If you caught our coverage of the Louder Than Life festival last October, you would have been introduced to the amazing trio Raveneye who rocked the crowd all the way from the United Kingdom. Just in case you missed our first interview with the guys you can find the link here. Now that everyone is brought up to speed, we got the opportunity to meet up with the guys once again in Indianapolis on the last leg of their tour with The Darkness.
UG: We noticed you guys just made it on the Billboards Heatseekers chart! Congratulations on that… that’s awesome!
Raveneye: Thanks Man
UG: You really seem like an unstoppable force that just keeps popping up everywhere. I don’t know if it’s because we follow you guys on Facebook or what, but your name keeps getting thrown around. It seems like you guys had a strong debut then just picked up momentum and never really took your foot off the petal. Now personally we think that’s awesome, but I would think it’s possible to wear yourselves out that way. Do you see the need for any kind of break coming up soon or do you prefer to keep things moving full force?
Raveneye: I think a break would be fantastic, but I think one thing we want to do is build up something sustainable. The problem with a break is the potential to fall because all of sudden all the hype comes up and everyone cares for a period. You get people that cared just because that’s the right thing to like in the moment. One thing that’s nice what we’re doing right now is we’re building up our own community of people that we meet and we hang out and talk to on Facebook and Twitter. We build up our own crowd of people everywhere, you guys we saw last time and today we get to make our own community that’s following us. A break would be good but I see it more the way we want to go about it… more organically and just develop our own crowd that’s a dedicated loyal fan base.
UG: This time you’re touring with The Darkness and last year you guys have a lengthy tour with Slash. Did you all learn anything from that experience that you are bringing with you this time?
Raveneye: I don’t know if we have learned… I think we learned to appreciate a lot of things. Myles Kennedy from Slash had good spirits and he gave us a lesson to cherish these moments of driving in a small van, sticking it out, and making the most of that. Because this is just the three of us at the end of the day and looking out after this trip and all the routine and everything like that. These long drives and the stuff that seems tough right now is the stuff you’ll look back on and think of fondly. That will be the things that you remember. He said to keep gentle, watching videos and pictures of snaps and Facebook and Twitter is like your journal now you know? You put your daily little things like Starbucks spelling your name wrong… that’s our journal, I think he meant something a bit more.
UG: The last time we spoke you guys hadn’t done much touring in the United States, but now you’ve had a little bit more experience with the U.S. crowd and venues. How has this experience been?
Raveneye: It’s been fantastic! American crowds aren’t afraid. In some cities you get different audiences, then you know a lot of the places you play are for The Darkness gig and the crowds are already ready for some rock. It’s been a lot of fun, even last year as well was incredible. The crowds are loud and that’s what you want at a rock show. You don’t want the sit and stare audience, or maybe you get that because they think you suck. Luckily the crowds have been wicked and it’s been incredible to tour the United States, for a UK band and for me especially I think the ideology of touring the U.S. is like the rock n’ roll fantasy. To be able to do it is incredible, so I feel very lucky.
UG: Speaking of touring the U.S., there are these huge names that you’re playing on the same bill with The Darkness, Rob Zombie, Shinedown… Do you ever stop and reflect on that? I mean I know you’re on the road a lot and staying busy, but it’s kind of a big deal.
Raveneye: Not really… You know I think it’s like the immediate “What’s the next step?” I mean if you don’t start thinking of that then you start getting behind on things. Like now on this tour we are already prepping for the next record and making up demos now as we’re traveling, because there’s never really any time to sit back and relax. I feel like there’s always the pursuit for more and just to keep growing and developing and I feel like the moment I sit back in my chair, I’m not kicking myself enough to work and I think we are all like that. We all have that same motivation and it’s an honor and it’s not about being ungrateful. We’re not just sitting back appreciating it, we’re taking this opportunity and trying to make the most out of it towards our future, and enjoying the ride while its going.
UG: It goes right back to keeping that momentum for sure. One thing we noticed at the Louder Than Life festival, after the show we saw Kev in the crowd and he was enjoying the Goodbye June set I believe. It was great to see fellow appreciation of artists, but how many of those moments do you have with the acts you’re with? Do you get to appreciate them as fans often?
Raveneye: Yeah… I say we do. I mean we get bits like that, but it’s always intermittent. We make the last show or the ultimate show to watch the whole gig, you see bits when you’re walking through and stuff. I kind of like being on the road for a long stretch with a band like Slash for example or The Darkness… I kind of like hearing them at the beginning, you set up your match and you kind of hear the show and develop over the length of the tour. You kind of learn bits of where they do certain things and I kind of like that actually you now? The Darkness for example… Justin’s an incredible front man so we are kind of learning all these cool tricks that he does with the crowd. You kind of learn the showmanship as well and how they run their gig, because they’re both completely different. Slash and The Darkness, they run things really different, different kind of front man, Justin and Myles are different but both incredible in their own way. Little bits of those things that make sense for our shows.
UG: I think it’s really that way with any kind of any profession, you work along somebody and you pick up tricks and that’s how you get better.
Raveneye: Yeah for sure absolutely!
UG: While we are talking about Louder Than Life, the last time we talked to you the set got postponed until the next day. We were obviously disappointed at first, but we showed up early the next morning, we were right there front row and you guys totally killed it! I mean it was awesome! I really liked the Collective Soul set because it held sort of a nostalgia connection for me, but other than that… It was the best show in our opinion of the whole festival and I’m not saying that just because we’re sitting here. It was easily one of our favorites, so my question for you is as a band what is like hearing stories like that from your fans?
Raveneye: It’s kind of the motivation to keep doing it, you know? We get some horrible drives, we put some stupid amount of hours all the time into it and you know we love it and at the end of the day, we are making music so it’s not like boo hoo us. But to hear that comment it’s incredible, it’s lovely, it’s nice, it’s… I don’t know it’s really hard to respond. It’s that mutual thing, that connection between us… We create music and we perform and it connects to you in a way. I think it also validates that the hard work that we put in is paying off. People you know come up and go that’s the best show of the whole festival or whatever cause we are our own worst critic, we criticize everything and it’s good to hear every now and then that you’re not the worst band in the world, ya know? We’ve had some rehearsals where we are like “Why are we even playing together? Like what happened all of sudden to make this band sound like a disaster?” so we’re so critical side of what we do. When people tend to appreciate, it’s a good feeling, it’s a great feeling, it’s amazing!
UG: We see you guys talking to and hearing from the fans and I know you guys are on Facebook and you post the tour diaries and a lot stuff like that. Is it on your radar at any point to put all of this together into like a road documentary?
Raveneye: We would love to… We look at bringing other people on board, someone to film and document the whole thing, we would love that personally ourselves. We did it on the last tour as well and we have huge road diaries that we filmed together and put together ourselves and that was a lot of work to edit like that. It got me carried away because the videos were too long to edit and animating everything… But we would love that kind of thing just so we could see the best bit of things, so we would have it for ourselves as well. Myles said to do diary and have someone film and kind of share that backstage of what goes on and just all of that would be incredible. Alot of it’s silent because I don’t really speak at that point because I like to save my voice, we just throw a ball, we have a football. We have live streamed a couple gigs and we live streamed backstage and we realized that was a really bad idea because we just kind of sit back, and do admin on the computer, or phone, or Oli warms up his voice… it’s pretty boring. Yeah it is, so we decided against it
Drinking lots of water and herbal teas… That’s the real rock n roll!
UG: I believe I heard something on Facebook about recording your full length album and just a few minutes ago you had a comment about it, what can you tell us about that?
Raveneye: Recording starts May 5th, and we’re in the studio until June 1st and the record will be coming out around September. That’s the time that we are hoping, and that’s the main plan for the release but we are looking forward to it. We got 24, 23 demos that are all written, ready, recorded, and all demo’ed up on the computer.
UG: That’s a lot more than the EP…
Raveneye: The main thing is getting the most songs as possible, it gives you the best perspective as what songs work on consistency of the sound for the record. I don’t want every track to sound the same, but having enough writing in it within context of what the band sounds like… it’s a really good position and that many options to pick between. It’s also pain staking and annoying because it’s like “What do we not record?” It’s definitely a compromise to not record some of the songs for another one, so maybe we have to book another month in the studio and record a like a B-side of the album, its definitely gone from 5 songs to now we’ve got a ridiculous amount of songs… It’s really exciting!
UG: “Come With Me” is going on there right?
Raveneye: That’s one of the debates… I think it probably will be actually now that we’ve played it again on this tour.
UG: I’m going to hold you to it.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVO3TJ1QeeA]Raveneye: It is difficult because that is one of the ones when we first put the list together we were like “Come With Me is not going on it”, but we put it back in the live show because it works that thing that none of the other songs really do. It’s been really good, we will not definitely, but likely be putting that song on the record.
UG: It’s got my vote! The last time we sat down with you guys Kev barely wanted to talk, but his face lit up when we started talking about video games, so let me give him his moment. Kev, have you got a chance to play anything new?
Kev: Fallout 4… Yes, loving that… wicked game. I’ve never played any of the previous Fallouts before but
Oli: You’ve got to do Fallout 3
Kev: Problem is it’s buggy on pc and that’s where I mainly play my games.
Oli: I had it on my mac that I bootcamped to be a PC and it was perfect, it’s a great story.
UG: Fallout is an awesome game, we are huge fans of Bethesda. We were just talking about Elder Scrolls Online and spending way too much time on it and not getting our chores done and stuff like that. But Fallout is great!
While we’re talking with you directly, we seen you were featured on Drummer Magazine… That’s awesome and congratulations on that! How did that come about?
Kev: That was through our publicist. It’s kind of funny really, when I had the email come through saying you’re going to be in a Drummer Magazine it was like “This is awesome!” But I was expecting like a little tiny section of one of the pages ya know… It’s Kev from Raveneye… blah blah blah, but I got a full page and it was wicked. First time I was in any Drummer Magazine properly and it felt amazing!
UG: I’m going to pick on you one more time here… You have a large involvement in the Rhythm Room Percussion school near London. What can you tell us about that?
Kev: Yeah… that’s something that started early on this year with Chris, the drummer for Heart Of A Coward. They are a fantastic heavy metal band, so we decided to pull resources together and get together for a drum school. The plan is for that is to start teaching courses in schools and sort of incorporate work while we get people to drum circles together, talk, and trade music together really. There are a lot of different ideas that we have going for it.
UG: The past few years have been terrible for the rock genre, especially in 2016 alone there’s been a lot of iconic figures that we have lost. I look around and all these other icons that have been so prominent since I’ve been around aren’t getting any younger. Is there any kind of pressure being a younger act, or a feeling of responsibility?
Raveneye: No, because we just play the music that we love. I don’t feel like we have to carry any torch, we just do what we love doing and do it to the best of our own ability. We already put enough pressure on ourselves and there’s no comparison like… “How do we fill the hole of David Bowie?”. How do you fill that hole? There’s no need… David Bowie created that space that’s his. Now he has died and his music is his legacy and carries on forever, same with Prince. I don’t feel nervous to fill in that gap. I don’t think musicians now artists will ever really have that iconic stature that those artists did. Music defines different things now, and at that point Bowie defined an image and his music and that sound defined a culture of a period. Then you know all of a sudden everyone is trying to be Ziggy Stardust and put on make-up everywhere and stuff like that. Bands don’t really have that effect on a community in that same way anymore and not in a bad way, I just think there’s so much variety and you can hear so many different sounds… It’s accessible you can go to Spotify or all these different streaming services. With YouTube you can hear so many different styles of music and there is so much variety, there’s so much you know? The heavyweights now aren’t really deemed in the same iconic stature that Prince had. They’re almost more of a product of how well they dress, or how good they look, rather than how good they sing or write a song. They get other people to do that now and those are the ones that are in the front spotlight… It’s a completely different scene
UG: One final question… What’s the future looking like for Raveneye?
Raveneye: I think after the release of the record, that will be the answer to the question really… That is the priority really. Joining teams with an amazing record label called Frontier and we’re really excited to be a part of them. We are going to be working together releasing this record and that’s really exciting. They’re Italian guys and we spoke to them the other day, and we’ve got a plan for this, and we’ll get proper music videos, and there will be an official one, and probably put together another lyric video together as well which is fun. I did the last one and had a good time to do that and its really exciting. I think we look forward now because of the record… the EP has done its leg work, now with the record I guess we’ll see where that takes us and we still be the front of it all on Facebook.
UG: Hoping to do another U.S. tour?
Raveneye: Definitely! Next year without a doubt. Probably the summer we’ll be back trying to get all the festivals, we’ve got a 3 year visa to work in the U.S. and it cost enough money that we better be coming back.
As always we wish these guys the best of luck. They just wrapped up their U.S. tour with The Darkness and are hard at work on their debut album. You can stay up to date with Raveneye through the Official Site, and their Facebook Page.
