We The Starling
We The Starling perform in last term’s Battle of the Bands
How many people are there in the group?
There’s just the four of us – Alice is on vocals and guitar, Liz plays the drums, Greg is on the guitar as well and Tom does our bass.
How did you meet?
Tom and Alice met on their first day as freshers, here in Hertford. A little later, while standing in an Oxford indie club, Liz saw Greg (across a crowded room…) and decided he was ‘vaguely pretty’. And it went from there, really. But the first time we actually all played together involved a foreign country, monks and toilet cleaner. We couldn’t possibly tell you any more than that. Okay, the country was France. But no more than that.
Have you done very much recording?
Liz has a ‘barn studio’ in Somerset, with cows wandering around. We’ve been together for a year now, but a while back we went down there to record. We stayed together in the same room for four nights straight, doing a demo. It was intense, but good. Someone we know has founded Pink Lloyds Records and he likes our sound, but other than that, no record interest yet.
How would you describe your style of music?
Well, ‘aggressive pop’ is probably most accurate – we like that description – the songs are always slightly schizophrenic. Our aim is to put as many different influences as we possibly can into every song we write.
What or who are your musical influences?
Alice’s bad dreams. Or bad dreams generally. Comic books. And alcohol. Oh… musical influences? Anything and everythng. We have an eclectic taste: we’ll listen to everything from country to metal really – there aren’t any particular bands that we try to incorporate into our sound. It’s more something new gleaned from everything we’ve listened to.
What has been your best gig so far?
That’s quite a difficult question, but I would guess it was probably the one we played in Chew Valley, near Liz’s home. We were upstairs in this local pub with the most diverse audience we’ve ever experienced. From the stage we could see the bemused little children in the front row with their hands over their ears, and a lot of disapproving middle-aged people with frowns. I don’t think that they were quite ready for us, but I guess that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? That was the definitely the funniest gig we’ve played so far, if nothing else!
What do you think the future holds?
We’re finalists, so next year we’re going to buy a barge and live on it together. Then we’ll all get rubbish jobs, I guess, and spend all our spare time in our on-board rehearsal room.
We definitely want to go into the music business – there’s just nothing else we’d want to be doing. We’d like to have a barge with an engine so we can have massive parties, then wake up the next morning downstream somewhere and have no idea where we are.
21st Apr 2005