Following their entertaining and impossible to ignore set at this year’s Offset Festival (complete with yells of ‘stop walking you wanker!’ to passing spectators, enough ‘bad language’ to get the PMRC turning in their collective graves, and most importantly a series of choice cuts from awesome debut album, ‘Champions,) Planet Loud caught up with the four thoroughly nice blokes from Blakfish to talk ‘The money, the ho’s and the shows.’

Planet Loud – Hi Guys, thanks for your time. What did you make of today’s show?
Blakfish – It was good, cool. We hadn’t played together for ages, like about a fortnight, hadn’t practiced or anything, were just doing our own things for the last two weeks, and then we were like ‘shit, we’ve got to do the festivals.’ But it was good.

Planet Loud – Have you played any other festivals recently?
Blakfish – Yeah, we did Sonisphere in Knebworth, that was really good… we’ve been doing quite a few festivals around Europe also. We’re actually doing one later today in Birmingham, (laughs.)

Planet Loud – I see that you’ve got some UK touring lined up for the rest of the year…
Blakfish – Yeah, I think from now until December… The fifth of December? I think we’ve only got a couple of days out until then. We’re doing a short UK tour with a band called Bats soon too, which should be good.

Planet Loud – How does it feel to finally have the album out?
Blakfish – Well it’s taken ages to get it out… It was stressing us out, having this album ready in January, and six months later we still had to wait for it. It’s kind of worked out in our favour in many ways. The reaction’s been generally good… well; there was a certain 1/10 in the NME, but pretty good. Sonic Dice loved it I think, and the NME… Well, it’s not the kind of music that they would understand.

Planet Loud – Out of interest, do you ever find any trouble with hecklers? Judging by today’s show you might have a pretty novel solution to that…
Blakfish – We encourage it really. (laughs) It gives us something else to do… if we’re just playing and then are like (assumes ‘Fall Out Boy’ voice) ‘Thank you so much, goodnight’… that’s no good. This way they can shout stuff, and we can shout back… Sometimes we have a ten minute heckling session, where we shout stuff, and people throw things at us back. It’s all about getting a reaction. We like to think it’s entertaining, even if just for ourselves. Anyway… we’re all about the money, the ho’s and the shows (all laugh.)

Planet Loud – Regarding the future of Blakfish, can you see yourselves going on as long as, for example, people will still give you free beer?
Blakfish – I’d say so… as long as we can get fuel in the van, and get pissed out of our heads, but not be the band that has to get pissed out of our heads, we’ll probably do this until one of us dies. (hesitates…) I might as well knock it on the head now, get an office job… (laughs)

Planet Loud – To finish then, we’ll go with the old interview standard… Describe your band in three words?
Blakfish – … Probably tired, stressed and upset. (all laugh.)

Planet Loud – Cheers guys…
Blakfish – Cheers.

Interview by Rob Sayce