Gen & The Degenerates: Breaking The Cis-Tem One Note At A Time

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a weird time for bands and artists, especially for those starting out, creating a lot of new music during that time where everyone was stuck inside for the world’s safety. In that time, a lot of creativity poured out inside and fantastic music was released. Especially music from Liverpudlian band, GEN AND THE DEGENERATES, who so far have released singles Underwear, Runaway Blues, and Wild Thing, with more coming in the form of an EP, Only Alive When In Motion, coming out March 30th. With this, and the announcement that the band are touring with SKUNK ANANSIE, vocalist Gen Glynn-Reeves and guitarist Sean Healand-Sloan spoke with us about the new music, the touring life, and what to expect from the band this year.

“I think this is definitely the first opportunity to express the sort of variety of things that we can do and say this is a bunch of different things that we can do,” Gen explains when discussing the upcoming EP. “We’ve got kind of a range and scope here. I’d say we’re pretty ambitious people. It’s exciting, it’s what every musician wants really, no one wants to just release singles forever? No one wants to be one thing.”

They continued on to say about writing the record. “In terms of what inspires like me specifically, the others will have their own takes on how they get to get the ball rolling, but for me, as I started songwriting when I was pretty young, my dad bought me a guitar when I was 13. I immediately got bored of playing other people’s songs and just wanted to write my own, and they were dreadful. They were bad, but it was for me, it was a way of processing and understanding difficult things that were happening to me in my life. It was a way to experience that feeling but then also to make it something compact and easy to digest.”

GEN AND THE DEGENERATES started life a couple of years back when the members all met at university in Liverpool. Since then, they have performed around the city and signed with Marshall Records a couple of years later. “Liverpool is great. It’s a great city!” Gen informs us about their start in the city. “There’s a lot going on. It’s a really vibrant and interesting place and there’s a lot of bands coming out of the North West right now in general who are just killing it. It’s really hard for bands from outside of Liverpool to win over Liverpool, good ones first and vice versa. But once they do like you in Liverpool, the city is so loyal to the bands they believe in. It’s definitely a hard one for touring bands coming into the city because you’ve got Manchester and Liverpool, which are so close to each other. It’s like you kind of hit one or the other. Generally, if you’re so big, you’ll tour and play about Manchester, it is kind of the obvious one because it’s bigger and there’s probably more money in it. So a lot of tours don’t even come here. But there’s so much great stuff coming out here, out of Liverpool.”

The discourse around touring currently is full of unease as the year began with postponements and cancellations of tours due to the uncertainties over restrictions. Even as restrictions are being lifted, there’s still a level of uncertainty not just for fans coming back into venues, but also bands going back on the road, as Gen illustrates. “Whilst things are getting cancelled more often, it does seem to be bouncing back in a big way now and I think now the bands and the audience are much more appreciative of it and the nights that you do play are awesome. We played House Of Vans in London a couple weeks ago, it was so good. All of the bands were so strong, absolutely bringing that A game, no one was half-assed. Like everyone came to fucking go! Just happy to be doing it again. We don’t know when things might get cancelled again, so might as well bring that 110% every time and the audience is in the same boat. They were so happy to be out listening to live music again. I think people might feel weird, might feel they’re not ready to go back to normal, but we’re ready getting back to some state of like regular gigs and stuff. Cautious optimism!”

Speaking of tours, the band have been announced as one of the supporting bands on SKUNK ANANSIE’s upcoming tour across the UK later this year. “We’re really excited,” Sean states ecstatically. “We had that kind of ‘jaw hits floor’ moment for a couple of seconds. We can’t believe it, it’s gonna be amazing. It’s gonna be in the biggest venues you’ve ever played alongside a band we’ve respected for so long, even before we were in a band. So you couldn’t really ask for a better first tour. Like, because obviously we had one little small tour before we got signed, alongside a band who, unfortunately, aren’t even together anymore. And that was literally just before lockdown. Before we kind of kicked off everything. So this is like our first actual big boy tour and it was like, we’re playing fucking huge venues with one of the bands we love and that has headlined Glastonbury. They really paved the way for bands like ours and they’re so influential. Plus, it’s my birthday on the Manchester date, so bring cake to the venue!”

Only Alive When In Motion is out now via Marshall Records.

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