The Manic Shine: Life Cycles, Creativity, And Low-Budget Fire Breathers [Interview]
In the UK, winter is a still, bleak, and boring time.
With Trial And Triumph, The Manic Shine have the solution. It’s an immense, dirty, and raucous blend of multiple classic and modern rock styles with an idiosyncratic twist, sure to get your blood warm and fizzy. Head here for a full review if you’re curious.
For this interview, TMMP caught up with The Manic Shine’s frontman Ozzie Rogers to talk Trial And Triumph, life cycles, creativity, and low-budget Scottish fire breathers…
Your new album Trial And Triumph is dropping soon. How’s it feel to have that on the horizon?
A huge whirlwind of excitement, terror and relief! As I’m sure most bands find with any album, so much work has gone in behind the scenes, personally and professionally, that the release really does feel like a description of how far the band has come in the last 2 years; trials and triumphs abound!
Its strange because every band lives this strange seasonal birth cycle, peaks and troughs alongside the album/material release, and if you’re a “lifer” like we are then it becomes more and more familiar. A bit like all seasonal businesses – it can be depressing as hell when you’re slugging through the low cycle but the highs sure make up for it.
How did the band come to be? What’s your origin story?
Four turtles rolled in some toxic waste, met a ninja rat and washed into the sew…ah sorry – wrong back story!
Basically Orren (guitar), Hutch (bass) and I (vocal philanderer and guitarist) lived together about eight years ago. In between going to music college together in London, I kept forcing the guys to make recordings with me and they kept forcing me to jam with them and by the end of it we had become so co-dependent (like a parasite) that we couldn’t play music with anyone else anymore.
The band actually started off life four years ago with just Hutch and myself playing with a keyboardist and drummer who were both largely uninterested in touring and rock music, so they left after a year on the day of a show in Edinburgh where we had a two hour set and half the band was missing.
We scrambled Orren and his bro Tamir, and never looked back.
Our main strength lies in the fact that we jammed A LOT together before the band formed and know each other’s musical stylings and tastes. It helps us keep coordinated and able to make shit up on the fly – works especially well for live shows as it makes each gig a totally different experience, we hope!
What was your creative process while writing and recording Trial And Triumph?
Good question. In all honesty, we wrote about 30/40 songs before settling on the nine that we have on the record.
I know that doesn’t really say much when you hear that MJ and the team wrote about 800 songs for Thriller before deciding on the final bunch, but for us it was a lot, especially considering the detail and much-debated intricacies of some of the parts.
In any case the usual process we have is: I will come up with the song idea/melody, sections and lyrics, knock up a demo on Garageband/Logic, take it into the jam session, and see what’s what.
If it works the way it is, we keep it. If it doesn’t, it gets changed and if that still isn’t working, it pretty much gets shelved.
The final test is gigging – if it works for the crowd, we know we did a good one.
To be fair though, sometimes a track has a section that is too good to give up, so you rework the whole song around it, and that can produce some cool results. I reckon Blind Love had about 20 rewrites before it was “done”. Hold On was written in one go and has stayed pretty much identical to the demo. Swings and roundabouts!
How did you evolve as musicians and people while making the new album?
This is an even better question.
Sometimes I take issue with bands that go all out in explaining themselves because I fear that it becomes a rather self-centred back-rub type exercise (and no one really wants to know do they?!), so without going into too much detail: 2014 was a pretty rubbish year for everyone.
Big lessons were learned; we almost fell apart; at different points we were all pretty despondent about the band and the music, particularly because the label we were with at the time were causing issues.
Anyway, all of that changed at the beginning of 2015 when we broke away from that relationship and literally things could not have been better. We met so many wonderful people (producer Lee Batiuk; Mike and the lads over at PledgeMusic; and Jamie from Wall Of Sound PR) and things improved amazingly from there.
We feel rather lucky and humbled to be were we are, having written the best songs we’ve done to date, another fan-funded album under our belts and a much brighter future.
You’ve been touring around the country for the last couple of months. Which moments stand out the most vividly?
I’ll highlight two great shows.
The Iron Road in Evesham was a great night, not least because we played for about two hours with a full album set and jamming, but also because the fans there had a ball and were so excited to get the new record they were literally taking down our bank details to support us.
The next was a killer little show in a tin village in the Scottish Borders. The crowd were batshit, mosh pits, circle of death, crowd surfing, the lot. Fucking yeldi.
What’s the most random thing that’s ever happened at one of your shows?
Err…well, we played a show once in Bristol a few years ago. It was the first time we’d played there and was not great. But it was made up for by this one dude – who was utterly shit-faced, stumbling around the dance floor, shouting and applauding wildly at the end of every tune – spewing his guts out all over his own shoes at the climax of a particularly big section.
We just about wet ourselves.
The other thing that was pretty rad was we played a show from the inside of a truck shipping container to pretty crazy audience in Scotland.
There were fire breathers. I say fire breathers; more like several mashed teens, gulping vodka [and] holding Zippos up to spit fireballs at each other. I lost a beard hair or two.
After playing a show once, one of the fan’s mothers got into our van, again smashed, and refused to leave. We had to lift her out…
Beyond the album release, what does the future hold?
Well, we are planning to release another single after the launch this side of [the] new year, so that’s pretty exciting.
We have a few plans that we can’t talk about. Others that we can…we are planning to tour again in the spring, and if we’re lucky release even more new music next year.
One thing is for certain – we are planning big and aiming high!
What’s on your bucket list?
Oh the usual…play Wembley, support Tool, conquer the world, complete a bucket list, watch The Bucket List with Morgan Freeman….
Links
Trial And Triumph drops on November 13th. Check out TMMP’s review of the whole thing here for more info!
The Manic Shine official website.
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