There’s a very pressing issue that The Wytches have to deal with before the interview at The Joiners even kicks off: they’ve got to figure out how to keep the window open. The previous attempts have resulted in the window eventually shutting and given the blistering heat outside, it’s not ideal to have a shut window.
It’s bassist Dan that’s been tasked with trying although both Gianni (drums) and Kristian (vocals/guitar) supervise whilst shouting suggestions at him. “Use the bin!” Gianni insists despite there being bars on the window to prevent things like, say, bins ending up outside said window. Kristian on the other hand has a far more sensible suggestion of a folded up piece of paper– which ends up doing the trick.
“It’s like we’re The A-Team… Or something.”
This particular A-Team, more commonly known by the moniker The Wytches, are a trio that formed in Brighton in the not too distant past of 2012. Though they all have routes in music from a much earlier age; thanks to the ‘dead towns’ that they all came from originally. “I guess the general gist of it is that we all came from places where music didn’t happen and you were just left to entertain yourselves rather than in those bigger cities where there’s loads of stuff going on. You kind of just had to figure your own thing out which in our case just making music. That’s all we really ever cared about.” Kristian explains, a mentality shared by both Gianni and Dan: “We all came from places that kind of made us want to leave I guess? Made us want to be musicians.”
It was these dead towns that drove the members of The Wytches down to the bright-light allure of 7Bit’s favourite city, Brighton. “I met Dan in an all night, gay strip club…” Gianni begins, before the band erupt into riotous laughter and tell the real, “less interesting” version of events. Gianni and Kristian already knew one another from Peterborough and so, upon relocating to Brighton to attend university formed a band and advertised around campus for a bassist– an advertisement that Dan saw and responded to. “He was the only one that replied.” Kristian explains and Gianni jokingly adds that they “had no choice about him really“.
Despite not having a choice about Dan being their bassist, it was in fact Dan who named the band– though in the beginning it was just a The Witches which ended up being changed to The Wytches to increase their visibility on Google. “We just wanted it to be one of those standard sort of names, y’know? Like The Hives, The Vines… So we wanted to be like that really; not like the bands themselves but just to have the same title. Just keep it short, not something hard to say… Though I guess it is hard to spell.” I can’t help but be intrigued as to how it is hard to spell– it is, after all, only a one letter substitution. “Someone spelt it with an extra ‘h’ the other day– like Whytches.” Kristian explains and amusingly gets rather worked up about it, “I mean you don’t spell which with a ‘t’ would you? So why do you put ‘h’s where they don’t belong? You shouldn’t spell that sort of witch with a h– there’s nothing out there like whitch is there? So how do people end up doing it?”
“Alright, shut up Carol Vorderman.” Gianni jokes to shut Kristian’s spelling tirade down. “Oh who’s that new one on there? She’s a right babe…”
So line-up sorted and band name sussed, The Wytches played their first show a mere couple of weeks later at Islington’s Buffalo Bar. It sounds a little hasty, but all the band members already had vast experience in previous bands– mainly in the more hardcore region of the spectrum– which has very much given the band a united work ethic. “We all have this proper DIY mentality. [In the sense of] the music is and that we’ll just do and play anything… And that we want to get out there and tour. Because yeah, we just have a strong, hardcore way of thinking about things because that’s how we started and that’s all we knew” Gianni explains and both Dan and Kristian agree; though when I suggest that perhaps the motto of The Wytches should be ‘Do It Yourself’ I get told that they already have a motto, although no one seems to agree on that… Kristian suggests that it’s ‘No Fascists‘ whilst Dan is all for ‘Get the tinnies in‘ and Gianni goes for a more ambitious ‘Generation Voice‘.
Despite all being in hardcore bands previously, their latest endeavour is in a completely different soundscape. Their releases so far to date suggest that The Wytches are settled in the psychedelica underbelly– where there’s more of a darker, blackened edge running along the blissed-out moments. The band themselves describe themselves as ‘surf-doom’, a label that has confused many but when Kristian explains it– it makes far more sense. “It’s like doom metal and like doom rock. With like riffs and stuff but it’s still a little echoey like the surf music. I guess that’s just what I think of our guitar sounds really. I mean it sounds like maybe we’re trying to be a little subversive with our genres but we’re not… That’s pretty much just how we’d see it and how we describe it. It’s riffs and like slap echoes and stuff like that… I mean they’re quite similar too because they both go by very similar scales like the Egyptian scale. It’s like any sort of dark bands kind of formula so they all end up matching up.”
Their first release, ‘Digsaw‘, perfectly exemplifies the ‘surf doom’ sound and is positively littered with the DIY hallmarks (the video is almost a dead giveaway). Whilst the verses have the psychedelic sprawling guitars whilst the choruses lead to a much more ferocious and brutal affair; something that sent the bloggers into a frenzy when it first surfaced online. “We just kind of put ‘Digsaw’ out there pretty quick, I mean we didn’t really have a strategy for it or anything… We just did it.” Dan explains as a quick surface guide to the process, which Kristian then expands upon:
“We just had a lot of confidence in them already. If you want to do these sorts of things then you have to be confident about it so that’s what we felt about those songs and the associated imagery and so we just decided that we liked it, we’d worked hard for it and we were happy with it so… I mean, with Digsaw I kind of knew exactly how I wanted to go about it. Like go and do a video which just kind of looks like we sound and still people could grasp that it’s sort of a new band and yeah, like there was no financial input or anything. It was just like… maybe shit I guess? But we liked it.”
After the buzz it generated The Wytches found themselves with management and producers for their next release ‘Beehive Queen‘ with AA-side ‘Crying Clown‘; something they admit has somewhat impeded on their DIY ethos and they’ve found it difficult to come to terms with. “Beehive Queen we’re not as happy with the amount of input we had with it. I mean, before we produced ourselves and did the video ourselves. With Beehive Queen it ended up being recorded somewhere else, we had a director…” Kristian begins but Dan seemingly summarises it with one sentence: “It was easier to do but it was sort of harder for us to get in to it.”
However when discussing their recording experience of ‘Beehive Queen‘ it does turn out that things weren’t quite as bleak as the band first like to make out. “[We recorded it with] Ian Watson [he] definitely understood us as a band. We’d been to a couple of other studios and it was more complicated and talking about bass tracks and overdubs and stuff. But with them we went in and did one bass track, one drum track, one guitar track, one vocal track and then a percussion track and then done. I didn’t even go in to the studio on the second day, I was too hungover.” Gianni starts although Dan disagrees with that saying that he was the hungover one. “That was the night that Dan shat in a garden.”
‘Beehive Queen‘ also has one of the most impressive artworks of the year; it’s ludicrously trippy and undeniably unique; perfectly representing the band themselves. “The artwork is done by a friend of mine called Samuel Gull, he does illustration and he’s at university at the moment. He’s a very creative thinker, moreso than anyone else I know. So I knew that he’d just have his own kind of visual understanding of our band, moreso than what we can think of. He’s just this great visionary. So I just didn’t tell him anything and just didn’t tell him anything about what we wanted or what we needed to see… He just did it. It’s a painting too as well.” They’ve also recently had Gull design the first lot of merch, creating possibly my favourite band t-shirt to date.
It’s at this point that The Wytches tour manager and friend, Luke, heads off to get some supplies. Kristian, who has spent the entire interview drinking coffee coke sends him off with the request to buy some more (“All he drinks is coffee” Dan reliably informs me) whilst Gianni has to deliberate between which variety of Fanta (he goes for Icy Lemon) and then picking a backup– and Dan creates no fuss with just sticking to Pepsi Max. Before he leaves he dishes out the fortune cookies and they open them. Luke’s says: ‘your hard work will soon be rewarded‘ which makes everyone chuckle as Luke’s currently working as “a lackey for free“. Kristian’s reads ‘treasure your possessions‘ which seems eerily well timed considering not only 48 hours before the band’s guitars were stolen.
We all delicately skim over the issue of the stolen guitars and instead focus more on the touring in general. This trip out The Wytches have been supporting fellow newcomers to the scene Drenge though previously they’ve been with the likes of METZ and Death Grips. Despite the hiccup in Birmingham, they’re enjoying the experience because “all we really wanted to do was tour” and how both Kristian and Gianni want to avoid going “back home, back to normal.” Dan however is more open to the idea of returning home as he’s married and not a self-confessed bum like Gianni (and Kristian gets roped in to the comment too).
“We want to tour, tour, tour… Tour until you kill each other basically.” Gianni says with a surprising level of not being bothered by the idea of wanting to kill his bandmates. Kristian agrees adding: “I think because you’re so prone to becoming tired or getting homesick when you tour that if you do the 4 days on tour, 4 days off it’s just difficult for you. But if you just do like 2 months solid your brain is so much more in that place where you can cope. You’ll get past the point of wanting comforts and things and be alright with the road. We want to do that. We long for not having the comforts and things. I feel like I should embrace being a bum. Embrace not showering and stuff. But I can’t cope without brushing my teeth, you need to do that. Oh and I brush my hair, not that you can tell because the wind makes sure of that.”
A few weeks prior to this tour starting, The Wytches also found themselves on The Great Escape bill– playing two shows, one at The Mesmerist and one at The Haunt on the NME Radar stage. Being a ‘Brighton band’, Kristian confesses that it meant a lot for them to be included in the line-up, though the NME stage was not so much to the band’s liking: “For me it was a sort of closure. I went on holiday last year with my family whilst the great escape was going on and I got really sad that we didn’t get the opportunity to play it… And that I didn’t get to go either because I was away. Yeah, so it acted as a bit of closure that I came back and was able to do it this year instead. Also we hadn’t played a festival yet so it was our first. The NME stage though was a bit weird, it seems a bit over the top. I mean it was sold out and there were queues out the door to get in but it was mainly just the industry types.”
“It was nice to be included on the NME line-up and it was an alright show, but the show the night before in The Mesmerist was amazing. It was my favourite, maybe 20 times better.” Gianni adds, although when I inform them that a few of us queued from 4pm to get in to The Haunt it seems to soften their opinion a little.
As the interview draws to a close, it comes time to look to the future of The Wytches which currently looks extremely bright. In the near future there’s discussion of doing an EP (potentially for August, although this looks like news to some of the band) and they also aim to tour Europe. There’s also mention at starting a petition for bands to boycott Birmingham– though that’s understandable given the circumstances. In the long run though, Kristian is a bit more philosophical…
“Just not to be one of those hype bands that just explode and slowly fall down in pieces. Like we don’t want to be one of those big explosions, we don’t want to end up as the rubble after. We just want to keep on the steady gradient in which our band just gets better as time goes on. We don’t want to be a big, talked about band for a couple of days. We just want to end up being really consistent in what we put out. Making sure that everything we put out is good and at the same time releases are steady so there’s not like 5 years apart if our first one does well and we just fuck off for a bit with the money. We just don’t want to fritter away or anything.”
“I’d quite like to get addicted to heroin or something… Maybe smack. Actually, don’t put that, my Mum might read this and think I actually am and set up some sort of intervention already.” … Whilst Gianni is not.
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