With this interview, I was just sitting in the bar of the Kings Theatre, minding my own business and quite possibly surreptitiously picking my nose behind the laptop, when a random man came and sat down next to me. "Suzy?" he said. "I've been sent to see you." And a minute later a handful of noisy bandmates turned up. mINtSOUTH's photographers were telling every band they saw that mINtSOUTH were carrying out interviews so we had quite a queue. Well, I think everyone was actually trying to get to the bar - !free beer!
Previously published on mINtSOUTH.com in September 2009
Words - Suzy Sims
Editor - Rob Ball
(c) mINtSOUTH
THE DEADS - SOUTHSEA FEST 2009
mINtSOUTH: Tell me a bit about yourselves.
The Deads: “We’ve been going six years? Longer than that? I can’t remember. It’s got to be quite a while.”
Rich: “We split up for a while, a couple of years. We signed a record deal, done an album and that all fell through, and we’ve just recently got back together. It’s a couple of months at the moment.”
mINtSOUTH: Back and better than before?
Andy: “We’re enjoying it a lot more. We’re doing it for different reasons now.”
Rich: “I think we’re going to be better than before but it’s just going to take longer to get to that point, because it’s not as serious. It’s more for fun.”
Andy: “If anything happens it’s a bonus but at the moment it’s just doing it for the enjoyment of playing.”
mINtSOUTH: Southsea Fest – have you played yet today?
Luke: “We have already played, we really enjoyed it. It’s good to watch all the other bands.”
Andy: “There’s a lot of bands playing in 12 venues, all putting bands on now. It’s impressive really, seems like a lot of work and organisation.”
Luke: “There’s really a scene down here at the moment.”
mINtSOUTH: Any bands you’re looking forward to seeing?
The Deads: “The Ramblings, The Black & Reds. We’ve played with quite a few of the bands so it’s quite good to go to their slot when they’re playing and then they’ll come over to ours. It’s bands all supporting each other.”
mINtSOUTH: Which band member would you eat first on a desert island?
Andy: (laughs evilly) “It’d have to be Clym because to be fair he’s the biggest out of the lot of us. He’s the one with the most amount of meat on him.”
mINtSOUTH: How did you choose the name of your band?
Gary: “Clym had a song called Dead Stars. Then we kind of got together, got a couple of songs, I think we did one or two gigs called the Dead Stars. Then we saw a couple of other bands called that and we thought ‘oh, let’s change it’.”
Andy: “But we didn’t want to give it a whole new name because we’d started to get a bit of a following. To be fair the name doesn’t really go with us because we’re this Seventies kind of influenced rock band, and The Deads sounds a bit like a metal band.”
Gary: “We were going to have Johnny Valentine and the Stabbed To Deaths but when you narrow it down it’ll be Johnny Valentine and the STDs. We don’t want to get disease involved!”
mINtSOUTH: Gorilla versus bear – who would win in a fight?
The Deads: “Never really thought of that question before. It depends what bear it is. Rupert Bear? Grizzly bear? Gorilla, definitely.”
Shoutbox –
The Deads: “4th December we’re headlining down at the Cellars, and 19th November we’re playing at Hamptons. And we’re getting Clym to sort out our MySpace because it’s annoying, we’ve only got one song and we’ve got about fifty recordings!”
The Deads
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