The Blackout

By Claire White

With their fan base expanding with every tour they complete, it is no surprise that the anticipation for the bands new studio album is high.

The band recently set up a Pledge site to allow fans to contribute towards their new studio album and with overwhelming support, the band are set to release the album this year.

With their expanding fan base and new album to come, we can only predict big things for The Blackout in 2011!

We caught up with The Blackout’s vocalist Gavin Butler before the band’s show supporting You Me At Six at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange.

As it’s the start of a new year, do you have any ‘New Year resolutions’?

I never do the New Year resolution thing, cause I never stick to it! I think they are pointless things, because if you think you want to change something about the way you live, you should just do it any day when you think about it, not wait until the end of the year. It seems a bit silly to me, I’ve made no resolutions whatsoever, I’m too lazy!

Do you have any plans for the summer festival wise yet?

We are going to try and go around every and any festival we can! We’ve been put forward for a bunch, but we haven’t had anything back yet. We are waiting for the label and for the album to come out. If the album weren’t to come out for some unknown reason, then obviously the festivals wouldn’t pick us up, so I think they’re waiting to see that and if our tour schedule is all planned and one hundred percent locked in!

You recently set up a ‘pledge’ site, where fans could pledge on different items ranging from signed birthday cards to Christmas dinner with the band, what made you decide to do this and what do you think of the outcome so far?

We were in a position where we needed to do a record and if we waited any longer we would have just disappeared into obscurity.

At the time, Epitaph came back to us with another deal which we didn’t really want to take as they wanted to change everything, so we were like ‘we need to fund this album ourselves’.

We didn’t have the cash in the bank and we had just signed to new management and they said ‘we’ve been using this Pledge site for up and coming artists to get some money together and get in the studio to make a record’. We went down and met with the Pledge guys and we were a bit sceptical at first. We thought it was just asking for money, not actually selling things, but we went down and they explained the entire site and the entire process, what we get from it and what the fans get from it and we just thought it was a brilliant idea! As soon as we launched it the fans thought it was brilliant too and we wondered why we hadn’t done it anytime sooner!

Do you think you’d ever do it again or was it just the one off?

I think it was just a one-off for us. It was the right thing for the right time, I don’t think we would do it again. It was a great process though and I can see a lot of bands doing it!

Your fans are known as ‘The Riot Squad’ and you seem to have more of a tight bond between the fans and the band than others, is it important to you as a band to have a more ‘friend’ based relationship with your fans?

Definitely, we rolled that in with the Pledge thing as well to make it more of a personal experience. I think everyone likes to belong to something and it focussed our fans together a lot more. They met each other and people made friends through it and then obviously they come to the shows. It seemed a good idea to stick a name to the people who have allowed us to write and record this record and be in a band!

With the host of gigs supporting You Me At Six in December, how do you feel the shows went?

It went amazingly! Kinda gutted we couldn’t come up here the first time, but it’s snowing again outside right now! It was a blast, we’ve known You Me At Six for two or three years now but we’ve never toured with each other. It’s always been meeting up at festivals, if we managed to play the same day or whatever, so it was really cool just to hang out with those guys and meet Canterbury and Set Your Goals who were all lovely. It was a bunch of friends out, drinking too much and partying too much!

You seem to get a lot of praise for being especially good live, do you think that your audience interaction is what makes you different to other bands?

I think our love for playing live is what it is, cause I say it all the time in interviews; we were a live band first before we were anything and that’s always what we are going to be doing. We just enjoy doing it, we try and play every show like it’s no different to any other show. We recently played a small Barfly show in Camden mid-December in the middle of this tour and you give a show like that as much effort as you would a big show. You kind of just chuck your all into it!

You’ve recently announced a headline UK tour for March, what can fans expect from the tour?

Unrehearsed people! [Laughter] Obviously some new songs, we have a free download coming out soon and hopefully our single will be out by the time we play that tour as well. There will be a bunch of new songs that hopefully people know and that’s basically it! We haven’t actually planned anything yet, as we came straight off the You Me At Six tour, got snowed in for 6 days then ate and drank too much for the next while! Literally this week everything’s starting to pick up, that’s all we’ve been doing; sending emails and answering phone calls to get everything in motion for the next album!

What can we expect from the next album?

It’s a bit different, good different! We’re not ska-punk or anything [Laughter], we’re not too far away! There’s some classic “Blackout songs”! We’ve tried to push influences we haven’t really explored before, so I wouldn’t say there’s a change in direction, more of a broadening of horizons I’d say! If you’re a fan of The Blackout, you’ll still be a fan with this record!

Who do you predict will be big this year?

I think You Me At Six will just keep rising and rising until I don’t know…the king of the world or something!![Laughter] Oh imagine Josh king of the world! We played football earlier and he was already cheating! I don’t know, there’s so many awesome bands that have albums out this year as well, I’m hoping The Blackout [Laughter] will be! Selfishly going to say The Blackout!

The band head out on their headline tour this March and tickets are on sale now. You can also read our full review of the band by clicking here!