While in Australia, most music fans discover bands the old fashioned way by venturing online or in their local record store, listening to the radio, or getting a recommendation from a friend, in the UK the legendary music mag NME towers like a mighty edifice over the industry.
There’s even a label for bands that gain notoriety through being featured in the mag, “NME bands”. Their careers tend to fizzle out quickly after one overhyped album, plenty of photo shoots, and maybe an appearance Glastonbury or Leeds, somewhere near the bottom of the lineup.
But Birmingham lads Peace are an entirely different entity. While the press has made much of their connection to the NME, the band never needed an industry rag to pull them up. As frontman Harrison Koisser tells Tone Deaf, the band practically spawned the current music scene in their hometown.
What’s more, the band don’t have a whole lot of time for arguments about influences and aesthetics. They’re more interested in writing tunes, requesting their label give them a billboard that says “What the fuck, Birmingham?” on it, or shooting a video where the entire band dances off a cliff.
The Birmingham Scene
“In my lifetime, when you were in Birmingham, it felt like you had to go to London, but we couldn’t really do that, so we just kept on playing.
“We tried to play gigs for promoters but it was kind of a really bad time when no one would come to gigs, no touring bands would go there unless they were really big, there was no music scene, and the promoters would pay you like 50p for every person that would go to the show.
“So we started playing in Dom’s house and when you’re playing in someone’s house, not a venue, and everyone can bring their own booze, and you’re starting to make more and more friends and people are inviting people, there was a bit of a buzz around the band.
“We were doing stuff that people could engage with, because nobody had any money. None of our friends had any money and we were giving them something to do.
The Buzz
“And then I guess we started playing in some of the club nights more, we were playing in like a techno club, and then the pub that was open till 6am, so word just spread about us. But there was no scene. There weren’t really any other bands, just us. A few of our friends got into bands later, but we were already on tour by then. I think the scene got amazing after we left, because after we got signed, everyone was like, “Fuck, we can get signed as well!” Now it’s got a vibe, people go to shows, there’s band popping up all the time.”
“The first I heard of anyone [from the press] coming to one of our shows was someone from the NME. He was married to someone from Columbia Records, but he reckons that’s not exactly how it happened. He reckons that we were on his radar before then. But from my perspective, I always thought that the NME were the first people to come see us, but I’m not sure if that’s necessarily true.”
That Billboard
“That was us just being 19 years old and being offered a record deal. You know, we had just been partying for four years with absolutely no ambition, just playing as many gigs as we could, having as much of a laugh as we could, trying to stay out of trouble, and they offered us a record deal and we were just like, “Get us a billboard!”
“Because we were feeling like that, we kept on saying, “What the fuck? How did we get signed? This doesn’t happen to a band from Birmingham.” It didn’t at the time. It did immediately after, everyone started signing bands from Birmingham, but at the time it didn’t happen.
“And we were just like, ‘Alright, we we’ll sign with you, but we want a billboard with ‘What the fuck Birmingham?’ on it and a big picture of us and we want our record deal printed in Comic Sans font.’ And they wouldn’t print the contract in Comic Sans font, but they did give us the billboard.”
The Tunes
“I’ll write the song, the melody, and the lyrics and the structure. I’ll go into it with a verse and a chorus and another verse or whatever, and I’ll always have a little bit of an idea of what the direction is because it started off in my brain. But it’s completely democratic, if someone wants to try something we’ll do it and if someone feels really strongly about something you do it.
“You have to respond to people’s passions and at the end of the day, there’s four of us in the band and if someone thinks it really needs to be one way, we all respect that and we do it, even if it contradicts an idea that I might’ve had as a songwriter, as long as someone’s genuinely passionate about something and not just being stubborn it’ll always happen.”
“All of the songs changed before ending up on the record. Even ‘Lost On Me’ was actually not disco-y at all – that was actually like loud rock and roll in the beginning. It was like balls out, really fast and loud. And when we got into the studio it just kept getting funkier and funkier until we ended up with the ‘Lost On Me’ that we have now. So that was quite a transformation.”
“You can shape a song to be whatever you want it to be, because my demos are so raw that then in the studio, you’re like, ‘This one should have a really upbeat drum beat, this one should be really loud’, but then someone’s like, ‘But why does it even need to have drums because the demo doesn’t have drums?’ It’s kind of just making your mind up. It’s like having a piece of Plasticine and you can mold it into so many different things and you have to eventually decide what it’s gonna be.”
The Influences Question
It’s quite funny, because this time around we were trying to make [the album] not sound baggy or Britpoppy. We were especially trying not to, but the danger is that we grew up going to proper nightclubs and I used to be into trance music, but we’re also into like, Zeppelin and Bowie and all of these bands from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s and dance music stuff, because I guess that’s what was influencing people in the ‘90s.
“So you’ve got the same ingredients going into this. I understand that there are some bits that do sound a bit ‘90s, but maybe that’s just because those are the sounds we grew up with. I think your brain when you’re a child is like a sponge and that sets when you come of age. All my childhood, I was living through the ‘90s, so all my childhood I was hearing ‘90s music. So maybe it’s a bit more scientific than us trying to sound like a ‘90s band.”
“It feels like, to be honest, not all of them, but probably 30 percent of the music press in the UK, it’s almost like they want to dislike us, so they’ll just pick on the influences thing. Luckily, most press kind of gets that we’re not about that. We’re not about the past, we’re about where we are now and the future. It’s about the songs, not the style. We’re more about the substance than the style, but people don’t always respond well to you.”
That Video
“We decided we wanted to do a music video that was not taking itself too seriously, because we get so many video treatments and 90 percent of them, if not higher, they’re all singing into the camera moodily with really fierce performances, like a tribal woman emerges from the sea and blood falls from her nostrils. Like, what happened to the music videos that I used to watch ‘round at my uncle’s house?
“You’d put on Kerrang or MTV and see Foo Fighters dressed as girls or Green Day in a mental hospital, and I was like, “Fuck it, I wanna do something fun and not taking ourselves too seriously!” There was a trend around the time of people doing shitty videos with very serious dance routines. It’s cool if you see one, but everybody was doing them.
“So the director was like, “What if you dance off a cliff?” I was like, “What do you mean?” He says, “You’re taking yourself so seriously that you don’t wanna stop dancing and you end up going off a cliff.” I was like, “We’ve got it! Let’s just shoot it.” It was a total laugh to do. We’re not negative people, we were just trying to have a bit of fun.”
