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Firstly, where did you come up with the band name Mt. Misery? Before we were a band and I was finishing up our first EP, I was looking for a name to release the songs under because putting something on Bandcamp under ‘Andrew Smith’ wouldn’t be that interesting or eye-catching.
Around that time, a musician I admire called John Andrews was putting on a show at Mount Misery in New Hampshire, and the name stuck with me after seeing the flyer on social media.
In the end, I put out that EP under my own name, but when Lewis and Ste joined and we were talking about band names, that one came up and we went with it.
Who would you say the bands overall influences are? Bands and artists like Chris Cohen, Nap Eyes, Andy Shauf, Real Estate, who all share a sort of DIY attitude in their approach to making music that we often try to emulate. Neil Young is a big influence in terms of songwriting, Jeff Tweedy too - we’re all on a big Wilco kick right now.
Over the past few years the local scene seems to have taken a real shining to the bands music and live shows. How do you personally feel the response has been like? That’s nice of you to say so! I’m not sure if that’s something we’ve noticed too much but it is really nice when people we’ve never met come to see us play, or are complimentary about our music. We were really flattered when we put on a headliner at Base Camp in November and drew a decent crowd. It’ll be nice to get back to building on that when live music resumes properly.
You a released a good few singles and eps over the past few years. What are your plans on future releases? We’re currently finishing up an album that will probably be out early next year, and I imagine we’ll release a single or two in the build up to that. We originally thought the album would be out in autumn, but obviously with everyone going on right now, circumstances have changed. Nevertheless, the three of us are really excited about it and we’re so proud of how it’s turned out.
What have been some of your favourite shows so far? That Base Camp one is up there, along with a show we put on in Hartlepool when our last EP was released, for similar reasons. We played a couple of shows in Hastings and Margate supporting our friend Micah Erenberg and played as his backing band too, which was such a great experience. I don’t think it counts as an actual tour, but it’s the closest we’ve come to one so far.
You have your first gig since lockdown at Base Camp coming up. What are we to expect from yas at this show and going forward? I’m not sure what to expect myself! We’ve been in album-mode for so long, and this show at Base Camp cropped up kind of last minute, so I guess we’ll just be blowing off the cobwebs and getting used to playing in front of people again. Maybe a couple of new songs? We’ll see how we get on.
If you could pick five local bands/artists to recommend who would it be? Picking only five is almost impossible as there are so many bands in the area we really love, but here we go: Dressed Like Wolves, Tom Joshua, Picnic, Jodie Nicholson and Spelks.
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Live Photo - Andy Lochrie