Japanese Voyeurs

By Ellie Gaudiosi

After spending the last year playing shows with various bands, such as Young Guns and Rolo Tomassi, Japanese Voyeurs kicked off 2011 with their very own headline tour of the UK, which then led in to the Rock Sound Exposure Tour, alongside The Xcerts and Dinosaur Pile-Up.

We managed to catch up with the band at The Cockpit in Leeds, on the Rock Sound tour.

How’s your voice now after you had to pull out of a couple of dates on this tour?

-Its fine, the thing is it just can’t hack doing that many shows in a row. So it’s just like, in the past we’ve hoped for the best and sort of gambled and sometimes it works but this time it didn’t work. We had to pull out of some of our own ones and then with this one we just realised I wouldn’t be able to do that many shows in a row.

Other than that, how’s the tour been?

-It’s been amazing, yeah.

What do you most like forward to about being on tour?

-I like playing the most.
-Yeah that’s definitely the highlight!
-I really enjoy lugging all the gear out personally; I think that’s the best bit.
-What?
-When you lug all the gear out.
-Oh yeah, I look forward to that.
-I look forward to that, carrying shit around.
-I love sitting in the van.
-It’s fun when you get to meet people who have come down and really like what you’re doing.
-I like selling merch to people. [laughter].
-A tour like this is really good though because we’re friends with everybody on it so it’s like a really nice time.

If you could tour with any band, who would it be and why?

-Down, because they’re awesome.
-I’d say Acid King because even though they’ve been going for twenty years or something they’re still going and I think it would be fun. I think they have a lot of diehard fans and that’s always quite fun.
-I’d be scared to tour with any of my heroes or anything like that in case they turned out to be knob heads. I’d rather keep them on their pedestal.

If you could describe the sound of your debut album, Yolk, in three words, what would they be?

-Really fucking loud! [laughter]Even when it’s quiet, it’s really fucking loud.
-Very strong beast.
-It is good [laughter]
-Which one are we running with?
-All of them.
I liked ‘it is good’.
-Yeah, it is good.

Which one song from the album would you urge someone who has never heard of your band to listen to and why?

-[pause] Ooh, tricky one.
-I guess Smother Me.
-Smother Me is quite a good one anyway I think, because it’s quite representative of what we’re doing and possibly what we’re gonna be doing more in the future. There are some songs on the album that we still love but that we wrote quite a long time ago now so I think that that one’s more indicative of what we’re kind of, in to doing really.
-Yeah, Get Hold as well. That’s kind of got a lot of elements as far as the sort of, nicer melodies and stuff combined with heavy, more brutal aspects.

How did you find going over to America to record the album?

-Well, we recorded it in Canada in Vancouver and mixed the album in America. It was wicked.
-Super ace.
-A surreal experience.
-We got to spend some time in the woods for a bit as well because we did the pre production in a log cabin in the woods and we got locked away there for a little bit, just to sort of, go through all the songs and tidy everything up and work things out. That was pretty awesome and we went in to the centre of Vancouver to actually get the job done.

Seeing as though this is the Rock Sound Exposure tour, which other upcoming bands would you predict to be big this year?

-The X-certs.
-Other bands [laughter]Any of the others!
-They’re the only band I like!
-Mine and Johnny’s other band. Definitely.
-You’re in that band, you can’t say that band! [laughter]
-There’s lots of bands that I like that I don’t think will be big though, like there’s a band called Dope Fight who we love, they’re amazing, but I can’t imagine them being big in a commercial sense.
Are there any that you think people should just check out and listen to?
-Yeah, they’re amazing, Dope Fight. I recently got in to Human Fly who’ve been around for ages but I just never heard of them. They’re a Leeds band aren’t they?
-Yeah, yeah. And These Monsters as well, they’re good friends of mine. They’re amazing and they’ve been slogging it out for too long. They deserve a break.

What else can we expect from you in the future?

-More of the same [laughter]. Touring, music.
-Lots of surprises! Secret surprises coming up!
-Who knows what we’ll be doing next, we don’t even know!
-My beard will probably grow a bit longer. Bigger beard.
-I might grow a beard [laughter].
-Do you think you ever will, actually?
-We’ll see.
-Does your brother have a beard?
-He’s got some sort of thing going on, not really a beard, it’s kind of selective bits. [laughter]

The band’s debut album, Yolk, is due for release later this year. The first track to be released from the album is Smother Me, which is available to download for free from the band’s MySpace.