The Fallout Trust

We caught up with The Fallout Trust at their recent show in Glasgow...

How did you get your name?

I’ve always been a big David Lynch fan; I’ve always loved his films. There are always these really evil characters and really super clean characters representing innocence. The name represents that purgatory place in the middle between the innocence and the hellish evil. It can be two conflicting emotions or two states of mind, which is represented in the fallout and obviously the trust. It’s also to do with the fact that you’re always hurt by the ones you love.

This is your first headline tour. How do you feel about that?

Yeah, we have done a few supports. It’s quite exciting, just doing this on our own. We’ve played Glasgow two or three times before, once with Yourcodenameis:milo. So it’s very exciting to be stepping up and doing it ourselves.

That must have been strange playing with a band that is that much heavier than you are?

When I first heard them we thought maybe that would be the case, but their audience was really open minded. There was another band on the tour called Modey Lemon who were quite heavy as well but were quite straight blues rock. It was Yourcodenameis:milo’s idea to put different bands on that the audience would enjoy seeing. I didn’t know much about them before but once you get inside their music I found they were really inspirational.

When is the album due?

The Album is out on the 27th of February. That’ll be great just having it out because there are a lot of songs on there that we just can’t play live. I guess they are more studio based. Sometimes people are surprised when they see us because it can be a lot more raw and energetic than it sounds on record. It brings out our more experimental side.

It seems like you have been around for quite a while. Do you still feel like a new band?

A lot of people say that and we’re really confused because this is our first album and we still think of ourselves as a new band. A lot of people have said the first single off this album is our comeback single which seems weird to me. I’m a bit confused by that, I guess sometimes time can move very slowly.

How does the album compare to the EP’s you originally released?

The EP’s were a very good learning process. I drew up a sketch book of ideas and getting them down on record and releasing them before this album was really exciting. There were loads of different ideas and sounds on the EP’s that didn’t really come together as a whole thing. For this new album we tried to do something different. All the great albums have a distinctive sound that runs through the whole thing so we really tried to focus on doing that.

Your music is both experimental and diverse; you don’t sound the type of band that wants to follow a particular trend?

That’s something that’s never really crossed our minds. We never really wanted to be part of a trend but we never deliberately avoided being part of one either. With trends the vast majority of people who are part of a movement are following something and we don’t particularly wanted to be followers. We’re far to pig headed for that.

Experimentation is the only route to making something that nobody else is going to do. We come up with as many ideas as we possibly can and see which ones work together. One song will quite often be completely different to the next one. It’s not like we have a particular formula.

What different ways of writing do you have then?

We have a lot of different ways of writing, sometimes I’ll start with a sample, sometimes we’ll start with the more traditional guitar, sometimes Joe will just sort of sing whatever comes into his head and we cut it up and chop it into a melody. Changing the way you write makes a really interesting result, especially if you’ve got a lot of different ways of writing and a lot of different people adding to it. We’ve got six people in the band and everybody’s got their own styles and interest. Big Matt the drummer is more classically trained, he used to play a lot of jazz, so he can do a lot of different beats that might not be expected by an indie band. Jess, who plays keyboards and violin studied music so knows a lot about string arrangements. I’ve got no training whatsoever so I don’t really know what you should do. There are two ways you can look at it. Burt Bacharach said that you should learn all the rules and then break them but other people might say ‘if you don’t know what the rules are in the first place then you can’t follow anything’. I think I’m more from the second group.

We have a lot of different people in the group with lots of different backgrounds. The sounds we create have lots of interesting juxtapositions. We’ve worked really hard at making sure that all the instruments have their right place and that nothing sounds too overblown.

Are you different live to on record?

Quite often we play songs differently each time we play. It depends on how every bodies feeling. One of the great things about having six people is that if someone’s feeling slightly different then they’ll try something out and it’ll completely change the song.

Who have been your main influences?

One band who I can cite as an influence more in terms of their outlook rather than direct comparison to their music is The Associates. They were a duo from Dundee, and there was one guy called Billy Mackenzie who had this incredible operatic voice and the other guy Alan Rankine who used chucked up guitars, drum machines and created this sort of weird scrawl. Their approach to making music was the reason they didn’t sound like anyone else. They wrote and recorded in different ways like filling the drum kit with water and singing from the bath down the hall from the studio. They had a really interesting outlook that definitely inspired us in the way we write and record. We don’t sound as outlandish as them but we tried to approach writing with the same ideas.

We all live in this big old flat that used to be a sweat shop, we all moved in together and built the walls, building it with the album in mind, so we built a corridor down between the bedrooms which we use as an echo chamber. If you go and scream down the corridor everything’s really loud, it sounds like your ears are about to explode. It all sounds really live and angry sounding, so we used bits in the house to try and make the record sound a bit different. A lot of times people go to a studio and cut out all the sounds they hear outside whereas I think it’s really important to get some of the character of where you are. So we did that on the record. It means you get the sound of people playing pool in the next room, and people drilling through walls, stuff like that.

Are you finding it easy or difficult to break into the London scene?

The same way as we don’t really follow a trend we don’t really know that many bands. We often look to ourselves for inspiration and don’t pay that much attention to what other bands are doing. I know there are lots of bands around; it’s just that we don’t really know many of them. There’s like an attitude to moving to London but we just did it because it’s cheap. I’d quite happily live out in the country.

What do you think of the craze surrounding The Arctic Monkeys?

I love the way it has happened. There are no big companies pushing them to the top, its just pure people power – democracy of the internet. The other thing I like is the lyrics, there’s not so much innovation in the music but the lyrics are great.

Do you think the internet is a spring board for success or are you worried that you will lose sales because of it?

I don’t think that will happen. Arctic monkeys proved that point, everybody heard the album before they had even recorded it and they’re the biggest selling debut of all time. There’s a great freedom about the internet and people are able to hear it from the band and then tell their mates about them. That’s all the circle needs to be. There’s all the people who try to do their different jobs promoting the band but the only connection that really matters is between the band and the people. If you love a band then you are going to want to buy the album, you don’t just want one crap copy you want the real thing.

Finally, do you know what festivals you’re doing?

We don’t know yet. We’ll see how it goes in the next couple of months, get the album out and then see which ones we can do, hopefully lots.

Thanks to The Fallout Trust for their time

FUTURE GIGS

sorry, we currently have no gigs listed for this act.