We spoke to lead vocalist Jamie, keyboardist Ben and guitarist Tom around the release of their latest single ‘Diamond Eyes’, which was proceeded by a debut live stream on Facebook. “That was a great way of reaching a bunch of people,” they told us. “We’re definitely planning on doing it again from the back of a van at some point. It’ll be horrible but we’ll love it!”
Diamond Eyes is a single packed with harmonies, loud choruses, massive guitars and hard-hitting drums. “These are the kind of things we do best. It’s our first single in quite a while. We recorded that single and an entire album over a 24-hour period in a studio in Devon. That song made the album recording possible so it’s a special one for us.”
The band said that recording the album in such a short time period was surprisingly funny. “To be honest it’s a bit of a blur. We were up all night, so when we got to 5am we were pretty much just fuelled by coffee! The conversations went really weird and deteriorate, and went more mental as we did take after take after take. There’s actually some recordings of us abruptly finishing a conversation, doing a take, and picking up the conversation where we left off!”
Single ‘Diamond Eyes’ is pretty reflective of the band’s sound, and the track was chosen as the lead single for this reason. “It’s got the pop style, the instrumentation, the walls of guitars, the raspiness and the energy we like to give every time we play.
“The whole album was recorded live so it kind of represents what you’ll hear from us when you see us live. What you hear on the album is what you get live, it’s all kind of natural.”
The promotional video, which was recorded in the same studio as the music, and is available to watch online now. “The studio has nice looking rooms so it seemed the obvious place to record it.”
Hailing from Bath, I was keen to find out what the city is like to live in as a band. “It’s a very creative city; there’s lots of art stuff going on with film and music, so there’s a good community of small venues. It’s great for interacting with people, and we get lots of tourists so we go out and busk on the streets for a couple of hours and play to people from pretty much every country.”
The band use busking as a way of building their fan base. “Us making as much noise as we possibly can attracts people. From that some pay to go to our actual gigs. We’ve made quite a lot of fans through doing that. We haven’t done it for a while but I’m sure we’ll go back to it.”
We spoke to the band ahead of their April tour and rehearsals were going well, and we were also intrigued by their graphic design skills with the map they’d created to help them get around.
“I think it was worth it. The sat nav needed to go, as other things needed to be purchased. We used to have a sat nav that we called Eugene and he always led us in quite horrible directions and one day decided not to work altogether, so since then we’ve been designing our own maps from vague memories of what the UK looks like. It works really well until we have to cut through a couple of lakes or something on the way to a gig, but we usually dry off with a couple of towels!
“Someone actually commented that Cornwall is finally bigger than Devon [on our map] so we might have started some arguments about the borders of certain counties!”
So where is it now for the Black Knuckle Parade? What’s their big ambition for the year?
“Seven Christmas number ones! Different songs for Christmas number ones! It’d be about the joys of Christmas, and touring around Christmas, basically things that aren’t very Christmas related, but we’d give it a good shot either way.
“[Seriously though] our real goal will be tour around the country as much as possible, keep playing, keep on writing. Always writing, always playing, always making noise! The Christmas number ones can wait a little longer!”
Bare Knuckle Parade are due to play the Camden Rocks Festival in June.
This interview will feature in KBPS #9 available Saturday 14th May.
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