-COLOUR are gearing up for the release of their new EP ‘The Famous Boy Making Things’.

The EP was co-produced by COLOUR and Dan Swift (Kasabian, Snow Patrol) and was recorded at the band’s COLOUR Studios on the northwest coast of England.

Ahead of its release, we caught up with COLOUR’s frontman James Tidd to delve into five tracks that influenced the release.

‘Another Day in Paradise’ – Phil Collins | Listen via Spotify
I really loved the structure of the melody in this tune, it was on heavy rotation at the time of writing the EP. The harpsichord or zither-type riff just sounds great and that style found its way into ‘Minus’ and into ‘Black’ too.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – Queen | Listen via Spotify
I mean… come on! Harmonies, crescendos…we love this stuff and it gets the blood pumping like nothing else. What we like about Queen is they have really impactful bits in their songs, they don’t shy away from technical music and yet you’ll struggle to find someone who doesn’t like them. It’s very hard to put harmonies in tunes, hardly anyone does them and, of those that do, they stick to standards. But Queen do and there’s nothing better than a crowd of people belting the same thing as loud as they can!

‘Find A New Way’ – Tune-Yards | Listen via Spotify
A really progressive original band with catchy great songs, of which there are very very few right now. There seems to be just torrents of bands directly lining up behind someone else’s sound – be original! We binge listened to this tune in particular at the time and love the harmonies and the sparse nature of the verses. The track made me sit at a laptop and write something that was fully dynamic. It had to be sharp, empty and subby in the verse and then explode into a multi lattice glitch rock thing in the chorus – that was Tune Yards’ influence.

‘Trndsttr (Lucian Remix)’ – Black Coast | Listen via Spotify
We have a very heavy glitch-hop, glitchy-electronica influence that feeds into the music, we all love it and this tune is a great example, the exploding synths just sat me down when I first heard it! This fed directly into the question/answer synths in the chorus and just made us produce the EP with very little reverb – clean and mean. Check it out – you’ll understand where I’m coming from!

‘Burning Down The House’ – Talking Heads | Listen via Spotify
Classic and undeniably cool. It’s attitude and melody style fed into a couple of the tunes. Another thing that I love about Talking Heads is that they’re that a cool kooky American band that never needed to be anything other than themselves. Their Lennon and Funk influences are clear, but still it was a perfect mix and we love them for sticking to their guns. As you can probably tell by now, we’re not fans of unoriginality which makes it difficult to exist in the current unsigned music scene. We’re just comforted by the fact that the best bands in history did it their own way, and if they can do it then that’s what we intend to do too!

You can watch the band’s latest music video for ‘Minus’ below: