Go: Audio are in the middle of their first headline tour and, ahead of the release of their new single, Planet Loud caught up with the band to find out about their meteoric rise to fame.
Planet Loud – Congratulations on selling out your first headline tour!
Go:Audio – Thank you!
Planet Loud – What’s been the best way of getting your music out to the masses?
Go:Audio – Myspace definitely. Online has definitely been our biggest achievement. Without Myspace we wouldn’t be where we are now. It’s insane how many people and traffic we get through the site. It’s such an easy way of getting our stuff out to fans. Kids love it, they all have their own profiles, they can put your music onto their page which means their friends can check out your music without having ever heard of the band.
At the beginning I was adding literally clicking and adding hundreds of people, but when you start the momentum its really strange – before our friends requests would be empty but then suddenly people would be adding us. Since our last single we had about 400 requests a day! It’s getting hard, we always try to reply to people on the site, but if we send out a bulletin we’ll get over a hundred messages straight away – you’ll reply to the top one, you’re about to go to the one underneath, but by then you’ve got a load more messages and its jumped down. It’s weird not writing back to everyone, we have to write to them, because the reason we’ve got here is because of the kids, without them we wouldn’t be here.
Planet Loud – I noticed you have a MSN/hotmail address that fans can contact you on…
Go:Audio – It hardly gets used anymore because it becomes so insane. When Made Up Stories was being released we did a web chat, well basically I [Zack] broke my knee so I’ve been at home a lot, I logged onto chat and my computer crashed!
Planet Loud – Do you think it’s important to have such a strong link with your fans?
Go:Audio – Oh yeah. For this tour in August we’ve set up a meet and greet a couple of hours before the gig starts. We get people into the venue, meet them, take pictures with them, whatever they want because it’s all down to them where we’ve got to now. We’ve just released tour dates in November and we’ve got a number of VIP tickets that went on sale 24 hours before the rest which allows people into the venue an hour before doors open so they can see sound check and cause havoc.
Planet Loud – You recently played with McFly, how was that?
Go:Audio – Absolutely amazing actually! It was like a forest tour, as these outdoor fields – we’re doing 6 altogether and we’ve done 2 so far and they’re absolutely insane as we were on 2 hours after the doors open so the venue is full to capacity – 6 or 7 thousand. Everyone was in to us as well because McFly were nice enough to send out a bulletin about us to give them a heads up.
Planet Loud – Who else have you supported on tour?
Go:Audio – We’ve supported a lot of bands over the past year; Secret Handshake, Hellogoodbye, (that was awesome!), Scouting For Girls, Zebrahead, Bowling For Soup, Self Against City, a lot of American bands who are just trying to get started out like us. We’re still hoping to do some more over the coming months as well as our own tour!
Planet Loud – Who was your favourite to support?
Go:Audio – I’d say Scouting for Girls because we know them anyway, they’re on the same label as us, their fans were brilliant to us and every single night was great as we were able to gain a lot of fans ourselves.
Planet Loud – Seeing as your music jumps between pop and rock, do you think this helps your rise in popularity?
Go:Audio – Yeah, definitely. It’s great; touring with Scouting for Girls is different to touring with Hellogoodbye or Zebrahead and so you get both sides of genres fans liking us, so we’re doubling our exposure.There are people on the rockier side of things that don’t like us because of how poppy we are, especially now we’ve supported McFly but at the end of the day we play all our instruments we write all our own songs, it’s not manufactured and its brilliant if you can appeal to both. I haven’t been able to play any of the McFly gigs [because of breaking my knee] so I’ve only done the rockier side of gigs, but I think its great we can appeal to both sides from what I’ve heard both types of gigs can be mental. We’re playing with Fightstar which I think it amazing because I really like them, and they’re obviously quite heavy but look where he [Charlie Simpson] came from.
Planet Loud – Who influences you?
Go:Audio – A lot of American pop rock. There aren’t many English bands we have drawn inspiration from – it would be cool to say something like The Cure but it has been a lot of American stuff. For instance Josh likes electro, auto tune type stuff or dance music. Then there are bands like Blink 182 – the first time I heard Dude Ranch and Dammit I fell in love with it, then when they did What’s My Age Again I absolutely loved it. Also bands like The Eels, All American Rejects, Daft Punk and Boys Like Girls, who have only recently come out over here. A lot of it is very catchy. I also like bands like Taking Back Sunday, especially their early stuff. You don’t obviously hear it in our music but everything we listen to influences us a bit – you can’t just listen to one band and be influenced by them because you‘ll most likely sound like them – like, if you just listened to Blink 182 you‘d end up sounding like Blink. Oh, and I like jazz too! It’s funny because when we start writing songs it’s usually just with an acoustic guitar but then we quickly start thinking how we could start mixing them with beats and it just progresses from there.
Planet Loud – How do you feel about being nominated for the Kerrang! Awards?
Go:Audio – Absolutely amazed! We never ever thought about ever getting one. Kerrang! have been brilliant to us and supported us really well on the TV and radio and in the magazine. It’s going to be a lot of fun on the night; we’re going up against Elliot Minor which will be interesting – we know them and they’re good guys but I’m sure there will be a bit of friendly banter going on! This is going to be our first awards ceremony and it’s probably the best to start off with!
Planet Loud – Why no bass player?
Go:Audio – Because we’re quite into our electro – when we first started years and years ago we did a lot of writing and didn’t have a drummer, so we’d use one of those little electric drum machines and bass lines on the computer so they were really punchy and tight. When we properly started playing and writing we did try out with a proper bassist but going from the synthetic sound to a real player we just started to sound like a normal band, no offence or anything it did sound good but it just wasn’t “our” sound and was rather overpowering, just a bit too much. Going back to the synthetic sound with a real drum beat gave it a real dance-pop-rock type feel rather than being a normal band.
Planet Loud – How long have you been going for?
Go:Audio – 4 ½ years ago – literally at first it was just a writing thing in my brother’s bedroom with James. I know it sounds quite cheesy but it took us ages to get the right songs to want to go gigging -we had no inclination to want to go gigging at the beginning until we had song that we were really happy with. We just did acoustic gigs at the beginning because we couldn’t afford the backline. It was a good way of doing it really because it broke the song down to the bare minimum without the effects and gave us a taste for live gigs.
Planet Loud – How were you signed? Was is difficult getting noticed by major labels?
Go:Audio – It is so hard to get a record deal and we’re so lucky to have one. There must be hundred and thousands of bands out there in the world, it really is partly down to luck – you obviously have to be ale to play some songs too! We played loads of gigs, more and more people began to hear about us and got interested, but the main thing we did was send out hundreds of cds to people which eventually got us a manager. That’s the most important thing you can do when you’re in a band trying to get signed, honestly! If you get a manager who’s plugged in and knows people in the industry it can make your life a lot easier; you could be the best band in the world but if you’re not playing in front of the right people, its all about the right people in the industry! You could be the best band in the world but if you’re not in the right place at the right time then you’ve not got a chance. We were so lucky to get a good manager who got us a showcase that at the time someone from the record label was at and they likes us and they knew Howard [our manager]. You just have to keep going, increase your chances of being seen but the most important thing is to get a good manager.
Planet Loud – You were called The Vacancy… why did it change? Any reason for the choice of band name?
Go:Audio – We would still be called the Vacancy but there’s an American band also called that who have an album exported over here. If a band’s already released something and is still going then they have the rights to the name, so we had to change. For about 5 months we didn’t have a name whilst we were writing songs and eventually we got sick of not having one – Go:Audio is completely random Josh like the idea of a colon! We weren’t taken by it immediately but we though yeah, its pretty good, it’s a bit weird so people will probably ask us about it!
Planet Loud – Your Album is due out in August…?
Go:Audio – It was meant to come out late August, but it’s now been pushed back to later on in the year mainly because we thought we needed to release another single to back it up before it comes out. Just to help give us a bit more coverage.
Planet Loud – How long did it take to make the album?
Go:Audio – Probably about 5 months, just the recording part, something like that. We did it in 3 parts- normally a band has got all the songs and they might be recording for about a month, but we had about 4 songs, went into the studio, recorded them, then went back to writing, went back in to record another 4 songs then back to writing again. We had a set amount of songs due to the cost of studio time, if we didn’t have the songs there’s no point having the recording time, otherwise the costs do add up.
Planet Loud – Did you enjoy the process?
Go:Audio – Yeah, it was really chilled out. We were really un rock and roll -we’d start at around 8 in the morning then would work hard until about 10. I know someone else in a band who wouldn’t start until about 3 in the afternoon!
Planet Loud – What are your plans after August’s UK tour?
Go:Audio – We have a November headline tour planned at bigger venues than the August tour, like double the capacity, and hopefully another support tour which is unconfirmed at the moment.
Interview by Kim Allen
