We caught up with three members of North-Eastern hardcore troupe Lavotchkin during their recent UK tour, to talk the advantages of support tours, crackheads, and creating their great new EP, ‘Widow Country’.
Planet Loud – Heya, how’s it going, enjoying some time in Brighton?
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Yeah, we had a day off yesterday, had a nice little chill. We’re pretty sleep-deprived from seven days away.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – And the crackheads.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – I Should probably explain that. The other day we stayed with some absolute crackheads… they were really nice people, but my god, we’re not used to being around people so full of drugs.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – They kept waking us up at every hour, for about seven hours.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – They woke us up at really mental times in the morning, it was savage (laughs). We’d rather just forget about that experience.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – It’s great being in Brighton for a while. We’ve been here a lot of times, and though I wouldn’t say that it’s like a ‘home away from home’ it’s somewhere that we’ve visited so much.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – It’s somewhere that we look forward to visiting, as opposed to many towns which are pretty shitty. It’s a nice place to visit.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – We don’t want to shit on any towns. Hull (laughs).
Planet Loud – How’s the tour been going overall then?
Lavotchkin (Ben) – It’s been awesome, really fun. It’s good to be away with two really good bands. We get on with both bands as well which really helps. There’s been pretty good turnouts too. The first show was supposed to be the show with a dodgy turnout, but it actually turned out to be not bad.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – It’s been averaging about thirty or forty, which is fair considering that most of these have been midweek shows. You can’t really expect too much. But yeah, it’s been fun, everything seems to be working out so far.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – There’s been a really good vibe.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – We’ve been on time for pretty much every gig, which is pretty rare. Hopefully everything’s going to be good, touch wood.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Every day so far, the weather’s been good.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – We’ve been slow cooking in the van for pretty much the whole time (laughs).
Planet Loud – For those as yet unaware of the band, could you give us a little background info?
Lavotchkin (Martin) – Well, we’re five guys from different parts of the North East; our drummer is from Darlington, and Ben’s from York, so though three of us live in the same city, the other two live forty-five minutes to an hour in different directions. We’ve been a band for about five years at the end of this month, playing shows. We’d all done little bands before but I think it was like the first proper band for all of us, though when we started we didn’t really have any kind of direction. You know those bands that start off and don’t have a fucking clue what they’re doing, they just want to be in a band? Well, we’re still that band (laughs). This is five years later. Whereas most people who’re starting to do well for themselves have done a couple of bands, and by their third one, they’ve got it right, we’ve just gritted our teeth and kept ploughing through it. As much as I wouldn’t say that we’re a particularly big band in England, if we split up tomorrow we’d have still achieved quite a bit. We’ve toured Europe four times, did about two weeks each time, and been out as far as Slovakia. I don’t know if a lot of bands haven’t done that because they’ve thought ‘that’s a stupid idea’, or whether we were just lucky, but not many bands have done it (laughs). We’ve played with a lot of cool bands, a lot of bands who we’re particularly into, and we’re still enjoying it, you know what I mean? We haven’t got this idea at the back of our minds that we’re going to be the next Gallows or anything, but some things in life you just do for the love. We all have jobs and have had full time jobs… we’re all about twenty-four, twenty-five now so if it’s anything, our band is about avoiding real life (laughs). That is our band, it’s sidestepping real life for three weeks at a time. I’m so stoked that I’m not going to be at work until mid July now, it’s the closest we get to a summer holiday. You know when you’re at school and you get your six weeks off? When you’re stuck in working full time, constantly, touring’s the only thing that you look forward to, the only proper break that you get.
Planet Loud – Awesome. So, the new EP ‘Widow Country’ is ready to drop, how did you find the experience of writing and recording it? It’s been a while in the making?
Lavotchkin (Ben) – It’s taken a while to write it. The recording itself was fairly painless: we recorded with our friend Jason Sanderson, who’s pretty much recorded everything that we’ve done, apart from the first EP. He’s just a good guy, he knows what he’s doing, and it’s the most fun that I’ve ever had recording-wise, trying out different techniques and stuff.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – It’s taken a while to get it out. We’ve been working out the right way to put it out, if you know what I mean, because we’ve done other releases before, but this time we feel like it’s a step up on everything that we’ve done previously. We’ve wanted to have a fair crack of the whip this time rather than just slinging it out, saying ‘ah, we’ve got an EP out, buy it if you want.’
Planet Loud – It’s worth taking time over.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – Yeah. We were hoping to find a label who would pay us a ridiculous amount of money, (laughs), but coincidentally we started looking about the time when no one was getting any money from anything! So, in the end it became more of a sensible idea, from the point of view of money and what was best for our band, to do it ourselves. It’s self released on Shark City records.
Planet Loud – You guys have been touring pretty hard of late, so how do find life on the road? Have you managed to find accommodation for most of the nights on this tour?
(all laugh). Lavotchkin (Simon) – It’s been tight, especially this tour because we’ve played cities where we’d not played before, so some of the nights we have turned up and had nowhere to stay. Relying on the kindness of crackheads to put us up (laughs).
Lavotchkin (Ben) – It’s been stretch free, none of the drives have been too bad. The longest drive we’ve had has been about six hours, and with five of us in the band it’s only really been a couple of hours each. It’s nothing like Europe, where you’re doing thirteen to fourteen hour drives.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – The van only goes at about sixty miles an hour, so it can be absolutely mind-numbing.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Even though it’s been nice to get the warm weather on this tour, the van is pretty much a greenhouse. You put a clean t-shirt on and you need a shower after about two minutes.
Planet Loud – Yeah. So, when it comes to writing, how do you guys tend to go about things? Do you write collaboratively, does someone take the lead in writing?
Lavotchkin (Martin) – Right. Well, to be fair we recorded a load of things at the same time, so we’ve got a couple of seven inches coming out that are already recorded. Basically, on the EP, because we were recording at speed, I wrote the guitar parts for it, and then we all put it together. I would ask the guys a lot, ‘what sort of thing do you think we should have here?’ If you listen to our EP…I wouldn’t say that I wrote all of the songs because I totally didn’t, there’s so much stuff that got put to it, ideas, opinions. Even if it’s an idea, like Hub said, that we should do an absolutely devastating, thirty second, fast as fuck thing, and then after talking about it some more we came up with the idea of doing an absolutely devastating, slow as fuck thirty second thing (laughs). We all completely say what direction we’re going for. We’re just about to start writing an album, and we’re doing all of the writing collectively.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Some of the new stuff’s going to have some real speedwagon riffs in I reckon (laughs).
Planet Loud – Do you know where you’d like to take your sound from here?
Lavotchkin (Martin) – More eccentric, but not in a quirky way. More of everything is the best way to describe it. Heavier, faster, slower….
Lavotchkin (Ben) – More dynamics in general.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – Maybe try a few new ideas. Go a little, not experimental, but y’know, you’ve got to explore all the different parts of your sound.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – I might get the pedal-board back out.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – It’s not going to be a happy record though. We’ll be keeping it reasonably dark.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – There won’t be any singing anytime soon. In music at the minute, there is no point trying to be a sellout band or anything like that. No one, not even the sellout bands, are making that much money. We’re strong believers in doing what we do, what we want to do. We don’t want to be too much like anyone else, we’re into all sorts of different music. We’ll do whatever we feel is best for everyone at the time. At the end of the day, we accept that we’re not going to be huge or anything, but we still want to be proud, and be able to con our kids in years to come that we were a lot cooler than we were.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – As long as we’re still having fun, it’s great.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – We’re our own worst critics, so at times pleasing ourselves is more difficult than pleasing anyone else.
Planet Loud – Have there been any standout shows on this tour so far?
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Well, there have been no shit shows so far.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – People are picking up merch every night. We’ve had no shows yet where people have been looking at us like ‘what the fuck?’
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Usually when we go on tour, like any band really, there’s always a few stinkers. But so far, there’s been nothing like that.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – We’ll have to see how tonight goes. We’ve jinxed it now (laughs).
Lavotchkin (Simon) – Sometimes its nicer to be supporting someone, because if there’s no turnout for the show, we can say, ah well, it’s Throats’ fault (laughs).Nothing to do with us.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – It’s great to be away with two bands who are actually good. You play your show, but you get to watch some really cool bands too. We’ve toured before with bands who we haven’t gotten on with, and that’s tough.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – There’s actually only been one really, but we’re not going to name them (laughs). We generally get on with everyone. At least, we think we do. You might speak to some other people who’d say ‘we don’t want anything to do with them’. (laughs).
Planet Loud – How have you found the general reception to your music around the UK?
Lavotchkin (Martin) – It seems that we’re either really loved, or really hated. We’ve seen a couple of reviews which have said ‘this is the worst thing ever, it’s emo in the vein of Enter Shikari and The Used’ (laughs). It’s polarised. At the end of the day we’re not going to say, ah yeah, you think we’re really shit, so we’re going to stop tomorrow. We’d rather have some form of reaction than no reaction at all.
Lavotchkin (Simon) – I don’t think that we’re particularly hard to get, as a band. We’ve got no hidden agenda, we just like writing songs and playing them, having a laugh. That’s about it really. If people don’t like it for whatever reason then that’s up to them.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – Some bands that you come across are really quite business orientated, quite self aware and stuff like that. I don’t think that we’re really those guys. When we come on tour, ninety percent of the time is just fucking around. Obviously there’s still that ten percent of us that is the serious side, not wanting to shoot ourselves in the foot over anything.
Planet Loud – You’re doing it for yourselves?
Lavotchkin (Martin) – Yeah. We’re not going to come out with the next record, having big blonde fringes (laughs). You’re not going to see us in eyeliner.
Planet Loud – (laughs), Cool. What’ve you been playing in the van lately?
Lavotchkin (Ben) – Ah, everything. I know we’re a hardcore band, but we all love everything. If you look at our IPods…
Lavotchkin (Simon) – There’s as much hardcore on ‘em as anything else.
Lavotchkin (Ben) – We’ve had the new Coliseum record, the new Burning Love record. The new Trap Them EP. But then there’s been a bit of Hot Snakes, Aesop Rock, Hot Water Music, Bloc Party. We do listen to all sorts.
Lavotchkin (Martin) – We’re not haters at all, we like everything. Some people get into ‘the new thing’ and cast off the thing that they liked before, but we’re not like that, we just keep getting into new stuff and still like everything that we’ve liked along the way. We’re open. So if you see us touring with bands who don’t play hardcore, it’s usually because we genuinely do like their music. If we can get away with playing with them, we’ll play with them. We’re not bothered, we’re not pretentious people in the slightest.
Planet Loud – Great, thanks for your time guys.
Lavotchkin – Thanks.
Interview by Rob Sayce
