Self confessed veterans of the road, Flood Of Red take a quick break in Bristol to chat to Brits and Pieces’ Alexa Jade. Now a six piece, the boys from Airdrie talk good gigs, bad gigs and Meatloaf.

Hey guys, thank you for having me! How many shows down are you now?
Calum: Well this is the eighth day and I think this is the 6^th show.

How’s it been going so far?
Calum: Yeah it’s been really great. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback and it’s been really positive shows.

Are you particularly excited for any show that’s coming up? Hometown, London etc?
Calum: The last couple shows are going to be interesting; London, Nottingham, York, Glasgow and Edinborough and I think all of those shows are going to be pretty fun shows to play, for sure. I think I’m more excited to get to the places we haven’t played before.
Jordan: I’ve stopped looking forward to each gig so I can suprise myself.
Jonny: Low expectations!
Jordan: I know but I don’t really want to be looking forward to a gig and there’s like 5 people there.

What makes a good gig?
Calum: It always helps when there’s a full crowd or if you’re friends are there. Always helps when there’s people singing back; good atmosphere probably makes a good gig.

Have you got a worst gig ever?
Calum: We’ve had a few bad gigs..
Dale: Maybe that time we played half a song with one guitarist because Sean fell out of a tree the night before.
Calum: We were playing hide and seek at Dales house, which is in the middle of nowhere so it’s pitch black. Sean fell out of a tree and fractured his wrist pretty badly so he couldn’t play. Then at the show the next day we got about half way through the song and the input ripped out of my guitar.
Jonny: Or the show on the Euro Tour, where we started, first song, and all the power cut out.
Calum: We’re veterans of the road so we’ve certainly had our fair share of bad shows.

How long have you guys been together now?
Calum: We’ve been Flood of Red just coming up for six years now.

Were you something before?
Calum: We weren’t anything in particular, we were a bunch of kids who met through a mutual love of skateboarding in high school. What developed from just something we could do as a hobby, shortly became something we actually really loved doing, that when we changed the name to Flood of Red. That was in April 2005 that we became Flood of Red.

So, the latest single is Little Lovers, and the video came out last month – who decided on the video?
Jordan: It was a friend, Mark Forrer who thought up the idea of making it a documentary style ‘drum club’.
Calum: It was sort of the premise of the video that we wanted it to be like Fight Club, with drums. It was Mark Forrer and Andy Kelham from Rock Sound who had the idea; we didn’t want the same washed out video that every band does. There’s so many bands now who have the basic ‘look cool in the video’ where everyone’s in some sort of fallen down building or dark room, with some cheesey ass story line going on. We wanted to do something that was interesting to ourselves and sort of break the mould.

So with the people in the video, it’s all about destressing, forgetting your worries; what do you guys do apart from the band to destress? Is there anything you guys particularly love doing apart from this?
Calum: We all still skateboard, well Sean doesn’t.
Jordan: A good night out, a good drink, a good hangout with friends.
Calum: I do like a lot of cartoons. It’s just one of those ways I like to chill out, and focus my energy on something else. And apart from the band, I always enjoy writing music, listening to music, it’s always good.

Whats everyones favourite band?
Jonny: Bruce Springstein, Meatloaf..
Calum: Collectively we all love Meatloaf. Huge, huge Meatloaf fans. One day we’re going to meet the guy and it’s just going to be one of the most beautiful experiences ever. But I think the cool thing about us is we’re all influenced by very different things, because there’s six of us in the band and we all have very different music tastes as well as a common music taste. And that’s one of the things that brought us together, especially growing up. But now we all listen to very different things, which I think its an advantage when writing music.
Dale: Plus if we all had a the same favourite band we’d end up sounding like that band.
Jonny: But, there’s never going to be a song where we sound like Bruce Springstein or Metallica. Unless we play a cover set. Our dream is to play a set of the Tony Hawkes 2 soundtrack, all the way through, and then at the end have a high score battle.

If you found out a celebrity had Flood of Red on their iPod, what celebrity would you want it to be?
Apart from Meatloaf!
Calum: I was going to say Meatloaf.
Jonny: Rihanna!
Dale: Beyonce. If we knew we were on Beyonces mind..
Calum: I think we’d definitely want someone in power like, Barack Obama.
Jonny: David Attenborough
Calum: Oh yeah he’s a huge inspiration. We would love for him to love us.

What are your plans for this year then? Are going to go back in the studio, more tours?
Calum: Well we’re going to come off this tour and then I think we have a rehersal space in Glasgow which we rent out like 24 hours a day more or less. So we’re going to get back in there and finish off writing for the second record. We’re been writing on this tour, we’ve been writing recently.. I’d say at the moment we have about 10 songs that are ready to be worked on, but we definitely want to give ourselves some more time, get some more songs in the bag and choose the best of the bunch.We want to maybe release another single before summer time and then do a smaller tour, and definitely want to get some more support tours throughout the year.
Jonny: Try and go as many places as possible.
Calum: We definitely do want to get in the studio, hopefully by summer time and try and get that second album out as soon as we can. We’re all really excited with the music we’ve been writing so it’ll be really good to get it out.  

Check out Flood Of Red’s latest single and video, Little Lovers, here.