Clay at The Sunflower Lounge - Review and Interview

Leeds fourpiece - Clay, hit the stage at Birmingham's Sunflower Lounge last week as part of their first very own headline tour. They've been ones to watch for some time now with this band bringing their own sound to the current music scene with their unique spin on synth pop.

It was a pretty impressive turn out as the rather intimate sized room was packed out to the doors and energy levels were at an all time high even before Clay had taken to the stage; partly due to the impressive kick start to the evening that support act Sugarthief brought as they successfully hyped up the crowd.

It's always nice and refreshing to see a band that wants to lead their own scene and aims to create their own individual sound these days, and Clay are self admittedly trying (and succeeding) to do this.

The fourpiece begun with retro sounding 'Stay Calm', a wise choice to launch the evening off to a lively start from both the band and their fiery audience. Their clever use of synth and catchy lyrics add to Clay's developing style within their own sound. Their mysterious stage presence and confidence from attitude-fueled frontman Joe helped add to the exciting vibe about this band. During their performance of 'Why?' Joe successfully managed to get everyone in the crowd on the floor in preparation for the drop within the catchy track, only adding to the unmissable atmosphere beaming within the tiny venue. Every one of their tracks whipped up an enthusiastic reaction from each person in the room and the band never failed to maintain the excitement. Their first headline tour has given them the perfect opportunity to get themselves out there and show off their songs by giving us a mere taste of what's to come for their debut album.

Before the show, I managed to catch up with the band to have a little chat about where they're at now and where they want to go in the future, have a read below.

So, welcome to Birmingham, have you ever played here before?

Yeah, a couple of times now actually. We played here (The Sunflower Lounge) a few months ago with High Tyde and last year we played The Rainbow supporting Jaws which was our first time here; that was class, they're a sick band and it was a really good venue to play.

This is your first ever headline tour isn't it? How's it been going so far?

It's been absolutely amazing. It's weird cos we've done headline shows around the country before but this is our first actual tour and the crowds have just been insane every night. We've been building up to this point and been quite skeptical of how it was all gonna turn out but it's been incredible. You're constantly trying to win over crowds as fans when you support other bands so it's nice to finally come back on our own tour and see the same people that were there supporting you at other bands shows.

For people that don't know about Clay, how would you describe your sound?

I find it almost impossible to define because I think our tastes are constantly evolving and that runs parallel to our sound. I'd like to think that our band sounds like the music in our heads like the music we listen to all blends into one and outputs through our own material. We wanna make music that we feel isn't out there at the moment. We always try to strike the balance where we're conscious of the songwriting process in the sense that we want to write accessible pop music  but not to the point where it's overthought and contrived, so people are still able to connect with it.

So, we're mid way through festival season now, have you managed to play any this year?

Yeah, Isle of Wight, Tramlines, Live at Leeds but it's all been accumulating to this point right now with being on our headline tour; that's been our focal point of the summer really. We've just been focusing on ourselves rather than all the festivals. next year we're hoping to do the circuit but for now the tour has been the most important thing

Are there any festivals that you've got your eye on for next year?

Glastonbury. I think it's always gonna be that one, it's where everyone in a band wants to work up to I think. I also really wanna see what Bestival, Y Not, Secret Garden Party and Barn On The Farm are like to play; the smaller ones look quite cool. We did Reading and Leeds last year and that was fucking amazing so I think just more in that lane and carrying on and moving upwards from here. I just love the festival atmosphere, especially when we get to play them.

Do you prefer playing to festival crowds or to a smaller and more intimate audience?

It's weird because people are always there to see your band like festival crowds are all very accepting and welcoming but there's just something about smaller venues that you can just capture that vibe immediately because you're left with no choice but to just embrace that initial vibe you get. I don't think we can answer that fully at the moment cos we're still quite a new band and we've not done the festival circuit fully so we've still got a lot to do in that sense. But right now it's the small shows.

Are there any new bands that you've discovered recently maybe due to seeing them play at festivals?

We caught The Amazons at Isle of Wight Festival and they were really good, fucking love their new tune - Nightdriving. There's not much new music that excites us really, which is why we think our existence is necessary because we fill the gap that we feel isn't being filled by other bands.

Of course you're from Leeds, so are there any local bands that you've taken inspiration from? Even Leeds festival itself?

Although we're from Leeds, we play places like Manchester, Birmingham and London etc just as much as Leeds so we don't really categorize ourselves as a 'Leeds band' whereas a lot of bands from Leeds will play there like every few weeks. I certainly wouldn't consider ourselves as part of a 'Leeds scene' so I don't really know many Leeds bands. We just want to lead our own scene and have people buzz off us; we wanna grow in the country and then  spread, we don't wanna latch onto a scene cos that's not what we're about. We write our music to create a buzz amongst loads of people and just grow like that. Although of course there are some great bands going around in Leeds doing their own thing which is really cool.

So where did your main influences come from? What inspired you growing up that you listened to for example?

Well me (Jack) and Joe are brothers so obviously we've lived together all of our lives and we were always brought up listening to 80's music and just quite a lot of pop music so we're into older stuff. But we don't really sit down and try to nail a song to get it to sound like a certain genre. I think our biggest inspiration is just what we're listeingng to at the time, be it a new playlist on Radio 1 or we might have been listening to Jackson 5 or something like that for example. It just comes out from our own music that we listen to. We're really influenced by beats and some of us listen to Stormzy and other artstists like that and that comes out in the production side of things; I think that's where we get a nice span of genres in our music, it's never really anything in particular as such.

How did you all form as a band?

Of course Jack and Joe are brothers and I (Rob) have grown up with them and known them forever but I had no idea that they had any intention of starting a band. I remember being in Propaganda at O2 Academy in Leeds and Joe stumbled over to me like 'were starting a band, we're called Clay and it's gonna be sick, you're in man' so that was that. We met Danny at a house party a couple of months later and then we officially started in October 2014 and just went from there.

What's the music process like within the band? Is there someone who mainly comes up with the lyrics and the rest of you build it around that or is it more pulling things together as a group?

We don't really tend to write like other bands where they get in the studio and just jam until they find something that works. It usually starts with Jack who comes up with a whole song musically and he'll bring it to me (Joe) and I'll cover vocals but sometimes it starts the opposite way like I might be jamming on keys and write a whole demo. It could even just start from a word one of us has said like with our track called 'The Beach' the word 'beach' just inspired us so Joe wrote a whole hook around that. Sometimes we get lyrics from conversations we have or ones that we overhear. We often write song titles before the songs have even been written  and then try and build off on that and take inspiration.

What kind of things do you have planned as a band for the rest of the summer?

We're just finishing this tour and we're straight back into the studio, we have a couple of exciting things that we haven't announced yet and we're touring again in a few months time. We've also just announced a big partnership with Tomorrow Magazine so we've done a little feature with them too.

Written by Rosie Mulhern