Great Escape: Interview with Bwani Junction

Listen to Bwani Junction and you’ll find yourself tapping your toe to Afro-Caribbean inspired tunes lined with funky guitar, bongo drums and stylish, out-there vocals in line with the music found in the warmer parts of the world – all in all, it sounds exactly like what one would expect from such an act, albeit with a little sprinkle of modern rock dashed over the top. So you might be surprised to discover that these four Edinburgh boys – vocalist Rory Fairweather, drummer Jack Fotheringham, guitarist Dan Muir and bassist Fergus Robson – are some of the youngest faces on the scene: but don’t say that to their faces.

Formed a couple of years ago and with a self-released debut album already under their belt, Bwani Junction are going from strength to strength – most recently finding themselves nominated for Scottish Album of the Year. Playing at Psychosocial at the end of the first day of Great Escape, they were able to get a great reaction from a crowd evidently exhausted after the first full day of the festival. Intense tracks like Feel No More leant a little more on their modern rock appeal, whilst more laid back, African-inspired tracks such as My Body, My Mind gave weary travellers a chance to relax and groove. They even took the chance to play some new tracks such as Civil War and a spliced cover of The Pogues’ Dirty Old Town and African hit Shauri Yako, mixing African-inspired vocals and a shoutier, guitar-fiddlin’ chorus to an endlessly climbing bassline and persistent bongos.

The band aren’t afraid to occasionally make a statement, and Today’s Crusades was an altogether more solemn number, encouragingly toe-tapping but sadder and more sentimental in theme – inspired as it was by the soldiers leaving local barracks to fight in wars, and a fraction of them failing to make it back home. But whether it was a downbeat anti-war message or cheerier, internationally cultured ska number, Bwani Junction received a warm reception and their latest award nomination is a sign that, for the band, the only way is up from here.

In the afternoon before their show at Psychosocial, we took some time to have a quick chat with them about working with producer Paul Savage, the expectations they feel they have to (or don’t have to) meet and the interesting theme of their debut album, Fully Cocked. They also discuss the unique artwork they hand out at gigs, and I contribute some of my own.

How would you characterise your sound?

All:  Ooh.

Dan:  It gets…it gets tricky. What other people say about it is that if Big Country were from the Soweto, so like African and Scottish.

None of you look as if you’d be influenced by that kind of music. You look like the average guys you’d see walking past in the street.

All:  Yeah.

So where did this big African influence come from?

Dan:  My dad managed this band called the Bhundu Boys from Zimbabwe – 80s, 90s, and some of the Noughties if you call them that – and I just grew up with them from day one. I was actually born in London as the band were based down there at the time and I just grew up with them: went to a lot of gigs…doing homework at sound checks and stuff. I grew up with them and Rise [Kagona], the guitarist, gave me my first guitar lessons as well and his techniques kind of passed down [to me].

It’s all been inspired by that?

Rory:  Kind of. As soon as Dan and his dad came into the whole scene…it wasn’t intentional for the sound to be like that. It wasn’t like we said ”oh we should set out to do this” – it’s what felt right at the time. When we first started off it wasn’t like that at all; old stuff that we recorded and kept underground was a bit more poppy and less Afro.

You have received a lot of attention and a couple of plaudits here and there [headlining the BBC Introducing stage at T In The Park last year and being main support for The Vaccines]. You’re only a couple of years old, so did you really expect that kind of reception?

Rory:  We didn’t expect that. It’s May now so it’s been…seven months since we released the album and there’s a lot more attention growing than we thought by now. So it’s been quite surreal.

Did that come with a pressure to excel?

All:  (unison) Nah.

Just keep doing what you’re doing?

Fergus:  We never signed to a record label so most of the pressure that artists come under would be from their label; you know, they’d say ’we need another album’ or ’we need another single’ or whatever…

Rory:  Just like this… [Waves debut album Fully Cocked around]

Fergus:  Yeah…because we do everything ourselves and the only person nagging us is Dan’s dad, the manager. [laughs]

Rory:  It’s been good that way because it means that whenever people want to come in to get involved its our business so it’s not like we’ve signed our lives away and we don’t have a choice if something has to happen. It’s been a good bit of pressure because it’s all been between ourselves and telling each other and pressuring each other.

So there’s no pressure to make it sound different, more mainstream, or to throw in another drumbeat or…I don’t really know how this works.

Rory:  (laughs) We never wanted to seem like we were doing something that was mainstream and we said to yourselves ’if people don’t like it then, whatever’…

Fergus:  Then don’t listen to it.

Rory:  Then don’t listen to it, yeah.

The album, Fully Cocked, which was out in November, did quite well [number 24 on the iTunes Alternative chart in its first week]. Really well received, sounds great; did you expect it to do as well as it did?

Rory:  We didn’t really know.

Fergus:  We never really thought about it. We were kind of just…wanted to get it out, we wanted to hold a CD with our name on it.

Rory:  We had a lot of stuff that we had recorded before but this was the first time we’d been in a proper studio with a proper producer.

And you had a hell of a producer [Paul Savage, who has worked with Mogwai, Franz Ferdinand, The Twilight Sad and other big Scottish bands]. How was it working with him?

Jack:  He was kinda…it worked well because he wasn’t too strict. He told us if something sounded shit, but in a nice way, and it was just a good environment to work in. It was a really creative stage as well because a lot of the tracks that went in we didn’t think we were going to put on the album and then he said ’why don’t you try something and do this with the track’ and we thought ’okay, we’ll give it a go’ – two of the tracks we didn’t think we we’re gonna put on there…

Fergus:  We dismissed them ourselves completely.

Rory:  After we’d given it some thought and jammed a bit and tried something new the result was great and we were really happy with how it actually sounded in the end.

Fergus:  He was a gentle soul. He would never say do this or do that, he’d say ’why don’t you try that or how about this, what do you think of blah blah’…

You’ve played a lot of festivals. But Great Escape is something of a ’non-festival’. Are you curious about the quietness?

Rory:  It’s a nice change. T in the Park was full-on: you got there and there were a hundred thousand people wading through mud and spew…I really like Brighton from what I’ve seen so far, it seems quite chilled. I’m excited. We don’t really know what it’s going to be like: mainly, we don’t know what the crowd’s going to be like.

Dan:  There’s this little second-hand shop, impulse buy on the jackets [indicates leather jacket], on tour…

It is a nice jacket. Will it become your tour jacket?

Dan:  Possibly. Don’t know what the buckle’s for though.

You are all really, really young. Has there been any point where you have thought ’I’m too young for this’?

Rory:  Three of us have been playing since we were about 12. We’ve been playing music in a group for quite a while now so it’s natural, and it’s nice. It’s great to properly focus on it…we decided when we left school we thought ’we could go to uni but that’s going to balls up’ as half of us chose different universities and we decided ’let’s take a year out and give it a shot.’

Fergus:  We wouldn’t have gotten anywhere anyway.

Fergus:  The one interview that Dan and I went down for, we turned up at the wrong tour guide group and then got pissed and ended up having a jam. We thought ’this is not going to work…fuck it, let’s just go back, meet the boys and just do the band’. [laughs] But yeah, being young we never really thought of ourselves as young because we get on better with older people, to be honest.

Rory:  We don’t want to feel like we should be influenced by older people just because they’re doing something different. We’ve kept our heads cool and just do what we do.

Dan:  It’s almost offended some people at gigs…other bands have guys in their late twenties and they’re supporting people ten years younger, which is really offensive for some reason.

“THIS IS AN INJUSTICE!”

Dan:  We haven’t earned our stripes.

Rory:  We won’t name names but it’s happened before and it’s quite obvious so it’s a little awkward.

Obviously you’ve been pulling out the stops to show it doesn’t really matter.

Dan:  It’s come to our favour because people will say something nice about us and then they’ll say like ‘and they’re only eighteen!’ and, y’know…

Age is just a number, right?

All:  (laughs)

You have the album out at the moment…what could potentially be next?

Dan:  The next album.

Fergus:  We’ve got some new songs…

Dan:  We’ll play a couple tonight.

Rory:  We’re releasing a single at the end of May and we’re hopefully going to get back into it with the second album, maybe in September…maybe play a lot of festivals, whatever festivals we can get over summer and then get back down to writing and recording the second album.

Fergus:  We’re quite keen to get back into the studio because we loved the recording process first time around – it was so much fun. We have that freedom to kind of do what we want, which is great.

What follows is an audio clip of the interview, in which I share a drawing with them to be handed out at a future gig, and the band have me examine the liner notes of the album. There’s a reason it’s called Fully Cocked.