Leaders of the new Glasgow scene, punksters Rascalton have been gaining significant attention as ones to watch in 2019. Their show stealing performance at Stockton’s ‘Songs From Northern Britain’ festival in November has already proved to North East music lovers that they can live up to the hype. Damian Robinson caught up with frontman Jack Wyles to find out more about their next trip to the region.
‘Songs from Northern Britain’ was quiet a show.
Yeah, we loved that show. We love the North east crowd, and Stockton in particular, and it seems that the more northern you get when you tour the more fun the crowd it is. We’ve got a soft spot for the north of England
Fred Perry’s ‘Subculture’ recently marked you down as one of the most exciting punk orientated bands around. With your reputation growing how does that impact the band?
It’s a funny one because it’s nice to have people say nice things about the band, but we don’t really care if we’re honest. More than anything we find that nice comments tend to encourage us but we’re in a scene in Glasgow at the minute which is full of really amazing bands. If we’re good enough to be considered as part of the sene then we’re more than happy.
You’re back out on the road almost immediately after returning home from a previous tour. How do you remain motivated to put on such an intense show?
During the day on tour we tend to be knackered and we’re not sure if we can put such energy into our show, but as soon as the lights go off we just tend to switch and we go for it. We’re all best friends in the band so we spur each other on and our energy on stage comes from our friendship off it.
You’re about to go into the recording studio, how will you capture the intensity of your live sound?
At first it took a while to figure out how we could record our sound. For us music is all about the performance and intensity which comes from a show. Bands like the Libertines meant so much to us because of their intensity so when it comes to recording what we tend to do is record the band playing. Recording us all individually just doesn’t seem to work and because we know the songs so well we can usually record in only 2 or 3 takes.
2019 is all about recording for you?
We’ll still be out on tour but yeah 2019 our plan is to record some more music and capture the sound of the live show we’ve been developing. We’ll always tour though as we love it so much.
Rascalton play Think Tank, Newcastle, on 9th February