Chatting with Youth Man about ‘Bad Weather’
After listening to their debut EP, Bad Weather, we decided it was necessary to track down Youth Man, a three-piece riot from Birmingham that has been causing quite a stir lately with their full-frontal attacks on the norm.
We chewed the fat over other bands that are ‘doing it’, Henry Rollins, and trigger-happy music journalists.
So you’ve just played live at Leeds. How did you find it?
Kaila: It was good man, lots of fun.
Marcus: I didn’t expect these festivals to be as good as they are because we’ve never really played anything like this before.
Adam: I expected it to be a bit quiet, like at the beginning of most of the festival days, but the turnout has been quite good so far.
So you said you’ve not really done anything like this before?
Marcus: There are a couple of things in Birmingham that are similar, but nothing as big as this. The whole city just seems to be buzzing and that does not happen in Birmingham.
Adam: Yeah, it’s one room full of people, and the other bands don’t get any crowd.
Marcus: It’s because the councils don’t get behind it though, for example with Liverpool Sound City and this (Live at Leeds) it seems there’s a lot of support, not just from the councils but the city itself as well.
In the past couple of years, there’s been a buzz about Leeds. You’ve caught it at a very good time musically. Anyway, can we start with the basics? Is the band name, Youth Man, symbolic of anything, or is that reading too much into it?
Adam: I feel like that’s the best way to describe it, really.
Marcus: This is always a really difficult story to tell, but it’s based on something Henry Rollins said. He’s got this character that he always alludes to whenever he’s talking about how he’s old but acting like he’s young, so he’s gone for a run, and he’s forgotten about how he’s too old now to go for a run without feeling like shit. In that moment he’s like ‘yea youth man’.
Adam: It’s about expectations, either from himself or how someone else expects him to be the way he was when he was young, but he’s just not anymore. There were a few awful ideas before, though; we had Sack Of Rats at one point.
Sack of rats? That’s brilliant, sounds like it could’ve been a member of the Damned or something! On that punk note, a lot of magazines and the likes have been describing your music as Punk, is that something you purposefully set out to achieve, or for that matter, would you even describe yourselves as punks?
Marcus: You know, you’re the first person to ask us that in an open-ended way. Normally, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, right, it’s obvious, your punks. Now explain’.
Adam: There’s an overview of popular music since the 1950s, and there are about six genres. Punk is the closest one we align with, so it’s easy for people to label us as that, though I think it’s not just what we fit with.
Marcus: We like to make hard-hitting music and we like to make our shows a visceral and physical experience, but it’s just the way we think about things, we don’t have any boundaries in that respect you could call us punks.
I reckon if you ask a few of the people who know what they’re talking about, they’ll tell you punk is more of a mindset than a genre, and it seems you fit into that, which brings us nicely to our next question. You said you formed initially as you were disillusioned with the bands and the music you were hearing around you?
Kaila: Well, we’re all fans of music in general, so we were going to shows and listening to loads of it anyway, but we weren’t quite hearing what we wanted to and found at the time it was all a bit tame, so rather than complaining we decided to do it ourselves.
Adam: There were a few bands that were doing it, but not enough.
Marcus: Yeah, you were either a Death Core band, a Post Hardcore band or an Indie band, and that was pretty much it. So you either sounded like Bring Me The Horizon or Throats or Arctic Monkeys.
Kaila: In Birmingham anyway.
More than a good enough reason to start a band if you ask me.
Kaila: Lots of bands have stories where they say they’ve listened to Pixies for the first time and decide they just have to make something like it, but for us, it was the opposite. It wasn’t something we listened to and thought yea, that’s really cool lets try and sound like it, we thought that there was nothing cool, we need to make something else.
Marcus: What’s missing, I don’t know, let’s find out!
Adam: Watching U2 at Glastonbury made me decide we had to try and change things.
(Laughs all around)
You said a few bands are doing it. Can you tell us who they are?
Adam: For me, it was Rollo Tomassi, but they’ve lost two members who were pushing it in the direction I was enjoying, and now they’ve gone, it’s not the same.
Marcus: I think now, and not because we’re from the same city, but God Damn.
Kaila: Dillinger Escape Plan, Rolo Tomassi, M.I.A., and just general weirdos, really, weirdos who were and are doing their own thing without much regard for what anyone else thinks.
