So, what’s the craziest thing that’s happened at one of your gigs?
Quite a lot of stuff happens… We often have the stage invaded. To be honest, that gig in Manchester was pretty mental! We went for a bite to eat and we came round to the back of the venue and these two riot vans turned up, so I was wondering if the show was even gonna happen. Next, a fire engine comes round – the stairs had collapsed in the venue!

Catch Gentleman’s Dub Club at Horizon Festival in Bansko, Bulgaria. Taking place from 12th – 17th March, get your tickets from www.horizonfestival.net

Horizon Festival 2016

By Charlotte Mellor