In Conversation With - The Vamps
The Vamps kept the summer in full swing when they headlined the South Tyneside Festival last weekend, we had a chat with them about their plans for the 'Four Corners Tour' and their most recent album 'Night & Day'.
You’re back in the North East today, you’ve played a lot of venues here, which do you prefer? The bigger venues or the more intimate shows?
Brad: I remember the O2 Academy show here being really fun, the acoustic show that was really good. Every gig in Newcastle is fun, but I think each are better for different reasons so the big shows are good because you get to put a lot of work into the show and the staging. The intimate ones are fun because the songs take on a different meaning because they’re stripped back so both have different vibes.
You tour a lot, do you get to see much of the cities?
James: A little bit, it depends on the scheduling, but for example we came here last night, Brad’s parents are from here so they recommended a good curry house which was nice. The next tour will be five tours in five years so we’ve been lucky to visit a lot of the UK. With every tour we find new places and go to our favourite places when we come back so yeah, a bit of exploring.
Do you have any pre-show rituals before going on stage?
Brad: Yeah, chins. We’ve got this weird thing, we didn’t want to do the normal ‘hands in’ so we run our chins together before every gig, its very odd.
The new album came out on Friday?
Brad: It did.
What were the influences for when you were writing this one?
Brad: I think the nice thing about this is that the songs are stories over the past three or four years. Certain songs have been there for like four years so a lot of it comes from very personal experience so it’s nice to have them out and then sonics wise, its really just guitar, bass, kind of stripped back, thats the crux of what The Vamps is. Julia Michael’s, her EP was very good, that was a lot of inspiration for the sound of this album.
The ‘Night’ half of the Night / Day album was a bit of a change of direction, a lot of collaborations? How would you describe the sound of this album?
James: Collaborations allow us to do different things, so the last album was quite DJ heavy, meaning that the whole album could be seen as having a more EDM vibe, which is cool, but it’s nice to remain true to what we are which is an instrument group, so that’s why this half of the album is slightly less DJ based collaboration wise. We’ve got a couple of DJ songs again, we worked on a song with Kris Kross Amsterdam called ‘Cheap Wine’. Those collaborations skewer that way a little bit but mainly, without the collaborations The Vamps is instrument based. It is nice to branch out every now and then but again go back to the roots.
The new tour has been announced for next year? This time mixing arena’s with more intimate shows. Why did you decide to mix in a couple of smaller shows this time?
James: It’s called the Four Corners Tour, we’ve announced eighteen dates. We’re doing basically the arena tour we’ve just did, but with more dates added. We’re going to new places for the first time, places that we’ve never been to as a band. Some of the venues are 1500 capacity.
Tris: Because the arena’s don’t go to the four corners, so we needed to add more!