Interview: You Me At Six

We had the pleasure of speaking with the upcoming band You Me At Six about their new found fame, their craziest story from the road, and what it was like touring with New Found Glory and Paramore!

Do you guys have any favourite TV shows you keep up with?

Us as a whole band we like TV programs such as The Inbetweeners, Peep Show, Family Guy and South Park. I don’t really watch TV that much but some of the other guys like stuff like 90210, The OC, Dexter, Entourage and Intervention.

What has been your favorite venue to perform at?

We recently played a venue in Sydney, Australia called Lunar Park with Paramore for the Soundwave side shows. It was inside a theme park right next to the Sydney Harbor and it was such a wicked venue to play, and everything around it made it so much fun to play, hopefully we can play there again one day!

What is one of your craziest stories from the road?

We have many crazy stories from the road, the one that sticks in my mind at the moment is when we went out for the AP tour in America and we arrived the first day in Detroit and our merch guy Nate AKA Gurk comes and picks us up. It’s his first time driving a big van we had and it was so funny, so you can’t imagine how many laughs we got from that, but we pulled up to the hotel we were staying that night and he was trying to reverse into a car parking space and he accidentally hit this 4×4 truck. We all freaked out because it was first day and we didn’t know if we did any damage to our van or the 4×4, until these American Football guys come down really drunk looking at all of us. We all freaked out because it was a rough end of town and they weren’t the most friendliest people, luckily we didn’t do any damage to their 4×4 but our van got a dent. We all laughed it off after wards! Nice way to start tour.

Who would you say your musical influences are?

As a band our musical influences are Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, Incubus, New Found Glory and The Starting Line. Some of my musical influences are Thrice, Glassjaw, Biffy Clyro and Mastodon. I’m also a massive hip hop lover so I try and take influences from stuff such as Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Felt and Jay Z.

It’s been really nice recently because we have been playing new songs from our latest CD Hold Me Down so it’s been making us buzz playing live again and showing off the new songs. My favourite songs to play live at the moment are “Safer to Hate Her” and “Trophy Eyes” because they are very upbeat songs.

What was it like to tour with Angels and Airwaves, New Found Glory, and Paramore?

It was such an incredible feeling to play with these bands, we have listened to them and love them for a while, especially playing some of the venues with these bands because they have been so legendary like the Astoria and Wembley Arena. It was a really cool feeling because they taught us a lot of things about touring for so long and some great advice for our live shows what we have taken in, great to learn new tricks from amazing people we get along with.

Has there been a moment that hit you and you thought, “I’ve arrived?”

Last year we toured for pretty much the whole year and I think we were all worn out because we had never done so much touring in our lives, so when we got back home just before Christmas it was like, wow we have arrived back home after so long and we can relax for the festive seasons, the rest we needed for this year really. We also had that feeling when we arrived in Australia recently, it was such a long flight and we had never traveled that far as a band before, so we had a “Glad we made it beer”

How would you say Hold Me Down is different from Take Off Your Colours? How have you grown?

Hold Me Down is different because we had learned so much more about touring and our song writing capabilities had grown so much more we wanted to write not only the best songs we could, but something we really enjoyed listening to and feeling the songs passionately. Take Off Your Colours was when we were trying to find our sound and were really heavily influenced by other bands, kind of like we wanted to be these bands, where Hold Me Down is the start of You Me At Six in my eyes, because we have found our sound finally and it’s only going to adapt and we are going to learn a lot more in the next few years.

What do you think gives a band lasting power in an age where bands come and go so quickly?

We know that there are so many bands out there these days and it’s hard to make your name stick around, especially in the style of music we write. I think if you take so long to write a CD then people will forget about you these days because something else will come along and they will be the next band people are talking about, so we keep ourselves on our toes and try and constantly write songs and just building up a back catalog of songs. It’s more about live shows as well these days so we take a lot of time thinking how we work out our live set and how we can make it special for people to watch and go home thinking it was an awesome show. I’ve seen bands recently I love so much but they haven’t taken up to the next step and for people who are just finding out about that band they may not think of it as highly as these other bands who are trying to push it up to the next step to keep there name in the game.

Is there a big difference in your English fans as opposed to your American ones? Do they each prefer different songs?

There is always going to be a difference I think, they live in different countries and all have their own way about how they go about things. English fans are so passionate about the music and love to be part of your band so there is a tight connection there for us, especially as we are from England and these are the kids who made our band where it is today so we owe them everything we have, where as American fans are a bit more chilled back but they like to hang out and talk and tell you what songs they love and if you are playing them or not, it’s just generally a really cool thing to know that you’re fans really do care about us as a band.

You Me At Six Myspace: myspace.com/youmeatsix

Interview by: Lauren Wiginton