RAMzine caught up with Alex Green (Vocals, Guitar) and James Harris (Guitar) of Attention Thieves, after their headline show during the Enter Shikari tour.
This is the fourth time I (Dave) have seen these boys play in 3 years and even after a heavy one from the night before with the lads from Enter Shikari…… Attention Thieves bring the party! A last minute gig is pretty much the perfect description for their headline show, having just 3 days for promotion to take effect. With this in mind, roughly 50 people turned up to the show but it was like the boys were reliving the 1000 capacity venue from the night before. A burst of energy fills the stage as they reel off song after song with smooth transitions between each tune giving a professional crowd pleasing feel, at one point they even broke out a short rendition of ‘Bad Boys For Life’ by P Diddy… why not. With the small amount of people at the show there were still plenty singing along and it did help that the Vocals came out powerful with a slick switch between clean and scream.
RAMzine: We saw you guys play at Reading Festival which is your home territory, tell us how that felt.
Alex: “It was awesome, I had to move around the stage more than usual because there were loads of faces I knew and I didn’t want to stare at anyone too long. You get tempted to be half way through a song, stop, then have a conversation, ‘Alright Dave?’ it wouldn’t look great.”
RAMzine: Over the last few years you guys have improved on your song writing, stage presence and vocal ability. Is there something you’ve consciously changed or has it been a natural progression?
Alex: “I don’t think it was a massive noticeable thing, it was just a time where we thought actually we could do something with this.”
James: “It was when we started putting more effort into the set, going into detail about everything, each song, every interlude, we drop tuned to make it heavier live and we’ve worked a long time on new songs which we’ve waited and waited until the right moment to merge into the set. Now it’s a brand new set with everything tight, linking and flowing nicely with the whole set dialled.”
RAMzine: There was one song that really spoke to us that you played tonight and I don’t know if it’s how you feel the world perceives you or how you want to be perceived. The way you delivered it to the people and brought it to their attention was just phenomenal, and that song was…. ‘Bad Boys For Life’
Both: “Laughs”
Alex: “We’ve got to do that tomorrow.”
James: “Do you reckon we should do it for Enter Shikari tomorrow?”
RAMzine: Of Course!
James: “Ryan (Bassist) and I were bored in the van and we heard the song and thought yeah that’s a tune, let’s learn the guitar to that.”
Alex: “They just started playing it tonight and then everyone just kicked in, other than me who was like, what’s going on here? Do I start rapping? Are they expecting me to start rapping?”
RAMzine: Last night you played Western-Super-Mare in front 1000 capacity crowd it must have been a pretty awesome gig?
Alex: “Insane… we were signing autographs for about two hours afterwards, we were really happy that there were a lot of people in our t-shirts already and we sold loads of merch and 57 CD’s and to us that means 57 fans are actually going to have our music. Even the girl on the Shikari stall was impressed, it wasn’t far behind them I don’t think. It was crazy to think we opened, got a pit going, jumping, clapping and we had some sort of connection for them to want to own our music.”
RAMzine: So what’s in Attention Thieves immediate future?
Alex: “We have a sold out show with Enter Shikari. One of the good things about that is, that the fans that they pull are not people that just turn up, but they’re genuine music fans so we pretty much have a full crowd for our set as well.”
James: “Enter Shikari gave us loads of Jager last night, which was nice.”
Alex: “Yeah and the level they’re at they could really be different, but they go massively out of their way to be the opposite which is really refreshing.”
Attention thieves will next be playing at Hit The Deck, Make a Scene and Burn Out Festival.
