One of the vocalists from German country-rock band The BossHoss managed to spare a few moments before their Birmingham show on November 6th with Motörhead for an interview, where we learned about the bands inspirations, tour experiences and plans for the future.
I have to ask the obvious question; what is it like to tour with Motörhead?
It’s a big honour for us and it’s a very cool production. The guys are fantastic, we played last night our first show in Manchester, we had a great time. The audience was cool, really mixed up and nice and it’s just fantastic to have the possibility to tour with those legends.
How do shows in the UK differ from shows in Germany?
First of all, they’re a little bit smaller for us… no body knows us here, or not so many people like it is in Germany. But still the people dig what we’re doing and they enjoy the music, so it’s kind of the same then. We’re just starting [in the UK] and it feels a little bit like we started in Germany ten years ago, it feels like it’s happening here. It’s quite interesting and very cool.
Has there been a good response so far to the release of your first UK album?
Yeah, it just came out on Monday and we’ve played one show with it so it’s hard to tell how it’s going down in the end but it feels alright, it feels good for what I can say right now and people reacted good when we played it in Manchester; the reaction was very positive. And people keep writing to us on Facebook, sending emails and posting stuff, we get the impression that it works.
Your music is popular in Germany, but did you find it hard to build up a fan-base where there aren’t many bands similar to you or who play your style of music?
Yeah, we built up our fan-base over many years and we’re quite unique, we’ve got a unique sound so on one side it helps a lot because there’s not too many around who sound the same or do the same. On the other hand, it’s really hard to, for example, get onto the radio stations or on the radio playlists because most of the radios in Germany are not used to that kind of music; most of them think “too country-esque or too hard, too fast, too much guitar…” and stuff so its quite difficult in another way, but still altogether we’ve made a great career in the last ten years, in Germany and grew every year so it all makes sense.
You definitely do have a unique sound, what sort of bands would you say are your main influences?
We’re a rock band of course and we’ve got a lot of rock band influences, plus a lot of regular stuff, it starts with John Lee Hooker, blues bands, Johnny Cash and all those country influences. We also have punk rock, we really like Queens of the Stone Age, but also we’re kind of crossing types of music, putting a little bit of hip hop and mixing it with country or rock or AC/DC you know… It’s hard to name one artist or band that really influenced us because there’s so many.
You guys are obviously heavily inspired by American culture and country rock, did that stem from anywhere specific? Did you all meet because of a mutual interest?
We met a long time ago, the band has now existed ten years and we were friends before the band and we met because we like old music, retro music, I’ve been around in the rockabilly scene for a long, long time and met a lot of people who also listen to the same stuff. I met people and then I started to make music with the rockabilly guys and these influences came to The BossHoss band of course. We hang around Berlin and go to bars, we talk about music and listen to music, so it was kind of clear that we all wanna do this kind of music and bring together all our influences to do what we do now.
There’s a lot of members in your band, how does songwriting work with so many people?
Most of the songs that I write, I start with guitar and play some tunes and write lyrics and the songs, and then I kind of record, you know. We’ve got our own studio, a big base in Berlin, our headquarters, and everybody’s got his little room in that house and everybody’s got his technique to record stuff. Most of the time I start with an idea, a song, I record a demo version and then I send it out or give it to the others and then they listen to it and they see what they can add to it and then we meet in our rehearsal room and we rehearse together, change here and there and then we record altogether.
Finally, what are your plans for after this tour?
We’re going back to Berlin, we’ve already started to work on the next album. We’ve been to Nashville for two weeks, about four weeks ago we came back, and we were every day in a different studio and met people and we were writing songs and now when we get back to Berlin we start to break down those ideas we started in Nashville. In June or so next year we’ve got a single from our next album and the album’s gonna be out in September and then a tour. And we play a couple of festivals next summer.
