Sheffield foursome RedFaces - a Little Indie One To Watch 2018 -
kick off the year with the follow up to ‘Take It Or Leave It’, new single ‘Messed Up Feeling’ released last week. Recorded at Miloco’s The Pool in London and produced by Carey Willetts (Athlete) ‘Messed Up Feeling’ is described as "a driving, monster of a song, with nods to their RnB influences".
Who are you?
I’m Isaac White, I play bass guitar, bit of synth, keyboards and sing a bit in RedFaces. Harry Lyon sings lead vocals and plays some guitar, Charlie Yapp plays drums and sings a bit too, and Ryan Laycock plays guitar.
Tell us something about yourself and how you came to be where you are today?
We’re from Sheffield which obviously everyone raves about being indie central in the UK. It is pretty good for music though. Me, Harry and Charlie all grew up together in school and all loved music so started a band. Nothing serious at first it was just playing poorly executed covers for school gigs and parties. But soon we started writing our own stuff, and we got gigs in Sheffield city. We must have played everywhere from West Street Live to the Leadmill. And slowly we gained some “fans” (people who probs feel sorry for us so just continue coming to our gigs) so we started writing more and more songs and playing more and more places and here we are today.
Give us an idea of your musical style and influences.
We collectively have a pretty widespread taste, but fundamentally we were bought up on classic sort of bands from the 50s, 60s and 70s - I’m a massive Beatles fan and to be honest everything I write has some sort of Beatles streak somewhere in it. But, yeah, we love all those bands like The Kinks, Beach Boys, Hendrix etc. We briefly got into the whole Britpop thing so obviously love Blur and Oasis. We also love a few 00s indie bands - especially Kasabian and the Strokes.
Now though our tastes have all sort of diverged a bit, I’m in love with psychedelic pop bands at the minute, like Tame Impala, Pond, Post Animal who really inspired me to look at different ways of writing and making music - it really opened my mind whereas many bands stay in the kind of “guitar” world listening to these bands really inspired me to listen to as many types of music as I can and it often incorporates itself into our sound in the end.
Charlie’s a lo-fi dude - he loves Rex Orange County. He loves the sort of bedroom, slackery sound mixed with some solid hip hop grooves. We all love each other’s taste in music and all our influences come out one way or another in our music.
Explain the production and writing process behind your songs.
That’s difficult because it can often be completely different every time. But really our songwriting centres around melody particularly. Lyrics are something we struggled with until these recent sets of songs but I think we’re starting to get the hang of it (hopefully???)
'Take It Or Leave It' was a fun one to write. We were working on some arrangements and demos and stuff and I had this kind of thumping bass line that I’d written whilst trying to imitate something of of Mark Ronson's latest album. I wanted something really groovy so I strutted around my bedroom with my bass until had something that grooved, and I couldn’t stop playing it. I’d actually forgotten it completely until I played it one day and Harry loved it and then we wrote the song around that groove. We were done in about an hour.
It’s called 'Messed Up Feeling'. It’s sort of about having insecurities and being indecisive in a relationship - which is something that we all face since we’re away a lot. But the song kind of says although there might be some shit times in life, we can pull through if we face it together sort of thing. A lot of our songs revolve around that - perseverance in the face of insecurity.
Harry had this little melodic chord pattern that was kind of sad in tone because of the lyrics. I guess the verse lyrics still are sad, but at the time I was listening back to my mum and dad's old record collection and there’s some amazing bass work on them. So I tried to imagine what someone like James Jameson would do, but through a really dirty fuzz. I didn’t even thing it’d work but it gave the song this killer groove and it just stuck.
Yes! We’ve got a few dates planned in April, as well as Liverpool Sound City Festival and the Neighbourhood Weekender so come and have a chat and listen to me ramble on EVEN MORE.
Sat 5 May – Liverpool Sound City
Sat 21 Jul – Tramlines Festival, Sheffield *Main Stage supporting NGHFB
Sat 28 Jul – Y Not Festival *Main Stage supporting Catfish & The Bottlemen
How's the rest of the year looking, plans-wise?
We’re kind of playing it by ear at the moment. We’ll probably release a few more singles this year - maybe an EP, I don’t know. We have loads of songs and are writing all the time, we’re just not sure what to do with them yet ! But we’ll figure it out.
Spotify is brilliant, Deezer, Apple Music and I think there’s a bit on Soundcloud. It’s sometimes on Tattoo fixers as well, which is nice.
What social media platforms can we find you on?
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