BBC FOLK & ACOUSTIC:
Congratulations gentlemen! How are you feeling?
MATTHEW (guitar): It’s just brilliant! When John Tams said “Last Orders” it was unbelievable. Everyone here was so good that it could have gone to anyone and we wouldn’t have been surprised, but when he said us, it was just… brilliant! You feel bad for the others because they could have easily won.
JOE (melodeon): I was just cheering and they had to push me on to the stage! We were completely tongue-tied when we had to make speeches, we were just like, ‘thank you, er, thanks again’! But it was a really fantastic experience.
What was it like playing on stage tonight?
KEVIN (fiddle): It was absolutely amazing, being able to perform in such a nice venue…
MATTHEW: When we went up to play another set after we’d won, it just felt completely different to when we played earlier because we were on such a high.
JOE: When we were playing the encore I couldn’t stop bursting into smiles!
How have you found the whole Young Folk Award experience?
MATTHEW: All four of us have been here before in different combinations of bands, and it’s been better than ever this year. Getting together with people our own age who are into the same music is always great.
JOE: We’ve had a lot of time to get to know people. And the semi-final workshops were really informative.
KEVIN: It’s been great learning more about improvisation and different techniques for arranging your sets, and learning about the business world.
DAVID (fiddle): This was the only place we’ve ever been taught about the business side. Most workshops you go to are just about tunes. There are people here from the music world and the business world and they encourage you to ask questions.
Tell us a bit about the structure of the band and how you make your music.
MATTHEW: We’re literally the worst band ever for agreeing on things, in a morning we’ll disagree over the best way to make porridge. Seriously, we can’t agree on anything!
KEVIN: We all learn different tunes from everywhere, and we suggest them to the whole band, and then if everyone agrees to do the tune, we’ll have a big argument over how to arrange it!
JOE: We just play the tunes through lots of times, and then individually start doing different things with our parts, just naturally playing around with it. That gradually works into an arrangement. Then you keep adding to it…
DAVID: Like the sets we’ve been playing tonight… by the time we’re playing the festivals they’re going to be totally different. Every time we play them they seem to change and develop. They’re never a finished article.
You all live in different parts of northern England, is that going to cause any problems for you?
KEVIN: Me and Matthew live in Newcastle – he’s on his year out and I’m in the last year of school. David’s moved down to Leeds University to study Maths and Music and Philosophy, and Joe is in his last year of college in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. So we all live quite far apart.
JOE: We don’t get that much time to practise so it’s a case of grabbing a minute together. I go over once a fortnight to Newcastle, for a rehearsal with our big band Folkestra, which is basically how we met.
KEVIN: We were thinking we should just go away for a week and sort out a full repertoire and get everything sorted, try and record a CD to sell at festivals.
You have a busy few months ahead. What are your hopes, as a band, for 2007?
JOE: I think it’ll be an amazing year, just going from gig to gig, performing.
MATTHEW: Winning this is such a compliment. We’ve not been a band for that long and this shows us that we have got potential. This will encourage us to stick together and push ourselves…
JOE: It’d be great to be thought of as just ‘good’, rather than good because we’re young.
You’ll be playing some major UK folk festivals as part of your prize: Cambridge, Towersey, Cropredy. What do you think you will offer the festival crowds?
KEVIN: We want to bring in lots of different styles, English music, Scottish, Scandinavian, Iraqi, whatever we want…
JOE: I go to the Ethno camps, the last one was in Belgium and I’m planning on going to Slovenia this year, and that’s an amazing way of meeting people and picking up really different tunes that no-one else knows. So hopefully we’ll bring a bit of that into it.
MATTHEW: Also the fact that we do genuinely enjoy it. We try to portray that when we’re playing, just try to get across that we really enjoy it, we really love playing. So we’ll try to put across that energy and enjoyment of the music.
