James Buckwell from the Burn FM music team caught up with Brummie band Superfood in Camden ahead of their sold-out headline slot for the “NME New Breed Tour” at Dingwalls last November.
How has NME new breed tour gone for you guys so far?
Dom: Absolutely fan-bloody-tastic. It’s been amazing hasn’t it?
Ryan: It’s been perfect really. We’ve been treated really nicely everywhere we’ve been!
Dom: We’ve been treated with 6 packs of crisps at every venue, 4 bottles of water and 7 beers!
Ryan: And bananas galore!
Dom: There’s been loads of bananas for some reason?
Ryan: We’ve been going bananas for bananas.
Do you guys get to choose what’s on your rider?
Dom: Emily does. She gets to choose what we drink and how much of it we’ll be drinking.
Have there been any dates that have stood out for you so far?
Dom: We’ve been saying that Birmingham and Manchester have been the two maddest ones. But we’re about to play in London so hopefully it lives up to the Manchester-Birmingham vibe!
How was Birmingham for you guys being your hometown?
Ryan: It was really great! It was on Halloween so we all wore spooky outfits. We were dressed up as the characters from Hey Arnold.
Dom: They weren’t that spooky because they were living though! It was bittersweet that was. I keep saying this but I would’ve loved to have gone on there, just sold out our first show in Birmingham and gone on all cool, walking on with like sunglasses and a leather jacket. But we were dressed as Hey Arnold!
The last two times I’ve interviewed you guys has been at support slots and I know you haven’t had your own headline tour in a while. How has it been topping the bill for such a massive tour?
Dom: It’s been great having your own sound guy and getting to leave your amps on stage. It’s just a lot less hassle and things get done a lot earlier! I mean you can go out and get food without having to run to Sainsbury’s or whatever. It’s just so much more chilled.
Ryan: Before the tour personally I was a little bit nervous. Mainly because I’m just so used to being the support band. But we spent loads of time in the rehearsal rooms to try and get our set up to scratch and stuff like that so we feel pretty prepared to be honest.
What have you changed about your set now that you are a headlining act?
Ryan: Well we play for a lot longer and have more of our less well-known songs.
Dom: And our personalities have changed. We’re a lot cockier and we now drink wine on stage. We’re complete dickheads! To the other support acts we’re like – “Man don’t look at my guitar! Don’t look at me man!”
Ryan: Somebody looked at Emily’s guitar before the show and she made our tour manager clean it. She said someone looked at it for too long.
Dom: Yeah he had to disinfect it because the support band looked at it.
Ryan: Apparently he had “dirty eyes”.
How are the other bands you’re touring with?
Dom: Honeyblood are amazing! Some great lasses from the upper Hebrides … I think! That’s in Scotland right?
Ryan: I really fancy Stina the singer but she’s got a boyfriend.
Dom: Me too I really fancy Ryan the guitarist but he’s got a girlfriend.
Ryan: Who is actually Stina … I just lied to Dom.
Your debut album “Don’t Say That” came out last week. What has the reaction been to it so far?
Dom: It’s been great so far! I mean it’s not made a massive blip in the charts or anything. We were just talking about it. I think the kind of people who are listening to our music at the moment are not the people that are downloading albums. Most of them probably haven’t even used iTunes before! I don’t think it’s really about that with our kind of music.
Ryan: Excuses, excuses!
Dom: But like on Twitter you get someone saying every 10 minutes “We love your album”. And with selling out shows and this tour – it’s just great!
It’s quite a short but sweet kind of album coming in at just 35 minutes. Was there a reason you did that?
Dom: Yeah well we didn’t want to go too weird on our first album I guess. We wanted to just get some singles out and make an impact and then start to build our fanbase from there. Then we can start doing the things we really want to do. In terms of: Gamelan orchestras, steak guitars and those little chipolata sausages as drumsticks.
Ryan: Ham sandwiches as well – you can actually play those pretty well if you’ve got the right technique.
Dom: And we’re going to regurgitate noise through cats!
Do you have a favourite track off the album to play live so far?
Ryan: We have a secret track off the album called “Poison in Your Eyes” – it’s featuring McBusted.
Dom: It is the best track on the album but nobody’s heard it yet. We’ve managed to keep it under the radar.
Where did you choose to record your album and why did you choose to record it there?
Dom: Lincolnshire because it’s cold. We really like our guitar’s going out of tune all the time.
Ryan: Yeah it makes it more interesting and gives you more of a headache.
Dom: And we can go and hang out and whisper to the cows.
Ryan: No we actually did! It was in the countryside in the middle of nowhere in an old abandoned chapel. Really interesting to record there. It got a bit weird towards the end of the week didn’t it?
Dom: Yeah we went on a little walk shall we say at 7 in the morning. And we walked across these meadows. Anyone could’ve just woken up and seen us on a Sunday morning while me and Ryan were just walking across the meadows off our tits, going up to cows and whispering to them. I swear you tried to ride a cow Ryan?
Ryan: And we managed to lose each other!
Dom: That was the best day of our lives I swear.
Ryan: And for a split second I understood everything about the universe and then I lost it because I started patting the cow again.
What are plans between now and Christmas then?
Dom: We’re going back into the studio in Birmingham to record some more songs!
Ryan: It’s looking pretty rough at the moment, like there’s no carpet or anything. It’s just a really good room that needs some work.
Dom: It’s called “Sherlock Street Studios”. It’s in Digbeth, you can come and live there if you want and be my mistress. But our studio within “Sherlock Street Studios” is called “Pillow Baby Studios”.
Superfood’s debut album “Don’t Say That” is available to download on iTunes now.
