In Conversation With - New Hope Club
New Hope Club talk about being back in the North East, playing around the world with the Vamps and what is next to come for them….
You’re back in the North East today! Are you excited to get out and perform?
Blake: We stayed here last night, it was nice yeah, we’ve never been to South Shields before. We’ve been to Newcastle, but not here, it’s really nice, really cool. Its our first show in a month and a bit, so were excited to get back out. It should be really good!
For people who haven’t heard you before, how would you describe your sound?
Reece: We take a lot of inspiration from older music, like our favourite band is The Beatles and we all play instruments, but there is kind of a modern twist because obviously were quite a young ‘pop’ act and a lot of our fans are younger. I think it’s just quite fun, energetic and we play music that we want to play live because our favourite bit about all of this is playing live music and touring so we make sure that we have energetic songs to play on stage’.
Back in April you did a string of headline shows and they were the first headline shows you’ve done in the UK?
George: Yeah we did a set of headline shows. ‘Road to Shepherds Bush’ we called them because then we finished up playing two nights at Shepherds Bush Empire in London. That was amazing, that was like our first big show so it was all leading up to that. We had a lot of fun on the journey. Reece actually wasn’t there for almost all of it, because he had his appendix out, so he played the first show in London and then me and Blake carried on, but he was back for the Shepherds Bush shows and it was… actually it was incredible, it was just so good. The videos I’ve seen online, I just wanna keep doing it over and over again.
Straight after that you went on The Vamps arena tour in the UK, and did other shows with them around the world, what’s it like supporting them in so many amazing places?
Blake: It’s obviously amazing, this was our third tour with The Vamps, and they’re just great guys, and its so good to play on such big stages, go round doing the arenas and they took us on a world tour last year, so we went to places we’d never even think about going. We get to meet people and see the new cultures and meet all the new fans and gain more of a following.
You’re first show as a band was in an arena too?
Blake: It was! Our first ever show was to 15 thousand people, so it was quite scary, cause we’d never played live. Obviously we’d practiced together and played, but it was our first time playing to a crowd and it was crazy.
Did you play any new music on tour or the Shepherds Bush shows and what was the response like to it?
Blake: New music? Yeah we did actually! We played unreleased songs, songs that we’ve not really sang before. We played ‘Medicine’ which wasn’t out at the time but is now, so yeah that’s out.
George: We played our song ‘Crazy’ that we also played on The Vamps tour.
Reece: We just filmed a video for ‘Crazy’ in LA.
George: It was our first video in LA.
Reece: We’ve got a lot of new music coming out because the music that we have out we wrote when we were quite young at the start and ever since then we’ve been writing songs, getting better as songwriters, going on a lot of trips writing and yeah I think we’ve just been preparing so much for the album making sure that we’ve got the best songs possible for the album. We keep teasing our fans with new music and they hate it, they just want it out. It’s frustrating but we’ve just been patient and just waiting for the right time.
Whats your favourite song to play live?
Blake: Oooh, it changes. I think ‘Crazy’s’ my favourite.
George: Yeah ‘Crazy’ is cool.
Reece: I like, obviously ‘Fixed’ thats the OG, that’s the favourite, the fan favourite, so that’s a good one.
What’s next for New Hope Club?
Blake: We’ve got loads of new music.
Reece: We’re going to Spain.
George: We’re playing a festival in Malaga, which is quite cool.
Blake: And we’ve just got loads of new music, like we said we’ve just done a video which will be coming out this year.
Reece: I think were off to America.
You think you’re off to America? Hahaha…
All: Yeah hahaha, we don’t know yet, might go…
Blake: Little holiday hahahaha
Interview by Lauren Stewart