Saturday 6 April 2013

The Minx - Interview

The Minx are an exciting new five-piece band from Manchester.  They released debut single No Friends in July last year and have just finished a tour with Inspiral Carpets. 


They’ve already won over the hearts of Manchester scene luminaires such as Pete Jobson from I Am Kloot who described them as “the most exciting new band I’ve heard in years, a ferocious live proposition”, Tom Hingley, Clint Boon, John Robb and Mike Joyce.

Debut three-track single No Friends has already caused a stir around Manchester with its energetic punk approach and Chris Haddon’s no-nonsense vocals. They have transferred that to the live shows with the Inspirals, their effusive energy with Chris’s jack-in-a-box stage presence and a fierce rhythm section captivating the early arrivers.

The band are Chris Haddon on guitar and lead vocals, Paul Robinson on guitar and vocals, Steven Stuttard on bass, Kieran McIntyre on keyboards and vocals and Andy Evans on drums.
We caught up with them in Holmfirth before the last night of the tour to find out a little bit more about them, their plans.

 So tell me a little bit about the band and how you got together?

Chris : We’re a fairly new band, we’ve only been on the scene a couple of years.   I’m Chris, I sing. Andy plays drums and we went to nursery and primary school together, started messing round in bands ever since we can remember. We’ve been in The Minx for two and a half years.   We were at school in Wythenshawe and we met Paul the guitarist, who’s from Stockport, in college and got the band going.

Andy : Everyone was mates before we were a band. It’s quite unique and important for us.

Chris : We have a laugh as well and are good friends.

How did you get the Inspirals tour?

Chris : When we released the single No Friends, the Inspirals heard it and really liked it.  Steven Holt was tweeting about it and was asking about our other stuff so he was quite keen. He was pushing it to Clint (Boon) as well who then played the tracks on his XFM show and we got a call asking us if we wanted to do the tour.

You’ve done one single so far...

Chris : Yeah, it’s called Good Friends.  We released it in July last year and we’ve been gigging to promote that.  We’re in the studio next week and we’ve got an EP coming out in June.

So do you have an album’s worth of songs ready?

Chris : We’re in the studio for a week recording eight tracks. We’re not releasing all of them straight away, probably do a couple of EPs.  Then at the end of the year we’ll see where we are and probably have an album’s worth of set.
Do you write songs individually or do you write as a band?

Chris : We write as a band.  I might come up with an idea and we put stuff on top of it or we might have a jam.

Andy : It works well for us. The responsibility for coming up for a song is something we all do together.

Chris : Someone will spark the idea and the rest of us will throw it around.

If you had to describe yourself to someone who’d never heard you, how would you do it?

Chris : We always get labeled as a punk band. It’s very easy to get labeled.  Because we’re loud, we’re thrashy and we’ve got lots of energy, but we think we’re much more than that.  Part of it is the energy, we’ve got that new wave sound, we’ve got some pop sensibilities in there.

Andy : I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but there’s a lot of different genres coming from all the band. From The Housemartins, that people sometimes frown on, The Clash, Talking Heads and Ian Dury.

Apart from being in the studio, are you going to be playing any shows?

Chris : Like I said, we’ve got a week in the studio and then as soon as we’ve done that, we’re going to be booking dates for the EP release in June and then it’s going to be continuous throughout the year after that.   It’d be nice to try and jump on another tour as well.  This has put us up a notch, this is the first tour we’ve been on and we’ve been learning things like not going out and getting drunk the night before.

How far do you want to take this?  Do you want to be a really huge band or are you doing this for fun?

Andy : We want to be the biggest in the world, I think.

Chris : Definitely, we’ll put the hard work in and see where we get to.  We definitely aren’t doing it for a laugh.  We want to release music to be heard by everyone.  Maybe this time next year we’ll be closer to that after we’ve smashed this year.

Andy : We can be an important band. We’re not a political band at all in any sense, but we definitely have a voice and we say what we think in our songs. I’m probably biased because I’m in the band, but The Minx are a band I’d want to listen to.

The Minx are on Facebook (where you can buy the No Friends single), Twitter and Soundcloud.

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