INTERVIEW: Josh Gallop & Alexander Share – Phoxjaw

Given that most interviews with bands are done at gigs or festivals, over Skype, via email or even as a telephone call, it was nice for Distorted Sound to meet up with PHOXJAW guitarists Alexander Share and Josh Gallop for a chat over a pint in a local pub in the run up to the release of their second EP A Playground for Sad Adults, their impending European tour with BLACK PEAKS and how they combine Middle Earth with, erm, outer space…

Guys, thank you very much for joining me. Firstly, Goodbye Dinosaur… gained a lot of plaudits and was very well received across a number of different platforms. I know this is possibly a bit of a stupid question, but were you prepared for the positive reaction that it got?

Alexander: Not at all, still blows me away!

Josh: Same here. We just wanted to put out some music that represented our band and what we were working towards. We didn’t play a gig for the first year of our band and that was what we wrote in the time, so we decided that we’d put those songs out and see what happened.

Alexander: I also want to add that when we were writing and recording it, that’s when we were able to enjoy it as the fans do now. I mean, I still like hearing it, but it’s no longer ours to enjoy and hasn’t been since we released it. I’ve already got that way with A Playground for Sad Adults as well!

Well moving on to the new EP – a lot of the songs on the record had been played live for a good period of time before recording them, some up to a year before. Why was now the right time to commit them to tape and in addition, why did they not make Goodbye Dinosaur… in the first place?

Josh: I think that it was just because it had been that long since we’d starting performing them – we wrote them immediately after we finished Goodbye Dinosaur… and so it was the logical step that they were to be the next songs released. Additionally, we had this set of songs that we’d played for ages and we just decided that we wanted to play some new stuff, so we brought the songs into the live set.

I think as we go on and the band gets a bit bigger, you’re not going to get away with playing unreleased songs as much as we are now because you have to play what you’re promoting and it’s actually got to the point where we’re aware that there are certain songs we have to play. As a result, the last couple of years have afforded us that little bit of freedom because nobody knew the material as much, but now they are and beginning to form attachments to certain songs, so now we have to tune into that and build our set accordingly.

You’ve also mentioned that you have to keep writing music, that if you go for more than a week without doing so you get itchy. Do you think we’re going to reach a stage where bands are releasing more EP’s regularly than a full album every couple of years or so, particularly given that the world’s attention span appears to be shortening and wanting more instant access?

Alexander: Yeah, I reckon so. To be honest with you, I think we’re heading towards an area where we’d love to do more split release EPs with bands as well. We don’t want to be one of those band who has the regimented cycle of ‘Write the album, record the album, release the album, tour the album’ and repeat, we want to have far more freedom than that. We’re a very creative band in terms of our personalities and we don’t want to be held back by anything at any point.

Josh: Yeah, I agree that in a modern world stuff can be done very quickly and you can turn stuff round easily, so the option to do that is lovely. I do like full albums, I love the journey they take me on and that’ll never get old; people like to say it’s a singles game but that’s not the case.

Alexander: It’s a collector’s game as well, isn’t it? You’re more likely to collect albums than EPs, you take them more seriously. When I see an EP for example, I feel that it’s the setup for the album to come, although there are some EPs that do stand up on their own, like Coloring Book by GLASSJAW for example, which for me stands on its own so well I prefer it to a lot of their albums.

Josh: I think it’s important that you can dip in and out of both and you understand what is required with both. Sometimes we might have two songs that only really work well together and don’t match anything else, so that’s the point where we might say ‘Well these go together, let’s see if we can do something around them?’

The journey can really work as you mentioned too – look at The Wall by PINK FLOYD…

Alexander: Mate, Roger Waters is brilliant at putting albums together and tying the songs together it’s one of the things I’ve said about our band, that our interludes and intros/outros need to be the cement that hold the records together.

Josh: Yeah, we love that sort of stuff and it’s why we’ve tried to dive into that on a smaller scale. We’ve got an EP that is meant to be ‘bang bang bang bang’ in terms of delivery and we’ve still added an interlude to it. How can we put an interlude in a five track EP? Don’t know, but we’ll figure it out!

Alexander: But that’s us in a live setting as well, we come out with little doodles in between songs and without that I feel it would be quite boring. There are songs you want to go straight in on though, granted.

Josh: A lot of the time our live shows feed into those intros and interludes though – we’ve grown so fond of a small piece of music to segue into one of our songs that we’ve kept it permanently and then we say ‘Let’s put it on the record’.

Alexander: We’re like nerds, really!

So talk to me about your writing process then, because you’ve got a lot of different styles within your music – DEFTONES, BIFFY CLYRO, CAVE IN, REUBEN to name just a few. Does your writing come from all different areas as well?

Josh: At the start of the band we had a set way of doing things but as time’s gone on we’ve been open to trying out even weirder ideas of how to start a song. Even if it’s a simple as putting a loop in and we’ll work something out of that.

Alexander: Yeah, that’s something I’m working on a lot – loops and the metronomic side of things, having the track pulsating and immediately making everyone recognise how banging it is. Goodbye Dinosaur… is quite fast but it does have some dreary moments and I tend to write a lot more of the faster stuff but the slower, softer side is what makes it interesting.

And that’s replicated on Playground too, when you go from something as bullish as Melt, You’re a Face of Wax to the more gradual tempo of The Curse of the Button Man which remains incredibly crushing.

Josh: I do listen to that song and go ‘Fucking hell’ [laughs]

It’s great how it just stops, mid-note as well – it leaves you wanting more and doesn’t close off the record as you would like it to.

Josh: I actually read something about that today, that you could put the album on repeat and it would make sense as the intro as well, and I thought about that and was really happy that someone had made that sort of connection with it that we hadn’t necessarily done ourselves.

Alexander: The sample we use at the beginning and the end of the EP are how we open and finish our set at the minute as well, and people are seeing these songs live so much that what we have in Playground is a snapshot of PHOXJAW at this very moment in time, so when they listen back to the EP, even in a few years’ time, what they’re hearing is the band in 2018/19 and there’s something really cool about that.

Talking of things that are cool, your first European tour is coming up this autumn opening for BLACK PEAKS. We know you played a bit with PEAKS last year, but describe what it was like to get the call to say that you’re going back out with them and that Jamie Lenman was going to be on the bill as well?

Josh: Yeah, we enjoyed that tour and it ended up being a sort of stepping stone for us. We played one gig with BLACK PEAKS in Exeter and we got chatting to them from that point and they said ‘We’ll hit you up again’ and then we got on that tour in November and it was like ‘Holy shit! We get to tour the UK with this band’ and then on the tour they were hinting that maybe doing something at the end of the year and we were all thinking ‘What’s it gonna be?’ [laughs]

Alexander: I used to be a massive REUBEN fan, I used to listen to Racecar is Racecar Backwards all the time and it’s just so weird that I’m going to be going across Europe with Jamie Lenman.

Josh: And the BLACK PEAKS guys are some of the nicest blokes around. I watched every night of that tour we did with them and it didn’t get old at all. I watched each individual member on different nights and as a band they made us step up our game as well because they’re so good at what they do; they just nail it.

Alexander: It felt a little bit like when RUSH and KISS toured together, only they’re RUSH and we’re KISS. They’re all chilled out and relaxed and we’re in a huddle drinking beer! [laughs]

Josh: It totally works though because if we went on that tour and tried to out-musician them we’d lose, but we brought our chaotic, punk-y energy to that tour and as a result we brought our own game to play and not only do they have their own but Jamie Lenman has his too, so it makes for a nice mix.

You do have a reputation for being an exceptional live band – how difficult was it to get those songs to translate in the studio when you were recording Playground?

Josh: It’s not easy: I feel like when you come to see our live show you expect any releases to be loud, crushing heavy and with plenty of distortion, as if we’re trying to reach out and shake whatever building you’re in to its very limits. But when you’re recording it you have to remember that people are going to be listening to it through tiny little headphones and you’ve then got to think ‘Okay, how can we make that same sort of thing?’ To a degree we don’t though, we treat it as a different beast to our live show, where we can add crazy little things here and there like harmonies.

Alexander: Yeah, I agree that they’re separate entities. If we had a great idea for a keyboard sound that was going to be in a particular part of a song, we wouldn’t think ‘Nah, we can’t do that because we can’t physically play it’, we’d work around it. We’ve got samples that we play at certain points and eventually we’d like to get someone in to play live keyboard and do all of that for us in the future. We never want to hold ourselves back from doing something – that’s really the main PHOXJAW mantra; that we don’t have any walls around us and we’re free to go in whatever direction we want to and by meaning that I want all of our records to have something different as well.

Josh: If we wanted to put a hard techno bit in one of our songs then we would! [laughs]

Hey, you can get away with that as well! Moving on slightly – obviously being a full-time musician is near impossible and as a result it’s not going to be a shock to hear that you all have day jobs. Have you ever had to turn down a gig or tour because of that and in turn how difficult was it to take on the BLACK PEAKS tour coming up logistically?

Josh: Yeah, it’s certainly difficult; I think we’re all in the same mindset that when something comes up we say ‘Yeah we’ll do it’ and then figure out the hard bit later!

Alexander: I think that when we started the band we’d take on anything that was offered to us, but now we’re a bit more careful of what we agree to do – Josh has moved in with his partner, Kieran [Gallop, drummer]’s moved out and we’re not blind to the knowledge that everyone has to pay bills; sometimes I don’t have work, you know? So we do have to be careful but most of the time if it’s something good then we’ll definitely do it. We have had to say no to things we really want to do, though.

Josh: It’s not always easy to work it out, particularly when we’re not at the stage where the band is our job and that’s all we need to do. It’s like starting a business, you don’t take money out of it for a long time after you’ve formed it. But right now we’re at a place where we’re getting somewhere so that makes it worth taking the time off because we know we’re headed in the right direction; work hard now and it’ll pay off in the future.

Did you have points from when you started until now that you thought you might not break out of the local scene?

Josh: I think we’ve always had quite a big ambition for it. None of our previous bands had ever broken out of Bristol, so you never know of course, but when the opportunities came to us you don’t hesitate – you just take it. If you live and breathe it then you have to be doing it, and as mentioned before, we’ll figure things out later!

Any UK dates in the pipeline at all?

Josh: There are a couple of things in the works but we’ll definitely be doing something before the end of the year, I would imagine. We won’t be neglecting anyone, we’ll definitely be touring Playground through the UK later in the year. Watch this space!

And although there will be no plans now, will you have a full debut album at some point? I guess that with the release of Playground you’ve used up all your material to date so you’re starting afresh?

Josh: Yeah, we’re working on it but we write music every week together so it’s never really all used up!

Alexander: I’ve been writing it in my room today, for example!

Josh: Yeah, I was in a studio the other week, just playing around with keyboard stuff and sent it to Danny all while I was mixing the songs for another band! When I had ten minutes to myself I’d mess about a bit, get something I thought would really work and immediately send it over to Danny [Garland, bassist/vocalist] on the fly and he would respond saying ‘Yeah I like that’ or whatever.

Alexander: That’s how it works with us a lot of the time: you gauge the way that people respond to a piece of music that you’ve written. Sometimes you do need to be a bit forceful and say ‘Trust me, it’s going to be sick’ and then sometimes you do end up winning over the others so they’re in agreement that the track works really well. There are definitely some weird bits on Playground, but they’re a ‘good’ weird, you know, like a proggy weird. Nothing wrong with that though!

Josh: I think we’re just super honest with our music though. We write what we want to hear and if people like it that’s cool; we’ve got intent behind it, we’re not writing songs because we want to get big, we’re doing it because we want to write songs!

Alexander: Exactly. That’s the most important thing, certainly in my world. I feel that it’s my job in the band to be making good records because it’s the music that’s going to talk at the end of the day. People aren’t going to see us in another country, they’ll hear us first and think ‘Yeah, that sounds good, I’ll check that out.’ We need stuff that’ll grab people and hook into them. That’s why I want something inventive, I don’t want to sound like other rock bands. I want to have something unique and I’m always trying for that. My room’s like a fucking lab, I’ve got amps everywhere!

Josh: A musical version of Radagast from The Hobbit, right?

Alexander: Yeah, exactly! [laughs]

Josh: And then once he’s got it all down on his little loop pedal, he brings it to me and then we just go on a spaceship and take it from there. That’s our process, from the woods to the spaceship!

That’s an amazing analogy! Guys, thank you very much for speaking to me today.

Both: No problem, thanks for having us!

A Playground For Sad Adults is out now via Hassle Records.

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