The Slow Readers Club

The band speak to Gigslutz. On their Manchester influences:

The Stone Roses and The Smiths are probably our favourite Manchester bands, we didn’t grow up in that era but their music still featured heavily on the playlist at indie clubs like 42nd Street, 5th Avenue and the Venue in our formative years.

On being recognized by New Order’s Peter Hook and Coldplay:

We were on the same bill as Peter Hook at Salford Music festival, didn’t even realise he caught our show till he was bigging us up in the NME. He is a legend isn’t he, so it was a great honour. The Coldplay thing was even more bizarre, our video for ‘Block Out The Sun’ featured on the Coldplay site for a week in a gallery section where they highlight anything from music to art. Brought us a good few thousand views and more importantly lots of new fans. It was great of them to give us their endorsement and share our music with their following.

The band are interviewed by London-based music blog, We Close Tonight. On Manchester’s live scene:

Yeah, Kurt had been in a band with David as well before so we were all familiar with the live scene in Manchester. I think our first gig as Omerta was at Band On The Wall and probably our first gig as SRC was at Ruby Lounge. We’ve played a few places around Manchester, some of the newer venues as well like Soup Kitchen and The Castle we’ve played recently. There was a thing in the press recently about it being the most live venues in the country of any city. There’s a lot of choice. There’s not always people there. More recently there tends to be more people. These venues become trendy and suddenly they’re not trendy any more. It’s a cool city for music.

Aaron Starkie is interviewed by MancunianWays.com. On releasing Cavalcade as an album.

We’d had various bits of advice, and the industry is changing to less of a focus on the album, and more on singles. But we always thought [the songs] would be part of an album…If I had one criticism of the first record. It’s well loved by fans and I love it myself. Some of those tracks we’d recorded three or four times by then, and you just haven’t got the energy that you have when you go into the studio and write it for the first time.

On the title track:

I’ve got two young kids, a four-year-old boy and a six-month-old girl. And was seeing my son grow up, the speed he changed from a baby to a toddler. And it made me think about me leaving home, and one day him leaving home, and all that melancholy stuff. There’s a track on Seargent Pepper’s called She’s Leaving Home, it’s the same kind of sentiment. One day you are going to go out into the world — the Cavalcade — and it’s a big adventure.

The band is interviewed by Ellipsis before their performance in Liverpool. About Cavalcade:

On the first album, some of the tracks came from a previous incarnation of ours, a band called Omerta that Jim and I used to be in, so the first album was written over a much longer period than this one…The songs stood up but a lot of the first album felt quite old, to us anyway, but the second album, that was written over… maybe two years, I don’t know…Two years, around day jobs and things, and we had a really good working relationship with the producer – not that we didn’t on the first one, but I think he got a little bit more out of us, and it was a little bit closer to what we wanted…We’ve got more of our own sound on this one, maybe, whereas on the first album we were trying out a few different things, sort of big string-symphonic melancholy stuff, synth-driven stuff. We’ve the same on the second album but less… less orchestration, I guess.