One EskimO

0:03Well, we're live behind Largo in Los Angeles with the man who's traveled quite a distance to get here. Christian from One Eskimo, thanks so much for doing this. Yeah, you as well. So tell me about the tour. You've been on your saying you've been here basically on our side of the world for about a year now. Well, yeah, practically. I mean, we started out kind of this time. Last year we started touring with Tory Amos. Then we toured with a guy called Bob Snyder and an uncle Gomez. And then we've just come off tour with Michael Franti. And we've been doing our own kind of shows. So it's been a busy year and we've kind of seen a lot of the states. I understand the Gomez and the Tory Amos, Bob Snyder, our two degree. But Michael Franti's a big departure for you guys. It was, you know, it was a very different tour for us. But it was a really, you know, really kind of fun group of guys and a kind of fun audience, you know.

0:51It's quite different from, I mean, every show we've played has been quite different. We've toured with Truckee from Massive Attack. Yeah. We've toured with, we've toured with such different people back in England as well. It's kind of real strange mixes. And it's kind of, I suppose we kind of don't really think about it. You know, we kind of walk out in front of an audience and just see it as, OK, this is, you know, this is people that are on our audience most of the time. It's just when you're supporting these guys. So I suppose every time it's just a, you know, it's just a different experience. It makes it more fun, you know. It makes each each show quite different. What records do you grow up with? What did you get into music with? I load, really. I've grown up listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and the Nirvana and kind of so much, really.

1:44Yeah. And Massive Attack and the Fuji's and I suppose it's, and right across the board of all of us really, you know, there's, I think, there's so many kind of different influences throughout the whole band. I think that's why it becomes quite a kind of different sound really. It's not like us, you know, this is the band we're trying to kind of be like, you know, I think we're just kind of, are these are the sounds we like? This is what we want to do with playing. Yeah, and the sounds are hard to replicate live. I hear everyone's kind of multitasking doing two things at once. Do you think it's a one? Yeah, I mean, we've recorded the album as we play live, you know, as we've tried to make it. So everything is as free as possible. Nothing we do is on any kind of trigger system, like a tape system. Right.

2:29And it's kind of these single hit triggers that our genre does. And, you know, it's all, there's a lot going on on stage for four people, definitely. Yeah. What are you playing? I don't know. I'm just doing it. So three people at the end of the day. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But you'd be, I mean, like I said, there's a great sound for the three guys. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. For sure. I heard you started like it's kind of like a boy band pop idol in Britain first. Oh, yeah, it wasn't in a boy. I wasn't a boy. It was a role in the boy band. I think it was just, it was more, it wasn't even there. It was just just a million miles away from what I do now. I think it was just an age of just not being ready to be kind of working with major record labels and. How so? Well, I think you just need to find your feet. You need to find what you kind of, you know, I'd loved writing.

3:15I got signed it. My publishing when I was like, I started working my publishing when I was like 16. I signed to publish a big publishing company, 18. And then kind of major label doing these songs that you're kind of developing as a writer. And you're doing these songs that you wrote however long ago that, you know, and things change over that, especially that period of your life. So I think to kind of establish yourself as a songwriter before you're kind of out there singing your material, I think that's definitely, you know, it's the better way of doing it. You need to kind of, you definitely need to be proud of what you're promoting otherwise. It's, yeah, it's too difficult to be doing it. And you weren't with that first record? Well, I think like I said, you know, I just, I'd, by the time I'd written them to the time

4:01I was promoting them, I was just a million miles in the new direction. Fair enough. So you're still in the direction one ask most heading. I mean, we're just getting, honestly, I think we, you know, we've lived together. We've been in a van together. We've been on a radio session together. We've been in that such close proximity of each other for a year now. And it feels like everyone's getting much stronger. It feels like working on the second album, it feels like, again, it feels like we're just developing more, it feels like finding our feet a bit more. It's a nice time for us. Are you working on second record? We were always writing songs, you know. You can write on the ropes. I know some bands have trouble writing on the ropes. Well, you know, for such a long time we were in a little van and I was just setting the front just kind of writing lyrics. But to try and pull any kind of melodies together, any kind of song structures, you can't do it.

4:49But we've just kind of moved on to a bus and it's been great. You know, we kind of, everyone breaks off and starts working on stuff and moves it about the bus and it's been a really nice way of working. It's been a really nice way of pulling the stuff I've been writing over the last year together as well. Can people hear the songs live? Because I know you're on tour for a couple more weeks here. Well, I think we've learned our lesson in the fact that we just want to make sure that every song is exactly how we want it before people. And we're going to start playing them live, but we're not going to start kind of taking in any recordings into the record label just yet. Not yet, fair enough. And we're still on our first single out here and it feels like a lot of places it's still building, you know. Yeah. Well, it seems to be building quite well. It was number one, the triple A transfer for a while. Yeah, it's kind of a strange place to be because we want to carry on writing music.

5:38We've been on this single foot for a while and we were kind of waiting to see what we're going to do next. What is the next single? What's being released in the future? We're kind of working out. It's a nice situation to be in because this one song has kind of introduced a lot of people to the album, but there's so many different opinions on the next single. I think that's a nice place to be. It's nice to know that people are listening to the whole album and people are coming back with different favourites. It's nice to feel that it wasn't just about this one song because we don't feel it was. Especially in the age where people don't listen to albums anymore. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know what, our audience is slowly growing, but it's really nice to see that these people are out there singing the whole album. Like I said, singing the whole album, it's not just kind of the single comes up and there you go.

6:24It's been nice. Do you think this animation concept is going to continue on with the next record? I would definitely do something visual to go along with the sound of the next record, but I think it needs to make sense with the sound of the next album. I said, I think we are developing and I think that will kind of develop in some way, but I don't really know what way. Yeah, well, as the sound is developing, that's the main thing first. Well, for people who just know candy just from the radio and everything like that, they might not know about this animation. How did that all come about? This is fascinating. Really, this was just, I've just kind of grown up in that kind of love in this Japanese kind of animation. And it was at a point where we were kind of working on the album and you start developing

7:14some kind of visual to go along with it. And it's kind of where we're going to go. What makes sense with the music? Because we really felt like we wanted to develop that rather than kind of give that over to someone else. And then we started developing sketches and ended up doing this one animation for one of our songs. It took about seven months of about six, seven animators working on it. And it was pretty much full time. And this was just kind of our own kind of love for it really and pulling some friends together. And then we won this British animation award for it, which was quite a big thing back in Europe. And that just kind of escalated. Then we had some funding from Warner Premiere to get our whole album animated. And we got the guys that did the gorillas to finish it off.

8:03Yeah, it sounds like it's kind of a whole five minute section to seven months. So it was a massive project. I think we had about 30 people working for about a year. It's crazy. It gets you up to different audiences though. It's a different way of promoting a band. I think it was, for us, I hate the way of even people feeling like you have to promote yourself, even kind of getting on, doing certain things on certain way that bands are feeling like they have to do their own marketing now online as well. And I feel like it wasn't about that for us. I'm not saying it was. It just kind of worked out well. Yeah, I mean, it definitely does. But I think it's definitely a case of what do we want it to look like? You know, and these doors just kept on opening and as they did it just, you know, we kept

8:51them kind of moving forward. Well, I know your manager's phoning from London. So you got to go. But what are the plans for the summer? What are you guys up to next? We're here. We're here just for us though. We're here for a couple of weeks. We go home for a couple of weeks and then we're back here on our own tour. Yeah. So I think within kind of six to eight weeks time, we're kind of going around. It's been really nice. It's been really nice visiting each city again and you get to know what you like about each place and every time you go back, there's a bigger audience. It's been really nice. Nice. Well, Christian, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.