Hiya folks 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?
IATUH: We don’t think you pick music so much that music picks you. It’s like you have no choice!
9N: Exactly. It is a Compulsion. We started young. We got hooked. The parties. The beautiful people. The buzz. Once you drink from the bitter cup of indie-failure you are ruined for life.
Introduce us to you / all to the members and your musical history. What do you have in common as bands?
IATUH: We consist of ‘Dragon Lord Apocalypse’ on vocals, drums, guitars, and ‘Kid A’ on guitars, bass, keyboards, and brass/string arrangements. Both bands seem to exist on the outer parameters of the music scene, sending regular missives into the ether, and hoping to find like-minded oddballs to listen to us.
9N: We are Ted Pepper who pretends to be a musician, Pete Brock who pretends to be a guitarist, and Sydd Spudd who really is a drummer as proven by videos on the internet. We are a loose and amorphous collection, friends first, band second.
We set up RGM USA and many other countries in the world to share music with America and the UK, good idea?
IATUH: Definitely to us, as we are a transatlantic band, that formed on Reddit during the early days of the pandemic. Dragon Lord is from Baltimore USA, and Kid A is from Cornwall in the UK.
9N: Absolutely. We’ve gained a lot from sharing with musicians from across the world. We don’t think of ourselves as being a British band in fact, so media that cater for a world audience is spot on.
You both create a mythical universe to perform in. Why? How does it affect your music and how you communicate?
IATUH: We are both reluctant to appear as ourselves, as we prefer to let our music do the talking. We can promise you we are much less interesting in real life than our ‘Unicorn Personas’! I think some people enjoy the escapism we try to provide, from the awful state of human existence at the moment.
9N: Mythical? No. No, we don’t. We tell the truth, but the truth is so strange people think it is invented, people think we are joking. We regularly get described as being somehow comic, but our reaction is one of coping with the horror we see through laughter.
What did the pandemic mean to you?
IATUH: It literally formed our band! We both met on Reddit and decided to form our band to fend off possible mental health issues during the pandemic
9N: We were born in the pandemic. We rose out of the plague pits of Leicester, a city the government decided to punish for obscurity and misbehavior by sealing it into months of lockdown while the world outside began to twitch and smell the clean air. If the pandemic hadn’t happened we would probably still be sitting in a pub talking about how good it would be to start a band. We’re both pandemic bands, and there are many others. The Qwarks and The Margaret Hooligans for example. The enforced isolation and time affect different people in different ways. Some people baked bread and hoarded toilet paper. We baked toilet paper and hoarded bread, and wrote songs.
What was the most fun you have had on stage?
IATUH: As a transatlantic band, we have never met in the flesh, and probably won’t have the opportunity to play live, unless by some miracle a record label decides to take us on.
9N: We’ve only played live once. Well twice, but one time was on purpose. It is intense and stretches you. The most fun was probably playing with The Qwarks on a couple of songs at the end where we could relax and just enjoy it. That said, walking along the front of a small stage in a tiny club with a room full of people shouting at you and scattering little plastic dolls shoes was quite good.
How do you work together within your groups? How did your groups work together?
IATUH: The basis of this track was sent to us by our 9 O’Clock Nasty friends. We chopped it up a bit , added vocals, and the sax line. I think we added some guitar low down in the mix, but most of the guitars, bass, and drums came courtesy of ‘the Nasties’.
9N: We don’t have a set way of working. One of us usually brings a rough idea and we destroy it and remake it. Working with I Am the Unicorn Head was so calm in comparison. As they say, we shared the bones of a song with them and were blown away by their response which took it to a new place. That sax line. They heard something in it we couldn’t. We added some typical 9 o’clock Nasty elements to what they had produced and they smoothed and integrated them into the song to make it complete.
If you had to describe your band/music to an alien how would you describe it?
IATUH: We are Aliens! I guess the one rule we live by is ‘expect the unexpected’! We try to make the sort of music we’d want to buy ourselves, and we have VERY eclectic record collections to influence us!
9N: That is a code to live by! We can’t say what we are, but we can say what we try to be. We aim for essential. To the point. Brutal. We make short songs that have things to say. Sometimes stupid things, but things nonetheless. Recently we’ve been on a kind of garage-punk streak but we have released pop, bhangra, dance and electronic music in the last couple of years.
Why do you think you stand out as a band?
IATUH: We are Unicorns, and we don’t tend to come across many others making music! By default, that makes us stand out!
9N: We need more Unicorns in music. The campaign starts here.
What do you think is the most important news story of the day?
IATUH: I liked the story when the entire UK Tory Party assembled in their Conference Hall and fought to the death, like rats in a sack, in a ‘Hunger Games’ type scenario. Or was that just a beautiful dream?
9N: That is a hard question because the news is laden with payloads of fear. Ultimately the news story of the day is the one that isn’t published. It looks bleak. Let’s play golf in our underpants.
What’s your favourite song of your own output? Which song do you each like most from the other band?
IATUH:We’re both very proud of ‘I Fear God (is leaving tonight)’, which is an 8:30 mins dystopian epic! We both really like many 9 O’Clock Nasty songs, which is why we are so delighted to be working with them! At a push though, we both love ‘ Playboy Driver’.
9N: Currently and as usual it’s our next release, a twisty hip hop rock stroll called Sleepy Policeman, and of course Playboy Driver, which still gets us buzzing every time we hear it Of Unicorn songs, it’s BFF, Omnipresent, and Turn it On but there are so many: we are big fans as well as thrilled collaborators.
You have new music, what can you tell us about it?
IATUH: We have just released our debut album ‘Future Dinosaurs’ which is now on Bandcamp.
9N: …and it is the album of the year! A killer. Superb record. Sleepy Policeman is the furthest along of the new batch, and we are not short on ideas. We’re in the process of setting up a second studio to capture these things before they escape into the ether and some other bastard gets them! There’s a pipeline of material in various stages of construction and
deconstruction, all different, all 9 o’clock Nasty, all venomous commentaries or vaudeville shakedowns, depending on your point of view.
Talk me through the thought process of the single.
IATUH: We’d wanted to work together for a while, and it was great we finally got around to it! Hopefully we’ll team up more in future.
9N: There is so little time. The shift to social media from live events means that the ability to write and produce new material is more and more important. You used to be able to write ten songs and play them for a year. So the collaboration was actually a release, a refresh. We would definitely like to do more. This one started life as a potential single called 9-Ball. We actually released that to our mailing list (we give away a free song or video every month exclusively to subscribers) but we shared it with IAMUH and we gave Unicorn Head freedom to use it as they would. They kept the bones and added layers and ideas on top.
What was the recording process like?
IATUH: Very interesting to receive the individual tracks from the Nasties. It’s fascinating to see how other bands work, and put their music together. Just one example, we found that we both process vocals very differently. No right or wrong way, just different!
9N: We have a signature way that works for us. Mr Thumbs who has worked with us a couple of times just looks at the screen and shouts Too Hot Too Hot and cries. The recording was a while ago but it is still very clear. Late at night, past midnight opening the computer to find the latest ideas from the Unicorns. Working before dawn to respond with our ideas. A day waiting to hear back. Repeated day after day. Once the basic idea for a song is there, once all the excess is trimmed away and the performance is trapped, it is a craft process. Incremental improvement. I Am The Unicorn Head have much more defined ideas about how they want to sound, we are perhaps more chaotic, so they held the project together and gave it direction and we pulled the rope to shake the boat from time to time.
What was the biggest learning curve in writing the single?
IATUH: We wanted to make sure the identity of both bands remained, while creating something quite different and original.
9N: We achieved that I think. At least that is how it sounds to us. For me it was about vocal metering and cadences, what you can do with words as beats, and whether we could pull off what we were attempting without getting shot at or arrested. We managed to avoid both so far.
Would you change anything now it’s finished?
IATUH: Nope, it’s just what we had hoped for, and we look forward to doing this again.
9N: Never, never, never, never go back. That way leads to madness. Once a song is done move to the next. Yes, we have a project to revisit songs we made last year. Yes, that is a contradiction.
What are your plans for the year ahead?
IATUH: We are working on our second album. It is a concept album/Rock Opera based on the adventures of two ‘Unicorns in Space’. Each song will be a chapter in the story and will be released chronologically, to tell the overall story, piece by piece, as it goes along.
9N: More collaboration. We loved working with Golden Plates and with I Am The Unicorn Head and we will be working with the Qwarks this year. We would love to work with other people too. I’m Bent was the end of a chapter for us in a way. We feel that we said what we wanted to say in 2-minute firecracker garage-punk so we will be trying to flex in some new directions. More hip-hop. Some dub. Electronica. Expect some very varied output for a while. We also want to go back to doing EPs. Working on singles has been very successful for us in terms of building an audience, but we need more space to say more, so there will be some 3 and 4-track releases soon.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the world?
IATUH: Peace, Happiness, and an end to the frightening rise of Fascism!
9N: Get Into Them. Decide which side you’re on, the middle is going to get very uncomfortable.
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