Newcastle metal band A Thousand Lies talk past, present and future.
It was with trepidation that I drove to Sunderland to join A Thousand Lies at their band practice. Not because of the band, but because of the location and my awful sense of direction. Chris Nesbitt met me outside and led me and my photographer through a maze of corridors in quite an intimidating building. “It smells in there, I hope you don’t mind” he warned us. It turned out he wasn’t joking.
The room was so dark that it took a while for my eyes to adjust, and so humid and moist that my shirt was damp when I left. In such a small room I felt conscious of being entirely in the way. Beer cans littered the amps and cables snaked all over the hideous carpet. I couldn’t help but think that I wouldn’t feel too safe in the event of a fire. The band seem used to all this though.
A Thousand Lies is made up of five guys with a shared passion for the music. Drummer Dave McQuillan, guitarist Steve Barclay and bassist Stephen Bagnall are all from Sunderland, whilst guitarist Andrew Bright and singer Chris Nesbitt call Newcastle home, but living on different sides of the Tyne doesn’t seem to affect them any. There have been a few changes over the years before A Thousand Lies became the band they are today. Stephen Bagnall says “It was originally me, Brighty and Dave, with Dave on guitar and singing, Brighty on guitar and me on bass, when we were about 13, so [the band started] about 12 years ago now, just doing Metallica covers and what not.”
“Just learning how to play” adds Andrew Bright, “the four of us went to school [together], just not Chris”. Steve Barclay joined the band when he was about 16 years old, and started playing guitar for them, at which point Dave moved to drums, but they were still just playing covers. “Then they started playing fucking cock rock, and I went in to death metal, and eventually we all came back as A Thousand Lies but I was off for a bit, and they had two other piece of shit drummers before me!” Dave McQuillan says, causing everyone to laugh for a while.
“We were always trying to find a singer though, even when Dave was in the band doing it, it was just kinda, he sang because nobody else was there to sing. We found a singer! Eventually! ” Barclay laughs. It was only when they found Chris Nesbitt that their old band disbanded and A Thousand Lies was officially born. Although there is some confusion over the timing of all these events, “That was 2006” asserts Bright, and is met by a chorus of “five”, “end of 2005, aye”. “Start of 2006 one might say...” he insists and everyone laughs. “The 13th month of 2005” is the final agreement! “We’ve all had a bash at doing bass, drums, guitar, but we’re kinda settled now on what we like.” Bright reflects.
One of Chris Nesbitt’s first acts within the band was to come up with the lyrics to their very old song ‘Should Not Be’. One of the first songs that they did as a band, Bright comments that it’s a song they never play anymore.
A Thousand Lies have an individual sound, and despite being influenced by other bands they don’t compromise themselves by sounding too much like anyone else. Every song has a similar theme, but every song is different, and Bright feels that they’re becoming “heavier and more melodic”. With regards to the writing process, Bagnall comments that “it’s a lot more united now”. He draws reference to their old days as Stronger than Death, “We used to have songs that were written by [Steve], songs that were written by Brighty, and they were just so different! There’d be a thrash one, a groove one, an epic one and then a kinda other one...” Song writing is now a joint effort and in my opinion it’s working for them, damned well. Apparently they can be highly critical of each others’ ideas though, “You cannot be in this band unless you can handle some fucking grief like!”
Having been gigging on the local music scene for some time, fans at their shows tend to know all the words to their most popular songs. So the band were quite anxious when they tried out some new material at a recent gig at Newcastle rock bar, Trillians. Lead singer, Chris Nesbitt (lounging across the room looking quite comfortable, “I’m not posing I just have bad posture!”) thinks they may have played too much, but as Bright says, with that sort of stuff it’s just trial and error. “Been working on nothing but new material at the moment, cabin fever is setting in!” Nesbitt jokes. “We’re not really gigging as much as we’d like” Bright adds. They currently have two new songs recorded for their forthcoming album, and they’re working on another six. The plan is to get them recorded by June, then gig as much as possible. One of the new songs they played at Trillians was a complete change of pace for the band, and a surprise for the audience of loyal fans. A ballad, called ‘Dies in Me’. “The rest of [the set] was pounding, then there was just this nice fucking melodic ballad thing in the middle of it!” McQuillan laughs. Barclay thinks that the audience weren’t sure how to take it, because it was a completely different style for them. However, from where I was standing in the audience, it seemed to go down very well.
The recent buzz on facebook surrounding A Thousand Lies has been talk of an upcoming DVD. And there’s the fact that I’ve had a camcorder shoved in my face by Bright at every one of their gigs I’ve been to recently. (He laughs as he finishes my sentence for me). It’s been in the making since December, and has taken until now to complete. Bright takes full credit for this one, putting his hands up and saying “that’s all my fault - Basically all the footage has come from last year. We went up to Shetland to do a thing called Vunk fest. That was really cool. There were loads of bands from Holland, England, Ireland, and Scotland. We did loads of big gigs last year. Full Throttle festival was really cool. It’s just us being stupid and pissed, and all you guys coming to the gigs and having a laugh. It’s all on video!” Barclay compares the DVD to the Pantera home videos. It’s a look at what goes on behind the scenes (which I can only imagine is hilarious debauchery), and Nesbitt sums it up as “30 minutes of stupidity really”. Well I for one can’t wait. It’s due out with a live CD in June before they take off to play Vunk fest again, so “stay tuned!”
Touring the country sounds like an intimidating feat for a relatively small band from the North East, but A Thousand Lies have done it and plan to do it again. At the end of June they will embark on the “road to Vunk tour”, hitting Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen then on to Shetland. They’re touring with a band called Semperfi from Aberdeen who they’ve played with a lot in the past. When on tour, Nesbitt finds that the crowd “don’t know [the songs] but they love the shows”, and apparently the Scotland crowd are awesome. They’re “nuts” and they “love buying merchandise”, sounds like what every band needs. One of the factors that comes into it is that in some areas of Scotland there’s not much going on, whereas in Newcastle there’s a few bands playing everyday. “We had one gig up in Elgin, Scotland, it was us and Ten Tonne Dozer from Shetland, and we had a local band on first. It was like 5 quid a ticket, and it was packed, and the crowd were like “oh yeah, we heard there were a band on so we just come down [sic]”, it just never happens here”, Barclay explains, “it was rammed, they were swinging from the rafters of the building! We didn’t think there were that many people in Elgin!”
On the opposite end of the scale, they don’t have as fond a memory of gigs in London. “It’s hard going like, they’re a bunch of cunts” McQuillan says, only half joking. Bright thinks that “it’s not really a metal town, it’s a glam town”. One of the problems being that there’s just so much going on there. On the same night they played in Camden, there were seven other gigs going on just in that area. Vying for attention against that many other bands when you’re metal heads from the north must be difficult. “It’s all about making money down there”, Bagnall says, “They gave us a load of tickets and expected us to sell like 40 tickets down in London, when we knew about four people down there!” Despite these setbacks, they’ve played The Underworld, which is a renowned venue and fairly impressive in my opinion. Down south they’re often the heaviest band on the bill, but people still love them. They tell me that venues in London often say “yeah you can play, but it’s £500 for the room”, which Bright explains is a problem... “We’re just not the best looking guys to fill a place full of fucking people like” he laughs.
Back home, their favourite venue is Trillians, and that’s probably the consensus amongst most local bands. “The O2’s awesome, but it’s nothing compared to Trills”. They played with an American band called Tesla on the main stage of the Academy a couple of years ago, and absolutely loved it. However, they still consider Trillians to be the hub of the Newcastle rock scene. “When you get a group of people who really want to be there, and love music just for what it is, not about anything else, they’re the best gigs” says Bright.
When asked to pick a favourite song they all pause for a few seconds thought, then decide that there is no collective favourite song, however they do agree that a song they pretty much always play is ‘And So The Story Goes’. Another is ‘Become How We Were’, which is about “epic things”, or so I was led to believe. Apparently it’s actually about being hung-over. They woke up one morning lying next to an unopened kebab, a bottle of Southern Comfort and a bottle of cider, and wrote a song about it. “Chris’ lyrics make very mundane things sound cool! We spend ages on the lyrics, and they’re all about getting pissed”. McQuillan loves to play the outro to ‘Become How We Were’, describing it as “epic” and “awesome”. Nesbitt’s favourite song to perform is ‘Last of the Believers’ because “it’s a rip-roaring kick to the nads”. He adds, “it’s a good song you can look at people with and just fucking stare at them in the face and go “I will kill you!” Bright’s favourite song is ‘Gripping Ice’, because it’s “fast, groovy with lots of shred in it” and has elements of pretty much everything they do as a band. They then turn on me when I admit my favourite song is ‘the Hound’, “Interview time! Why do you like the Hound?” [laughs]. All I can tell them is that it got stuck in my head for weeks, and I never got sick of it. I can see why it’s so hard to agree when they have so many awesome tunes to choose from. There’s something special about each of them that could make it a potential favourite.
For such talented musicians (yes we were treated to a private performance!), there has to be a future. A Thousand Lies jokingly envision a future in which they’d still be in this very room working on these new songs. Bright says “In all seriousness, every band would answer that the same, we just want to be bigger than we are now. We want to be still doing this, still getting sweaty and writing songs, hopefully with bigger gigs, bigger stages”. Barclay would like to be able to afford to not have to work (“not Axl Rose loaded” [laughs]), so that they could just focus on the band. “When someone asks you what you do, to be able to go “I’m in a band”, how cool is that?” Bagnall adds. “Living the dream!” This seems like a humble ambition, and one that with all their talent, hard work and charisma, they are so deserving of achieving.
A Thousand Lies and Semperfi are playing at Trillians Rock Bar on Friday 1st July.
