Crash Of Rhinos - Untangling a lump in the throat
interview by
Lorenzo Righetto
There isn't much information out there about you, so let me ask how you decided to play together. Listening to your music and watching you live, it seems like you must have been friends forever or something like that…
Maybe "half of forever". We met in the middle of our teenage years, through school or at punk gigs at the Victoria Inn, in Derby. Oli was the fastest pop-punk drummer in the West. Jim had a glitter guitar and loved a good palm-mute chug. I don't think we ever actually played pop-punk together though.
It all probably happened because of our unhealthy obsession with music and a shared outlook on life and creativity. And a mutual love for the cheapest Polish lager going.
Jim, Biff and Beal were in The Little Explorer. Draper was in Removals. Jim, Beal, Draper and Oli were in Jesus Years. Throughout all of that we always wanted to play together (we'd hang around each other's recording sessions), so as soon as those bands ended, Crash got going.
How does the music you make now relate to what you listened to as kids?
Probably in more ways than we're even aware of. But when we write together we get caught up in little ideas, effects or styles. Like your favorite little chord change in the outro of a Karate song, or throwing in a nice 80s pick scrape before a wailing guitar solo.
It seems to me that, on Knots, you managed to hold on to your identity while still pulling in different musical ideas from different genres. Do you see this as a direction in your musical evolution?
Yes. There was a big gap between writing Distal and what would eventually become Knots. In that stretch of time you listen to a ton of records, write a bunch of songs, travel, change, get older.
Do you find “Distal” already impossible to replicate?
No, not really. I have to say it's easy. We played those songs so much before going on tour or recording them in the studio - then we played them even more on tour. As long as it's all five of us and we've got energy in the tank, we'll be fine.
I read that you asked your producer for an “In-Utero-meets-Colour&The-Shape” sound. Why those two albums specifically? Do you think you managed to achieve what you had in mind?
“In Utero” for the drums. “Colour & The Shape” for everything else. They're great records we never get tired of, and they're ambitious albums with a lot of variety. I don't think “Knots” sounds like either one, but the idea pushed us to put in more effort.
Do you ultimately find the “emo” label limiting for you?
Yes. It sounds like “college-rock”, “indie-rock”, “punk-rock”, “pop-punk”, “alt-rock” and all those Nineties genres that got squeezed together in a bread machine, out of which came this sad, deflated loaf in the shape of a word. A sad, deflated loaf to describe an entire crew of exciting bands who each like to make rock in their own way.
Emo is generally seen as an American genre. Could you give us a brief rundown of the English movement instead?
There were punk bands doing things differently. Like Hooton 3 Car, Cotton Weary, Jayne Doe. Then they got heavier and more math-y with Spy Versus Spy and And None of Them Knew They Were Robots and Fine Before You Came (they're Italian, but I'll always remember the day they arrived in the UK!).
That's more or less all of it, from my point of view. It will be very different for other people depending on their age, where they lived, and so on.
I read that having two bassists is basically “something that just happened”. How so? How do you work in the studio, in songwriting and recording?
Like I said in an earlier question, we just wanted to play all together. Beal and Draper play bass in very different ways. Basically they work together without getting in each other's way.
The story of your recordings is rather strange, given that you produced your first LP in Turin, and it was released by an Italian label, Triste. Can you tell us how that happened?
Our first tour in Italy was with Fine Before You Came. Maurizio from Triste had just released “Sfortuna” and was on tour with them as their sound engineer. He liked us, so he said: “Come record with me, just like you play it live”.
You've been close friends with Fine Before You Came for a long time. How did you meet?
In Derby, at a punk festival. Draper had booked them. They showed up and played around 5:30pm on a Saturday afternoon. They stayed at my house. My mum made them a banana cake. They stayed in Derby and we put together an impromptu show the next day at a little place called Raffles. Word had spread about these lively Italian guys, and it was packed, and Draper's band, Removals, played there too, as did Little Explorer, and we became like brothers with different mothers scattered all over the world.
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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Lorenzo Righetto, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
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