I will probably have to cut it down a bit because 1012 words is a bit much.
You’re all fairly new to the music industry – this must be a daunting experience for you guys. How does it feel?
Well what can we say? It’s amazing, you know when you were younger and you used to play music really loud and pretend you were the one playing it that music. Well not the pretending part but when you were having fun playing that music. That sounds gay as hell, let me try again. It’s really scary because they’re so many legends and everything’s been done before, and you don’t wanna just copy someone before you, at the same time for most things there’s a reason why they haven’t been tried before.
The song “S.S.D.D” is the song you chose to release first as a single. Why did you choose that one? What’s the story behind it?
Ah right, well the letters in that song you may know stand for “Same Sh*t, Different Day” the title is pretty self-explanatory. The term comes from a novel written by Stephen King called ‘Dreamcatcher’. The story behind the lyrics is about many different people as they go through their days in hardships for example a young boy who is being bullied, a marriage on the verge of divorce etc. We all have this feeling from time to time, but the best thing we can do is to press on, besides that there’s not much that can be done but to press on and fake a smile so you can get through the day.
I was quite partial to the drumming and the bass playing, who were your biggest influences?
Ah, for bass there are so many people I could mention, but instead of going down a list of the obvious people, but I actually learnt to play bass by watching Michael Todd the bassist in Coheed and Cambria, he does the usual fingering technique common to bass, but his slap style is amazing, he really knows how to Slapa da bass man! As for the drumming, my biggest influence was “The Rev” God rest his soul, when he was alive he was my favourite drummer without a doubt. All the way from “Sounding the Seventh Trumpet” to the parts he wrote for “Nightmare” but since I’m not the only one who plays drums we are a collaborative so there’s some of us who play multiple instruments so another influence would be Lars Ulrich!
You say that you guys are a collaborative… How does that work exactly?
We all have our specialist instrument(s) we just think of a message or a story we want to tell then a bunch of us sit around and suggest a couple parts for the song. We only add something as a part of a song only if we all agree it sounds good and it fits where we want it to.
How did you guys form as rock collaborative?
Well it’s a bit of weird story, we started off as a 3 man band then as we started to write music we realised that it would sound better if we added someone who could play “this” then to counter that so that sound isn’t over bearing we needed someone who could play “that” and well basically the list went on, and on until we found that we had a collaborative. We probably could have cut some members but we decided we might as well do something no one has EVER done before. You know be original.
Since you’re a rock collaborative, how do you make sure the music fits together without it sounding like a bunch of musicians all playing as loud as they can?
Well like we said because this has never been done before it came with many problems we had to overcome or we might as well of just stopped there. But essentially we don’t use everyone in every song. What I mean is, we have only written 2 songs in which we all play, the rest of the songs have us taking turns playing. Argh! This isn’t coming out right, what I’m trying to say is that, let’s say on one song you have Ollie on drums me on bass, Josh on guitar and Sam on vocals, we’ll probably have Josh playing bass the next song Hayley on guitar Doyle on drums, Tim on rhythm and once again Sam on vocals. We integrate it so that we each get to show case different talents instead of doing the same thing every time, this was if in case someone has a mental block on a particular instrument they can try again on a different instrument and we always have ideas flowing.
Where have you performed? Do you have any upcoming shows?
Well recently we’ve been touring with Billy Talent, those guys are some next level sh*t! Seriously, I knew they we good but they’re so energetic on stage it’s unbelievable, we’ve been opening for them for this part of their tour and we have just one more gig to open for them and that’s at the O2 arena. After that we’ll probably be getting ready for Sonisphere, we’ll be playing there so be sure to check us out, urm then we’ll be doing a country wide tour to promote the album.
And finally what’s up with the name?
(Laughter) Um well you see the thing with that is we’d been trying to come up with a band name for like weeks now and no one could agree on anything. One day we were pretty much baked I’m not gonna lie, and Sam, Tim and I were just sitting around and I can’t actually remember how we came to Penguin Philosophers, I think it’s cuz at that point same demanded we put penguins in the name and Tim was getting all philosophical (as he does when he’s baked) so that’s how we came up with the name. When we told the others the next day, well they weren’t in love with the name, but they didn’t hate it and we really needed a name for the band.
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