Alvarez Kings talk to Hive’s Anastacia about mafia gangs, shaven dogs, and of course, music.
For starters, talk to us a bit about the music scene in Sheffield nowadays.
(Paul) It seems Sheffield’s music scene is healthy and vibrant at the moment. It’s great to see genre lines become blurred. For example, you have Mixed In Sheffield where electronnic artists and DJs remix tracks of more guitar based bands.
(Simon) There’s a lot more comaraderie post Monkeys. We all know how difficult it is to make it in this industry and its great to see bands get on well with and support each other.
(Will) It’s great to see an absence of egos and more of a healthy competiteness between us all.
You recently played SXSW, how was that? What other bands from this year’s SXSW should we definitely give a listen to?
(P) SXSW is the best festival around and one of the things on our checklists to do on forming our band. So we feel really privelaged to tick off that one!
(Rich) It’s a great atmosphere to see all these thousands of music fans come together filling the streets. It helps that the weather is always glorious.
(S) There’s 100′s of bands taking part so it is really hard to pick a few out of the list plus we were so busy over there that we didn’t get to see as many bands as we would have liked.
(P) Frankie & The Heartstrings spring to mind and we enjoyed Jamie XX’s solo stuff away from his usual setup.
What’s your favourite venue for playing?
(W) I think we can all agree that KOKO is our favourite and holds a special place in our hearts. It remains one of the best venues to play in London and is always a good atmosphere.
(S) It marked the point when we realised we had took the next step up the ladder so to speak to be the first unsigned band to headline that place.
(R) There’s so many amazing venues. We have just come back from a two week tour of Europe and six of these dates were in Italy. Most of the venues were 200-250 cap but some of the places we played were in beautiful places.
(P) Yeh like the one in Verona! A really cool place called Jack The Ripper in the middle of this beautiful tradional Italian countryside surround by vineyards. We turned up thinking how the hell is this going to attract people in the middle of nowhere? It was full by 10pm!
Your new EP, Patience Is Strength was released recently. How do you manage to come up with songs so catchy yet keep the lyrics/content high in quality?
(S) I think it comes from always trying to set the bar higher everytime we write new material. We always try and make sure the next song is better than the last. We’re really hard on ourselves which is probably why it takes us a while to write new material.
(P) Our main focus on this record was to focus on melody but without losing that interesting rhthym section and guitar we have used throughout all our songwriting. We found it hard to leave room for the melody to breath.
(R) We always sit down and review our latest offerings and talk about what could have been better.
(S) Yeh and from this I decided I needed to spend a lot more time focusing on my lyrics. I am proud of them and hope people can relate to them. There’s some dark subject matter in there but also some positive words that people can releate to.
Your name is a bit peculiar, how did you choose Alvarez Kings and which one of you chose it?
(W) I was looking on the internet researching about Italian culture and traditions – bit of a weird obsession of mine. I came across Mafia gangs in the 50′s and Alvarez Kings happened to be the name of one of these gangs. Straight away I said this is going to be the name of our band.
(P) It’s a strong, confident name that I think fits our style of playing and our energy onstage,
One band you’re obsessively listening to at the moment.
(S) It’s an obvious one. There’s no point in being pretentious and name checking a band no one has heard just for the sake of trying to be cool. The Strokes have just released a new album so that’s been on repeat during our tour.
(P) They were the reason we started listening to music more closely. Honourable mention goes to Local Natives.
What was your weirdest encounter with a fan/weirdest incident at a gig?
(P) I’m so glad you asked us this question. It happened recently on the German leg of our European tour. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. We played a place in Offenbach and this slightly eccentric looking woman came to watch us with her dog in tow. She brought a pair of shears along with her and after the show she made us shave our band name onto this poor dog! So now there’s a dog strolling around Offenbach with Alvarez Kings shaved on its side!
Where can we find you in the upcoming months?
(P) We’ve been asked back to play Europe so we’ll be in Germany and Italy in November. Other than that we play our next local show in Sheffield at The Plug on 13th May. The first back after the release and tour so I suppose it’s a bit of a homecoming for us. Should be pretty special seeing our friends and family in attendance.
(S) Our first major festival is in May as well at Osfest. We get to play alongside Example and Tinchy Stryder on the mainstage so should be fun!
