The Amazons — An Attempt to be Like Our Heroes
★ written by Ella Jones | cover image by Phoebe Fox | article photos by Vendy Palkovičová ★
At the time of intervew, following the release of their recent album ‘Future Dust,’ The Amazons were currently completing the last few shows on their recent tour of Europe, the UK and US — and I had the opportunity to interview them before their show at O2 Academy, Leeds. The upcoming four-piece rock band were scheduled to play at a few festivals this Summer including Y Not, 2000 Trees and 110 Above - unfortunately now likely cancelled due to COVID-19, but demonstrating an exciting future to come.
If you’d like to introduce yourselves?
Matthew: I’m Matthew from The Amazons; I’m the lead singer, who also plays guitar.
Elliot: Hi I’m Elliot and I play bass and do the backing singing — sometimes — on a few songs.
What’s the story behind the name ‘The Amazons’? Was it the first name you thought of or did you have other options?
Matthew: Oh my god, so many options! We’ve been in previous bands before with terrible names, so we respected the gravity of the situation when we were picking a band name. It came from a children’s book called ‘Swallows and Amazons,’ which was published in the 1930s. It was about these kids on a summer holiday in the Lake District. I liked its themes of escape — they go on an adventure and make things up. It comes full circle really because that’s what our album ‘Future Dust’ is about. This is why we’re called The Amazons. Everything is informed by our name, without us even knowing it. It’s kind of subliminal.
Elliot: There’s also a movie if you can’t be bothered to read the book; it’s about a gang — a family — about these kids who come together and have some sort of identity. That was another thing we liked about the name: about creating — not a clique per say — but creating a gang, a tribe. That's all we were going for.
So did you have any other name options?
Elliot: We played under a few terrible ones before we chose this one.
Matthew: Yeah, there was just loads of rubbish indie, kind of crappy names, like stuff with ‘clubin’’, and stuff with ‘girls’ and ‘blood’ and ‘young’ — real cliche stuff that didn’t mean anything. ‘The Amazons’ is a name that we thought had already been taken, because it’s a great name.
“This album was an attempt to have a go at being like our heroes.”
Do you have any musical influences or inspirations? Who did you listen to as a child?
Matthew: That’s a great question. It’s all informed by our parents really.
Elliot: Parents, I’m sure like with anyone, influence their kids — listening to their music first when you are in the car. You hear it in the background, kitchen, living room, whatever. My parents were kids in the ’70s, so all the big ’70s bands: The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles … the list goes on endlessly.
Matthew: I think being young lads — boys — [means] that you respond to the music with an inherent energy to it. The songs that really turned me on when I was younger were ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana. I heard those on the radio and of course my parents didn’t have those records, so they were fleeting glimpses at an exciting life that I wasn’t leading; that stuff my parents weren’t into. My parents were into Santana, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen who were my first loves. My first discoveries were based around aggressive sounds like Rage Against The Machine. And I loved Linkin Park, Green Day, Blink 182, Good Charlotte and these pop-punk bands. We were getting into music and I wanted a pathway to that. I had a Led Zeppelin guitar songbook; it was just so hard I couldn’t play it. But what I could play when I first started playing guitar was Green Day. I had a tiny 5 watt amp in my bedroom and I’d play their album ‘Dookie’ on my CD player and I would just play [guitar] along to it, jumping around on my bed playing at the same time.
Do you feel like you stick to the genre of rock n’ roll? Do you feel like in the new album you have experimented more or stuck to your roots?
Matthew: Rock n’ roll in its recorded history ... is like 60 years of stuff, so for us we’re definitely keen to just explore how far we can go with the heavier side of things. If you listen to the first record songs like ‘In My Mind’ and ‘Black Magic,’ they certainly are on that side of things. They went down so well and we enjoyed playing them live over a 2-year period. It was natural for us to get into the practice room and just play some riffs and have fun, and you will see what it’s like when played live.
It totally works in a live environment; people go crazy and you lose yourself in the moment, which is exactly what we were going for. We didn’t feel any pressure, we didn’t have any ambitions to change things or experiment with things that weren’t guitars, because we feel like we hadn't accomplished what we wanted to do with the first record. It’s an evolution of growing. I think some bands are in danger with their second and third records to totally overthink it or look at current trends and worry about being relevant. But these are not conducive to the creative process in any way — it just needs to be how you want to express yourself at that time. [With] this record especially, we were listening to bands like Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones and The Eagles, thinking, ‘These guys are amazing, fantastic bands.’ They write complex songs, they have interesting lyrical themes, and more than anything they have a musicianship that totally eclipsed anything that anyone is doing right now.
This album was an attempt to have a go at being like our heroes. It’s similar to the way that monks dedicate their lives trying to be closer to God, trying to be closer to the image of God. That’s like us with Led Zeppelin. I’m not saying that we want to mimic them or anything like that, but we want to capture the spirit of what they are doing, the musicianship and what they place value on. We want to do the exact same thing. It’s completely going against the current trends at the moment, which is very much like easy-to-digest, easy-listening, laptop-produced orientated stuff. We looked at that and decided against it; we want to sweat in a rehearsal room, we want to write real riffs on these ancient instruments that they call guitars...
What’s the best crowd you have ever performed for?
Matthew: Last night, Birmingham was absolutely off the hook. They responded well and we played slightly more songs from the new album.
Eliot: The first night of the tour is always a little bit nerve-wracking with a few teething problems. But you know that's just how it is when you are playing live, nothing really goes to plan all the time.
Matthew: Exactly. Because we are playing live, we haven’t got any backing tracks; when people use that, they often have time-coded lights, but we don’t do that. We are free. We are not shackled by that stuff so we can chop and change, we can throw in some covers along the tour and be adaptive.
Eliot: Live performances are like a house of cards: at any minute it could all fall apart.
“We want to sweat in a rehearsal room, we want to write real riffs on these ancient instruments that they call guitars...”
What’s your opinion on the shift to Spotify and streaming from CDs? Do you feel like that impacts you as a band?
Matthew: I think the continual shift from the physical way of listening to music has completely changed the music industry, much more than the introduction of CDs. It has changed the emphasis on where you can make money essentially. Live tickets have become more expensive because we aren’t making as much revenue on physical sales. Our parents have stories of seeing Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, and U2 all for like £5 or something ridiculous. Obviously inflation has an effect on that — it’s because all of these bands were selling tens to hundreds of thousands of physical music. Though I think it's great for the fans, they have the entire length and breadth of recorded music at your fingertips; it could not get better than that.
Eliot: I think our record would have been very different if we didn’t have Spotify and Apple Music. We were finding influences from those platforms with just a few clicks. You weren’t scrolling through dusty old record stores to find 1920s blues records; you have them there immediately.