Hiya Alex, thanks for joining us in the virtual RGM lounge today. Grab a brew and take a seat.
What made you decide that music is a thing for you?
It’s a funny story actually – it was 2003 when I was 13, and my mates asked me if I wanted to play guitar in their band, I’d never played guitar before but I thought being in a band was the coolest thing in the world. So I asked my parents to get me a guitar, and I started learning to play. I then went back to my friends and said I was ready to be in the band. To which they replied, ‘sorry we’ve got someone else’. I felt crushed and rejected, and I said to myself ‘I’m gonna be better than all of you’. This is what started my journey, it’s a bit like an origin story haha.
Take us more on that journey and your musical history.
Musical history, ok I hope you’re sitting down for this one. So I became a guitarist and started getting into serious rock music. The big bands I was listening to at the time were Slipknot, Muse, Nirvana, and RATM ect… Then one day, my dad said “right son, I’m going to show you some real music” and showed me Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Pink floyd, and that completely blew my mind. And that’s when I was getting seriously into guitar.
From there, my taste got heavier and heavier and more into metal, getting into bands like Meshuggah. I went on to study music at ACM when I was 17, met Ben Jeffes (DN producer) & Joe Chanucy (DN bass player) and started Era Untold – go check them out, seriously! The Era Untold thing lasted about 6 years, but we never actually played a live show. The goal was to write the craziest guitar music anyone had ever heard and I think we succeeded in producing a pretty gnarly fu*k*ng album.
Unfortunately we had no idea how to market it and it got lost in the void. That album was called ‘Maintaining The Fiction’ – I’d recommend checking that out for fans of heavy, technical metal. Anyway that record took so long to write and record that by the time we released it we were kinda over it and wanted to pursue other projects. Which leads to the band that sort of bridges the gap between that first band I did and DELLA NOVA.
This was Encoded (check them out too) I called it nu-prog as it seemed to fuse nu-metal with prog metal. I wrote an album that never got recorded, made an EP (Psychosis), released that, and did a bunch of shows. Wrote a second album and the band broke up before that ever got recorded properly. So it’s taken a while to develop the sound that we have now… Ultimately I realised that I wanted to make some super groovy, hard bluesy rock, and just like DELLA NOVA was born. A few years later the debut album comes along and here I am talking about it…
What’s the live music scene like in (LONDON) right now? Anyone we should be looking out for (bar you, of course)?
I mean, it’s London and like everything else in London it’s heavily saturated, which makes it a bit more difficult to cut through the noise. Maybe we should move to Plymouth or something… I’ve got a buddy called Adam who plays guitar in a killer band called Warpstormer. They’re based in London and I’d watch out for those guys for sure!
I’ve seen a lot of people struggling for support recently online. What’s your view on the industry?
Well there’s like 10 billion bands all competing for attention, and to make it worse people’s attention span has deteriorated to less than that of an aubergine. So it seems like the industry has turned into people making dumb videos on TikTok and hoping this will convert into real listeners for their music. I think we are all f***ed. LOL
Where do you feel you currently sit within the music industry?
I feel like we are sitting at the bottom of a huge mountain, looking up and thinking “oh shucks we’ve got a long way to go, better crack on”
Tell us two truths and a lie about you.
Ok:
- I used to work as a witches librarian.
- I’m going bald
- I actually really love Ed Sheeran’s music
Do you ever worry about people taking things the wrong way or cancel culture? Discuss….
Not really, if people want to get offended by stuff then that’s their business. I’m too busy trying to write dope riffs.
Do you sign up to any conspiracy theories? If not, why not?
I mean sure, there’s so many, where do we even start?
What was your best experience on stage?
There was one show we played in the early days before I had a proper pedal board with a power supply, and so the battery on my distortion pedal decided to die right at the end of a song. Luckily our drummer descended into a thunderous drum solo which gave me just enough time to run off stage and into the backstage area, grab a new 9V battery, run back on the stage, switch the battery over and was ready to play perfectly in time for the next song. I don’t think anyone realised what had happened but I thought that was pretty cool.
What was your worst experience on stage?
We played a show where the soundtech really couldn’t manage the volume levels we were outputting in this particular venue and all we could hear for the whole show was feedback in our ears. We are not particularly religious but we pray to GOD that this never happens again.
Tell us something about each member that you think people would be surprised about.
Well the most interesting person in the band by far is Joe Chauncy – the bass player. For a year or 2 he lived in a self-sustainable eco village in a hut that he built in the middle of the woods. A place called Runnymede near London. I mean you’ve got to be pretty hardcore to survive that through the winter months.
What are the next steps you plan to take as a band to reach the next level?
Onwards and upwards. More shows, tours, albums, world domination.
I hear you have new music. What can you tell us about it?
It’s a collection of some of the finest rock n roll music the world will have heard since the late Chuck Berry.. (go check us out)
What was the recording process like?
Everything other than the drums were recorded in my studio in a converted church / warehouse / party mansion where I live in Tottenham. And because it’s my studio I had the luxury of taking as much time as was needed to meticulously perfect all the parts to the heart’s content.
It was the mixing of the album that took so damn long due to the fact that I’m not the world’s best producer. So despite my best efforts and many months of painstaking second guessing, it was ‘finished’, only to be remixed from scratch 1 year later by my good friend Ben Jeffes & myself.
What was the biggest learning curve in writing the new tunes?
As it was a DIY album, tons of knowledge was gained about the recording and engineering process (and some great gear) that will surely make the next record run much smoother.
Would you change anything now it’s finished?
Hell no. It’s just about time we got it out there for the world to hear.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the world?
Please listen to DELLA NOVA’s self-titled debut album. It took ages to make and we reckon that it’s pretty good. Thanks for tuning in!
Alex
FOLLOW THEM HERE // PRESAVE THE NEW ALBUM HERE
MORE TOP BANDS COMING OUTTA LONDON HERE