The Big Moon play hard onstage, jumping up and down, making quite the ruckus. When I talk to Fern over a questionable phone line, the band have just their Southampton and London shows to go before they can have a rest and it’s no wonder Fern is worn out. As she says herself, “we just go with it and smash the shit out of it.” Even as a drummer, sat down behind her dancing bandmates, her thrashes pack a punch.
The exuberance of the band’s energy onstage, coupled with tight harmonies, is impressive considering they have only known each other for two years. After releasing a series of singles, The Big Moon already have a strong fanbase. Fern tells me about their Hull show which was “just full of kids looking to get absolutely trollied. They were just going mental. There were boys ripping their t-shirts off which was bizarre.” The tour has been mixed age-wise, and no clear demographic for the band has been figured out quite yet. This can be explained logically, because there is no one genre driving the momentum of their sound. Fern says “the songs are like pop songs played by a rock band. I think people are getting more into guitar bands again, but we’ve still got the element of pop; we’re a mid-point for some people.”
Their new single ‘Cupid’, which came out in April, was produced and mixed by Catherine Marks (Foals, Wolf Alice) as the band let someone else into the studio with them for the first time. “We’re used to tracking everything separately, which is a bit sterile. Catherine basically told us to set up and was like ‘Ok, just play.’ Everything you hear, other than doubled-up guitars and vocals, is tracked live. It’s just thrown together, which is why it sounds much livelier. If someone moves, you go with them. It was a lot of fun.” Fern tells me that they’ve started demoing for an album “just so we can see what we sound like not in a rehearsal space.” By my reckoning, The Big Moon will be playing even bigger spaces very soon.
