Venturing into a new sound, The Twang, a band who never stay still for a long time at any rate, are heading into the acoustic space with their upcoming ‘A Month of Sunday’s’ tour. Damian Robinson caught up with frontman Phil Etheridge to find out more about the Sunday’s tour and why now was the right time to push the band into new directions.
The Month of Sunday’s tour sounds really interesting. What prompted you to move in this direction?
We’ve written a number of acoustic tracks in the past, or broken down some of older songs for b-sides, and we’ve always had a really nice response. Recently we played This feeling TV and did our ‘Dream’ track and it got really good feedback which helped us decide that we should do some gigs which were a little more chilled than our usual gigs and present our songs in different ways; the show’s have been selling really really well.
A Month of Sundays is a great title and theme.
Yeah, we were going to have the shows as matinees but that was quite hard to pull off for various logistical reasons, and the original idea was that it could be to try to replicate that Sunday afternoon feeling. We may still try to do matinees in the future.
I’m guessing as a vocalist playing acoustic could be more difficult, how’s the rehearsals been going?
You’re not wrong, there’s less sound so in a way you’re more naked with your vocals. But I think that if you mean what you sing, then you can’t go wrong. It’ll test me and it’ll test our songs but that’s what we want. I’m really excited about the shows and from how we’re sounding at the minute, they’ll be really joyous.
In terms of song structure how are some of the better-known tracks sounding?
At first we were thinking of being like Nirvana at their unplugged and having candles everywhere, but we realised when we were rehearsing that even though it’s an unplugged gig we’ll probably have enough noise that the candles would be blown out in the first song. That’s partly because the songs, even though they’re slightly restructured, are still full of energy and still will be exciting to listen to. We’re doing this tour as we want to challenge ourselves, you can’t grow if you’re always doing the same things. This is going to be joyous and a really good way to spend a Sunday.
The Twang bring ‘A Month of Sundays’ to the Sage Gateshead on the 19th April.