The Starling Radicals Go Punk !
Topping the bill on the first night of the Punks 4 Mental Health Minifest this Friday 12th May at Crowleys Rock Bar in Swansea are the brilliant ' The Starling Radicals.'
George from the band kindly took some time out to answer my questions ahead of this weeks gig!!
Introduce us to The Starling Radicals, who is in the band? We are a 3-piece. I’m George, and I’m the singer and guitarist. Bain is the bassist and Joe Steele is our drummer. We go full-name on Joe Steele because it’s too Tekken to ignore. He actually knows karate. How did the band get together? Well, Bain and I founded the band a few years ago after we met online on what is pretty much Tinder-for-bands. We met up at the local, I brought my acoustic and played a bunch of songs in the beer garden in front of about 20 strangers, and we said there and then we’d be the biggest band in the UK within 5 years. We’ve not been made liars yet, but 8 drummers later and we’ve suffered setback after setback. Joe Steele is our first Jack, so it seems all we play these days is Swansea venues. How would you describe your music to those who haven't heard it? The cliché applies that only it can really describe itself, if I’m honest. We think we have the best songs out of any band currently playing in the UK. That’s our honest opinion, whether anybody else agrees or otherwise. We make a lot of noise. I suppose our bread and butter is big aggressive guitar-driven rock, but our pride is in our versatility, so out of our 50-or-so songs to date you’ll find traces of all our influences, and there are too many to begin listing. Something for everyone was the aim, though I suspect what we’ve really become is everything for just someone. And our search for that someone is still ongoing. We like to upset people. Weird ‘em out. Scare people. Sometimes. Who are your earliest musical influences? Speaking for myself I have to say Stereophonics, The Darkness, Gary Moore, AC/DC, Ryan Adams, Rufus Wainwright, U2 and David Bowie. If I had to answer for Bain I’d say Queens of the Stone Age, The Datsuns, Hanson and The Corrs. I’ll say myself for Joe Steele. Do you have any memorable gig stories, good or bad? Plenty. We once played a show in Bridgend on Boxing Day that got so raucous that the police were called and had to shut down the gig. Somebody got glassed, chairs were thrown, people were up on the stage. It was everything we ever dreamed of when we first started the band. You are playing the Punks 4 Mental Health MiniFest . What does mental health mean to you? We could probably give you several volumes-worth of an answer here, to be honest. We have quite a few songs directly on the subject. It has affected our little gang just like it does everybody. Whether it’s you or it’s somebody you know, it’s central to everything that we are, good or bad. The problem I find with coping with poor mental health, particularly when it’s somebody close you to, is that it’s so very difficult to treat it like a regular illness, which it needs to be if there’s to be any chance of triumph. If we were to account for every part of a person that makes up their individual identity, their true personhood, it is everything that becomes corrupted by poor mental health, whether it’s depression, anxiety, BPD, bipolar, schizophrenia, gender identity disorder or anything else you could care to mention. The patient becomes the illness. It’s a monster that swallows up not just happiness, not just a capacity to function, but a person’s whole being. It’s why so many people suffering from various conditions find so much solace in group identity, rather than individual identity. Mental health is responsible for everything from epidemic suicides to the greatest artistic, scientific and otherwise human achievements in the history of our existence. It’s a much-neglected founding column of our progress and suffrage, and we have to become philosophers to fathom the solutions. But there are no easy ones. What's your favourite song to play live and why? All three of us would definitely give a different answer here. We have a song that will be appearing on our next EP to be released this summer called Heart Of This City, which I believe is the best song I’ve ever written for this band. As a guitarist it’s just chords, but as a singer it’s a dream. A genuine dream to sing in front of people. Joe Steele loves playing The Scottish Play, which is another song from the upcoming EP. It’s a bit of a roller-coaster. Very aggressive, exciting, anthemic, frenetic, and odd. Similarly for Bain, it’s Unseen Empire from our first album Saintland. 100mph rock and roll, can’t afford to hold anything back. Exhausting and exhilarating. We used to finish on it. We just thought let’s do a crazy punk song with 7 key changes and a minute-long guitar solo with a big breakdown in the middle, and let’s make it impossible for anybody but us to play. Where can people find out more about The Starling Radicals? E.g. Online links We have different kinds of content on different platforms. Instagram (officialstarling) is where all the silly videos and snaps end up, Twitter is where we (I) have our (my) socio-political presence, following in the footsteps of free-speech-advocates like Dr Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos – and that’s @TheStarlingRads. Facebook is for updates , and it all ends up on our website anyway, which is TheStarlingRadicals.com . What plans do the band have for the rest of the year? Well, as I already mentioned we have an EP – Promiseland Vol.1 – planned for release later in the summer. We’ve not yet set a date, but expect it before August at least. It’s actually going be the first of two releases for 2017, with the second volume planned for the autumn. We’ll compile both records together at the end of the year and put it out as a complete album. We’re very excited about it, and you can expect us to be announcing a run of shows around the UK to accompany the releases soon.
Come see The Starling Radicals on night 1 of the Punks 4 Mental Health Mini Fest at Crowleys Rock Bar, Swansea, Friday 12th May. Doors 7.30pm. Free entry. Buckets will be doing the rounds on the night so please dig deep for a contribution to our chosen charity Links .
For more on The Starling Radicals click here
