The Amazons as a band have had a few stages to their evolution. Starting as an alternative rock outfit, the loss of their original drummer proved a serious blow to this incarnation. “We were in a creative rut; we were doing a lot of electronic music – it was awful!” But the band took a rapid about-face upon the arrival of a new drummer.
“Basically then we found Joe, he was playing a gig on bass, and we just thought: this guy’s not a bassist. He must be a drummer; just looked it from a mile off! He asked to join our band, we said yes. He had a John Bonham tattoo on his arm and so we were pretty much sold! This was mid-2014 I think; we got in the practice room and started rocking out, and yeah here we are.”
Here being an up-and-coming, alt-rock band; with heavy drums and guitar based melodic songwriting. “But we had this awful teething stage where we were trying to get him to play to a click and a backing track; just awful. So we just thought why don’t we sack all that off and just go back to the guitars.”
Once back to this wellspring; contemporary artists prove to be the more pertinent interests and influences – in particular citing Last Shadow Puppets and Queens of the Stone Age but “it’s fluid; it’s always fluid. There’s not really one band we go back to, it always changes.”
Stuck in the relative provinciality of Reading, touring has proved a formative experience with “numerous adventures to say the least”. They’ve made appearances in London, Brighton, Manchester and even further north to Dunfermline; which was, in his words, “weird and wonderful!”.
With two releases recorded for the next month, videos to come with them, and many other songs in the pipeline, The Amazons have a busy summer ahead – perhaps even venturing to Oxford before the year is out.
