I am sat in a black and white tiled shower cubicle in Bar Academy, Birmingham with my friend, Amy and Steven Ansell for his first ever interview in a shower, the drummer and singer from the Brighton two-piece, Blood Red Shoes. Steven has a bottle of Sambucca under his arm and I have a can of cider that we managed to smuggle into the venue because the drinks in the Academy are such a rip-off! French/cockney band, Underground Railroad have just performed an excellent set which even involved some cello. Blood Red Shoes are on in half an hour, hence, the reason why Laura-Mary isn’t here with us because she’s getting ready. Although, she did peek her head around the door at one point and say hello with a slightly confused look on her face. Here’s what happened during our chat on the day that I discovered that cider mixed with Sambucca actually tastes rather nice.
Katie: So, why the name 'Blood Red Shoes'?
Steven: Well, when we started, we weren’t trying to start a band; Laura just emailed me and said “shall we have a jam?” So we got together and wrote some songs, a guy heard it and asked us whether we wanted to play a show but we were really fucked, we didn’t really know what the fuck we were doing but we said “Yeah, we’ll play” but we didn’t have a name because we’d just had one jam. As we were trying to think of a name we were hanging out with one of our friends and he had this book called ‘Hollywood Babylon’ and in it was a story about Ginger Rogers and in that story, Fred Astaire makes Ginger Rogers keep re-doing a tap scene until eventually he’s like “Cuuuuuuuuuuut” “Why have you changed your shoes?” and she was like “I haven’t” but her shoes are red, she was wearing white shoes but now her shoes are red because he’s re-made her do the scene so many times that her feet have bled, she’s been tap dancing so much. We thought that this sounded really fucked up so we were like “let’s call our band that.”
Katie: Who and what are your main influences?
Steven: A lot of stuff because when you’re a musician everything that you listen to goes to your brain, Laura’s an artist as well so for her even more things go in, and so a lot of things go into our music. “Also, us getting frustrated about having shit jobs before we were in the band full time is also as much as an influence because it gave us that force to really do it.”
Katie: yeah, I know what you mean; I fell asleep at work the other day, it was that boring.
Steven: Yeah, it was just things like that, being fed up with your life and being fed up of the structure of somebody always telling you what to do. And there were musical influences such as Queens of the Stone Age, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, The Pixies and a band called ‘Q and Not U’, like nobody has ever listened to this band, they broke up a few years ago, they were the best band that we’ve ever heard, they were an American band and they were so good.
Katie: Yeah, I hate it when that happens, have you heard of The Delgados? They were really great but they split up
Steven: Ah yeah, I used to like The Delgados actually.
Katie: Are there any new bands about at the moment that you really like?
Steven: Yeah, I really like ‘Pulled apart by Horses’
Katie: Ah yeah, they’re good, you love them don’t you Amy?
Amy: Yessss!
Steven: I really like the band that supported us too, Underground Railroad, but they’re not that new, they’re on their third record but they’re still new to me, Laura found them and we were like “yeah, let’s take them on tour with us” and there’s a band from Brighton called ‘Peggy Sue’
Katie: Ah, yeah, I love Peggy Sue! They supported you when I saw you two years ago in Stoke!
Steven: Yeah, and I produced a couple of tracks on their album so I have a deep interest in the band but they’re just about making really diverse records.
Katie: Is Brighton really that boring because Stoke’s shit isn’t it? I imagine Brighton to be a lot better than Stoke!
Steven: It’s not that boring, but it was quite frustrating at the time. Brighton’s very small and you get bored of it because you can get bored of almost anywhere. “You could get bored when you have the most exciting life in the world, anything gets boring if it just keeps repeating itself, Brighton isn’t actually that boring, it’s just that we got to the point where we just felt a bit caged in, especially at the time that we wrote ‘Boring by the Sea’, which is the reason why you’ve asked this question.” It’s because at that time we started out on this really DIY punk scene and it was all about being like super underground all of the time and then we wrote these pop songs and we were always really happy that they were punk and fucked up but also catchy and people really hated us for that, it was kind like that reaction against the fact that we wrote this song and it was really disco, you could really dance to it and it was a bit of a hit.
Katie: Yeah and then there was that amazing remix of it as well that was even more danceable and popular!
Steven: Yeah and we were like this is a really amazing ‘fuck you!’ to all of the people that were like “you’re too pop, you don’t deserve our respect.” It’s so boring! It’s so boring! “Just because a song has a chorus doesn’t mean that the band is a ‘sell-out’ band. It doesn’t mean that it’s ‘not cool’ or ‘not underground enough.’ It just means that people like it for fucks sake!”
Katie: If you had to categorise your music into one genre what would it be?
Steven: Just rock. That’s it.
Katie: Which country do you most prefer to play gigs in?
Steven: Right now? This changes because each tour something else surprises you.
Katie: You play quite a bit in Japan don’t you?
Steven: Yeah Japan is really good. I think my favourites recently were either Belgium or Holland. We’re playing at a festival called ‘Lowlands’ and they did a launch night which was what we played at the other day and everyone who goes to the launch night gets a ticket, you can’t get them any other way.
Katie: How does Fire Like This compare to Box of Secrets? Would you say that you’ve progressed or changed or anything with this album?
Steven: I think it’s just natural evolution really, we didn’t change anything, and there are still just guitars, drums and singing. I think that for us it was about getting better at what we were doing. I see Box of Secrets was a starting point, I see Fire Like This as us figuring out our thing and I think the next record is gonna get much weirder than that because I think that we learnt a lot of stuff whilst making this album. The weirder moments that are found on this record will be a lot weirder on the next but I don’t see it as a change, just a progression. We write better songs I think, like, they don’t go on as long because we’ve figure out that every song doesn’t have to be really fast all of the time because this just gets really boring. I think it’s a slightly sadder record than the first one; the first one was a bit more optimistic. “I think that Fire Like This is more ‘us’, with the first record we were just kind of finding our feet, this record is more the real me and Laura-Mary and expressing more of who we really are than on the first album.”
Amy: At least you have turned to electro-pop like most other bands have.
Steven: You know what, we’d never do that! I mean we like to dance and stuff but no we’d never do that. If people said that to us “so, change your style”, we’d be like “what, really?” It’s like the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s made a dance/electro record and I’m like “yeah, that’s shit”. I would much rather listen to Date with the Night than I would their new shit record, its rubbish! Why would you change your sound? “People would think that it’s a bad thing that we haven’t completely changed our sound but we don’t fucking want to change our sound.” There are two things in a record, there are the lyrics to the songs and the way that you record them and just because you recorded it differently, doesn’t mean that it sounds any better so the way it seems to me is that if you write the same sentence in a different colour ink , one in red, one in blue, one in green and one in black, have you said anything different? No, you haven’t, you’ve just written it in red so that you trick people into thinking that it looks different when they first say it but when you really pay attention, you realise that you’ve just written the same sentence, that’s why if you write the same song but record it with a keyboard, it’s basically the same shit, you’ve just tricked people into thinking that it’s different. “We just thought “right, let’s write better songs”, you should make the way that you sing it more powerful by trying to really sing it like you mean it and don’t fucking worry about being electro or whatever by changing your sound because for me that’s a short term way into tricking people into thinking that it’s exciting.” I also just don’t really like keyboard that much. I love the sound of a loud, distorted guitar.
Katie: After the tour is finished, what’s next for Blood Red Shoes? Do you plan on playing any festivals?
Steven: We finish this tour and then in May we actually have a load of shows that we haven’t officially announced yet and then we’re doing all of those festivals like ‘The Great Escape’, ‘Dot-to-Dot’ and ‘Liverpool Sound City’ and I think that we’re playing a show in Moscow with The Horrors apparently and then in between the shows in May we’re gonna try and write some new stuff and try and release a new EP after the summer.
Steven: The album was released yesterday so tonight we are celebrating; this is why I have this bottle of Sambucca.
Katie Wilkinson
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