Interview 60 Seconds With: Dry The River

Vying for the title of the hardest working new band in the UK and purveyors of grandiose and beautific folk-pop which is somewhat at odds with their impressive and frankly, a little scary, tattoos, we catch up for a brief chat with vocalist Peter Liddle, guitarist Mat Taylor and violinist Will Harvey from Dry the River.

For the benefit of our readers who may not be familiar with you yet, can you tell us a little bit about your sound?
We play rock music in the broadest sense of the word, but it is quite difficult to describe our sound as we listen to a whole range of different stuff. Someone recently described us in a review as ‘hardcore gone soft’ – which is kinda true as we all come from punk and hardcore backgrounds but play acoustic folk songs.

Your tour diary looks insanely busy over the next few months…
Yeah, it’s ridiculous - I’m not even sure if it is humanly possible to actually play all the dates we’ve been booked for, but we’re really stoked we got the John Peel tent at Glastonbury. We’ve all been going to Glastonbury since we were teenagers, and that has always been our favourite stage – we’ve playing at 3:30pm on the Saturday.
We’re also playing a lot of European festivals – Katowice in Poland, the Haldern Pop Festival
in Germany, Pukkelpop in Belgium – it’s basically three of four festivals a week from here on in. Closer to home we’re doing Jersey Live, Bestival, Latitude, Green Man, The End of the Road Festival and Hop Farm with Morrissey.

Pete, I believe you’re Norwegian. No festivals lined up in Oslo or Trondheim?
We get this a lot! I was born in Norway, but I’m not actually Norwegian. We did an interview with Norwegian TV recently and they started to talk to us in Norwegian. I was like ‘Woah, hold on!’. We played the Bergen festival this year and I got a huge cheer out of the crowd when I told them I was born there but it was literally the first time I have been back there since I was a baby. It was kind of a cheap trick to play on the audience!

Any plans for an album?
We’ve started it and hopefully it will be finished over the next 6 or so weeks. We’re recording it in the States so we have to keep travelling back and forth. Peter Katis, who has worked with The National, Interpol and Jonsi is producing, so we’re in his studio in the wilds of Connecticut.

A free download of Dry The River’s debut single ‘New Ceremony’ is available from drytheriver.net. The band have just been confirmed as special guests to the Manic Street Preachers at Roundhouse on the 3rd July 2011 as part of the iTunes festival. They will also be playing the aforementioned festivals over the summer months (and a whole load of others besides…)