Eagulls

You can’t live and breathe the artsy, experimental post-punk life, without embracing the contemporary genius of Eagulls. I sat down with two members of the soon-to-be massive Leeds based indie rock band-- as they soared through their October UK tour.

George Mitchell (lead) and Tom Kelly (bass) talked to me about their music, life, and the future for Eagulls as a band, pre-gig at Exeter Cavern. We hung out in a closet-like room, equipped with a large supply of alcohol and carrot sticks, where the two told me about the horrors of Towers of London (band) and Salt Lake City(Utah, America)-- and even began to discuss playing a gig in a tree inside the Amazon Rainforest.

Where did it all start for you guys?
George: We started the band like, nearly 5 years ago is it now?
Tom: 5 years ago… We had a basement.
George: I think the thing that spurred us on to make a band was that me, Henry [Ruddell, drums], and Goldy [Mark ‘Goldy’ Goldsworthy, Guitar] went to Primavera Festival in Barcelona, and we was like, sorta’ saying then, ‘oh we should start a band’, and uh, it was there that idea sort of formed, and then Goldy went off and wrote some songs, then I didn’t wanna join the band, and he pestered me until I went and joined the band, and that was it.

For someone who has never heard your music before, how would you describe it?
George: Contemporary rock music, loud, brash.
Tom: It’s quite hard to describe.
George: Yeah, it’s not easy to describe your own stuff, I usually let other people do that themselves—it’s not for me to say, it’s hard.

I believe you’ve sold out of 10 of your 18 venues on this tour alone. How has the success of the band changed your lives this year?
George: It’s really good, I mean, we don’t work anymore—the band is just like our job, so to speak, and it’s nice, it’s what we always wanted to do with the band, like we wanted to just, be able to just, every minute of our lives to just be in a band, and we’ve accomplished that now—so, now we can go do something else like climb Mount Everest or something.
Tom: I think it’s made time pass really quickly this last year, since January, now it’s like October, it’s getting towards the end of the year, and these last like, 10 months… 10 months? Yeah, it’s felt like, 2 or something, ‘cuz we’ve been doing that much since January, I think… I counted the other day I think it was like, 170, 180 gigs we’ve done, not including like sessions and all that kind of thing. It’s been a hard slog like, but it’s been good.
George: Yeah, very good.

It hasn’t been long since the release of your debut album ‘Eagulls’, and you have received some awesome feedback, how does that feel?
George: “It’s nice, it’s good, and it feels like we’re appreciated, feel accomplished in something, we put a lot of work into it — it’s good to hear good feedback.”

Has anything really crazy happened to you at any of your gigs so far?
George: Last night was funny but I don’t wanna talk about that.
Tom: Yeah, *chuckles*.
George: Anything that’s crazy, we never wanna say it, because people will probably just think, ‘hm, that is quite crazy’.

Isn’t crazy good image to have for your kind of sound?
George: Not really, ‘cuz then people just put you… they point you in a certain like, place where they just think ‘you’re just idiotic lads, that are just… mindless’- like our music’s not mindless, it’s very on point, and it’s talking about actual things, it’s not just like… ‘get up on stage and be punk’, it’s not that, that’s what we’re very against. So we sometimes try and keep it on the down low for like when we are having fun and doing things that we shouldn’t be doing- because we don’t wanna be portrayed as idiots.
Tom: Yeah we don’t wanna be like, what’s that band… Towers of London—
George: --Your stereotype punk band that’s just like…’uh fuck this place’.
Tom: They were just based on like, being knobheads really weren’t they.
George: And their music was fucking shit, and they were just knobheads.
Tom: *laughs* Yeah.

Do you guys have any goals?
Tom: Get this next album out.
George: Yeah, we wanna do another album, see from there. I think the only goal we ever had was to play Primavera Festival, ‘cuz that’s where it sorta started, so maybe this year. I mean we got asked to play this year but we were in America, which was pretty shit, like, some shithole place like Salt Lake City in the middle of nowhere and we was just like ‘we could be at Primavera Festival now, instead of here’.
Tom: I’d like to do Glastonbury, mainly because I’d like to go there.
George: I think we’ll, next year we’ll do all those sort of things, we got asked to play Glastonbury this year but, we was in America as well so we missed out on quite a lot, but then at the same time we got to do way more things than most English bands do ‘cuz we did the whole America spectrum so—
Tom- I’d like to go to south like um… South America again, that’ll be a good place to go. Go somewhere weird. We’ll be doing like Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, I look forward to that in uh... January. I’d like to go some weirder places-- like Iceland.
George: Ha! The Amazon Rainforest.
Tom: Yeah.
George: Play a gig in a tree.
Tom: I’d like to go to Brazil.
George: A lot of people keep asking us to come to Brazil.

Brianna: Really?
George: Yeah, so, maybe!
Tom: We did get asked once but we couldn’t do it.
George: Oh yeah.
Tom: Last October, just for one gig wasn’t it.
George: Maybe we’ll do it one day… that’s a goal.

Lots of people have been asking me, where you got the name ‘Eagulls’ from?
George: Oh it’s a secret!
It sounds like you guys are going places, I’ve been listening to your music and it’s very fresh, very successful.
George: Cheers, thank you.
Tom: Thank you.