Interview: Canterbury

De Britse band Canterbury timmert hard aan de weg en stond onlangs als het voorprogramma van Kids In Glass Houses in de Melkweg. Wij spraken voor de show met Luke Prebble en Mike Sparks over het nieuwe album, touren, de Britse rock scene en meer.

Where does your band name come from? Does it refer to the city or the Canterbury scene? I suppose in a way it does refer to both of those things, but that’s not necessarily why we chose it as a name. I’m actually half New-Zealander by nationality and obviously there’s a Canterbury over there and some of my family is from that region. Yeah, it’s actually a number of things.. To each individual one of us it’s got some significance in a really weird way, so..

So it’s just a name that matches all of you?
Kind of! Yes, I guess so, which is kind of a strange twist of fate.

You’re releasing your new album “Dark Days” on the 13^th of January. Why did you choose to have your fans donate through PledgeMusic, since that’s not very common when you’re on a label? We’ve always been really fan-driven, we’ve always done stuff on our own with the fans involved as much as possible. You know, we released our first album for free on the internet and you can just pay what you want for it or get it for free. Our second album, we did on our own label and always kept the fans involved and this time we got signed to a really cool label, but at the same time they’re a small label. You know, it’s not like ‘world domination’ – Warner Brothers or anything, we just wanted to keep that kind of label thing going on. Labels are great for many reasons, but we didn’t want to lose what we’d already done with our fans before so we wanted to set up something where they could always be involved as well. Half of that is pre-ordering the album a year before it’s come out, before you know any songs or you’ve seen any titles and the next half is being really involved with how it’s made and come down to the recording and sing or shout parts on it. It all works for us. To record an album, you just have to kind of disappear for a year to write and record it, but in this way we’re always doing stuff with our fans. It went way better than we ever thought it would – I mean, we knew we had cool fans, but this really proved that there are people behind us who are as passionate about it as we are. So it did mean that it was kind of knocking down the boundaries of the label, but still having that solidarity with it. It was a cool, modern way of doing things and we’d definitely want to do it again.

What’s your favorite song off the new album and why?
Hmm, I think my favorite song on the new album is… It’s a song called “By The Trail”. It’s more of a slow paced one on the record. There’s some pretty hard rockin’ stuff on there but this one’s a bit more stripped back, with lots of harmonies and that’s probably what I’m into the most. I’m quite proud of that one. It’s come out nice, we didn’t have any idea how it would sound in it’s final form, but it was like ‘wow’, we’re really happy with it.