Perth Music

UK outfit Hadouken! are a band who sum up the genre-vaulting, scene-splicing, boundary-pushing spirit of music in 2008 and a band who can skip between grime, emo, drum’n’bass and euphoric rave in the space of a single chorus. That may seem confusing to some but music in 2008 is as confusing as it is complicated. Hadouken! causes division between trad-rock bores and the youthful, enthusiastic, attention-hopping minds of a younger generation.  Music For An Accelerated Culture is the debut release from the Leeds band and have been announced on the lineup to this year’s Splendour In The Grass music festival. Guitarist Dan Rice caught up with Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.

Click here to download the podcast of the entire interview. (9:44 - 2.2Mb)

Speaking about the release of their debut album, Music For An Accelerated Culture, Dan says “Yeah it has been a long process getting there. At the same time I think we are all glad, in retrospect, that we took the time to get it right and make the album that we wanted to make.”

I asked Dan to explain a bit about the history of the band and how they formed. “It started a couple years ago, I moved up to Leeds to go to university and met James (Smith, vocals) and kind of realized we had similar interests in music. We then worked together at a small record label called Surface Noise Records. James had always been producing stuff, UK garage and grime and then he started working on the track that would eventually create Hadouken! and generally stuff that had that grime influence but also reached a lot broader in it’s influences. We kind of decided that would be our playlist and we could make something out of that. We then got all the others on board, put the band together and the label became the home of Hadouken!’s first few releases.”

“We could only use our label for the very first couple of singles, which was good because it was really nice to be able to do that and not have to commit to anyone else so early on. But after that we kind of got to a size where we wanted to be fully focused on the recording and the live set and leave the label business to someone else. So we found a bigger label we were really happy with and got on with it.”

In November 2007 Hadouken! released a 12 track ‘mixtape’ that was available on USB only. I asked Dan how that came about. “Yeah it was USB only and was a mixtape of about 11 tracks of our stuff, remixes of our stuff and remixes that we had done of other people’s stuff. Part of the reason for it being USB was that we wanted to experiment and try out different things and part of it was simply that is wasn’t our debut album and we wanted people to realize that it was a piece of music that worked differently to that and that it was a mixtape. It was meant to be about us throwing together loads of different ideas and experimenting with different stuff and probably doesn’t have the cohesion the we wanted the debut album to have.”

With a sound that is very hard to define I asked Dan if he is able to say what type of music poeple can expect from Hadouken!. “Hopefully it’s naturally a mixture of the different genres everyone in the band listens to rather than sitting down at the start and going ‘we are going to combine this and this and this and make something new’ because I think that is kind of contrived and doesn’t really work out. I think it is a natural combination of what we all grew up with really.”

“We are really into it, it’s kind of been our first opportunity to play to crowds that are our age in the two years we’ve been going” Dan said about playing the many festivals around the world. “We’ve only done the odd support slot for other bands and spent most of our time doing our own tours so getting out and doing the festivals is great, just to play to people that either don’t know who we are or know a couple of tracks or know the name. It gives us time to try and win them over. None of us have been to Australia before so we are really excited to come over for the first time and see how the tracks go down and see what sort of thing people are into.”

Tour Dates:
Sun 3rd Aug - Splendour In The Grass Festival, Byron Bay
Wed 6th Aug - The Forum, Sydney (All Ages)
Thur 7th Aug - Hi Fi Bar, Melbourne

Music For An Accelerated Culture is out now. For more info on Hadouken! visit www.hadouken.co.uk

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Touring, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.