From the roaring thunder of distortion and heart-piercing fuzz of début single ‘Whoever’, October Drift unforgettably barraged into our playlists and ran kicking and screaming into our hearts. The foursome have since completed their first UK tour and continue to race forward with heavy hearts and soaring atmospherics into what seems like a very bright future.
We sat down with the band to get to know them better, and discuss everything October Drift related – from their sold-out début tour to their forthcoming single ‘You Are, You Are’ and the accompanying tour that leads after. Read the final part of our exclusive chat with October Drift.
The #OctoberDrift campaign so far has gained momentum from good use of viral marketing. The strength of your campaign I think lies in the quality of your output – the music and the visuals. The simplicity of your logo is striking and memorable, how did you come to settle on the imagery for the band?
October Drift: “When we first sat down and looked at what we wanted our band to be, we looked for a long time at things like logos, photography, art and other visuals.
We knew that we were going to be doing things the way that we wanted ourselves and not just put out what we think everyone else wants us to do.
Thankfully within the band we all have the same kind of ideas when it comes to how we want to be seen out there, and the ideas we had were taken by one of the most talented graphic artists we could find and turned into reality.
We had an unbelievable stroke of luck to be honest with you as we approached someone who’d created some iconic work for bands that we love, and just sent him our music and said that we wanted him involved.
Thankfully he was immediately a huge fan of what we were trying to do, and he loved our thoughts to how we wanted to approach things.
He took our ideas and came up with some of the most beautiful imagery we could ever have dreamt of. To say he nailed it is an understatement. He’s already one of our heroes and has done so much for us in such a short space of time. He’s on our team and kind of like an additional unseen member of our band in a way.
We also had photography done by a great friend of ours who just happens to understand what we need, and who is also not only a fan of our music, but a supremely talented photographer too. She did us some great shots that we use for press shots and we love what she has done for us.”
Your first tour pretty much sold out before it had even started, for a new band that’s pretty much unheard of. From what you’ve learnt so far, what would your advice be for other bands starting out and getting on to the live circuit for the first time?
“The number one thing here is when you get out there on the stage on your first tour, to give it everything you’ve got, and put on a show that will spread your word for you.
Don’t be that band that steps onto the stage and just goes through the motions. Try and make every show better than the last. Sounds obvious but in reality not many bands actually really go out there with that kind of goal.
Choose venues that you know you can sell out and don’t go for big venues that you might think are prestigious on your CV but where you end up playing to a huge empty space.
We want our reputation to come from packed sold out shows. There’s nothing better for gig goers than to know they’re going to be going to an ‘event’ instead of a run of the mill show that’s half empty. When we go to shows ourselves we want to go to busy shows, where the bands give it everything, and I think that goes for most gig goers.
Be clever about the shows you do, and always keep in mind your goals and targets for your band. Our band is all about the live show, so we keep a sensible head on our shoulders and only take on shows that we know we can sell out.”
After seeing the band live in February I was completely blown away – the energy, the passion, the sheer musical force. You gave everything in your performance, enough for everyone in the room to leave inspired. Where does your drive come from?
“Well the original drive comes from the motivation to make people walk away and tell people about us. If we do that then we feel we’ve succeeded. We rehearse for hours to get it right, and in our studio we’ll run through the live set at least once a day every day from start to finish.
We’re deadly serious about our live show, and to be honest we absolutely love playing live.
The gritty screaming howling wall of noise that we create is a sound that we love ourselves, and hearing what we do coming out of big sound systems will never grow old on us. It’s important to be a huge fan of your own music and we are.
The second drive is our pre-show routine. We’ll check out the bands who are supporting us as we like to watch other bands as often as possible as it’s our chance to find new bands to get into and quite often we play with some incredible bands.
After that we’ll head off to do our vocal warmups and then it’s time to wind ourselves up for the show that we’re about to do.
We need the same energy in our pre-gig antics that we put into our live show to get us in the mood so we head off somewhere out of the way for that prep time.”
I expect you all have been inspired by other bands live shows in the past. Do you have a certain band or musician that you look up to creatively when it comes to live performance?
“There are a few bands that we love either collectively as a band, or individually one of us will love, but in all honesty we’ve not really tried to emulate any of them when we play live.
It’s more that they might influence our music when we write it.
The live performance is something that we just can’t help or stop. In reality our stage performance comes solely from the loud noise that we make or the lyrics rather than any other band that we’ve seen.”
The next tour will co-inside with your forthcoming single ‘You are, You are’. What’s the song about? What inspires the lyrical content of your songs?
“I”m sure you’d expect us to say this but the new single is one we are all extremely excited about and we’re pleased to be out on the road touring to promote it. It’s a short track that is straight in, straight out, and will hopefully stick in your head.
This song is a real mixture between some of the visual imagery that The Doors classic ‘Break On Through’ projects to you when you hear the lyrics, combined with the idea that you get caught up in something so obsessively (could be when you listen to music, or create a piece of art, or even could be something simple like a piece of work you’re doing) that you lose yourself in it.
That feeling of being in a bubble slightly away from the real world. We’ve all been there and felt like that, and it’s that moment when you’re experiencing it all so vividly that you want to pull others in to come and see and feel the same things.
You are there, but you’re detached from the actual reality. Like you are physically there but you’re spiritually on the other side of an imaginary invisible barrier between you and the world. Make of that what you will…”
Going forward, what’s the goal for the band?
“The main things are to deliver the live show that makes people want to bring their friends next time, to release the best music we can possibly create, and to create unique and special experiences for anyone who is interested in us.
We’ll keep creating handmade artwork and exclusive items and try to offer our followers something a bit different and special, and to give them as much as we possibly can to be proud of us about.
We want to continue to play sold out shows, and to create visuals, videos and items that will represent us well as a band in the way that we want to be represented.
October Drift will continue to be a project where we keep our heads down, press on as hard as we can and where we will be genuinely grateful to anyone taking an interest such as yourself for inviting us to speak to you.
To anyone out there reading this, come and see us live if you want to experience everything we’ve spoken about in this interview. We’ll do our utmost to make sure you walk away ready to tell all your friends about us. Deal?”
OCTOBER DRIFT MAY TOUR
6th / THE CAVERN, EXETER. Tickets
7th / OPORTO, LEEDS. Tickets
8th / PLUG, SHEFFIELD. Tickets
27th / THE OLD BLUE LAST, LONDON. Tickets
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