On their third visit to the UK I caught up with Marcel Neumann, the guitarist of We Butter the Bread with Butter, as the band were making preparations for their set supporting Devil Sold His Soul at The Cellar. We spoke about the band’s touring experiences and their new album, Goldkinder.
What has it been like touring with Devil Sold His Soul?
Marcel: We’ve had a great time here. This time we are just the support band so we can’t bring out all our live show, our stage setup, and that’s quite relaxing because when we play our own shows we will have a huge show, a lot of lights, sometimes a lot of pyrotechnics. This time as a support band we have a lot of time to see the cities and all the landscapes and we love that.
On the German part of the tour, Devil Sold His Soul will be supporting you. Was this the plan all along?
Yeah, that was the idea behind this. We also take Yashin with us. We supported them last year and then played our own tour. Now we are supporting Devil Sold His Soul and when we go back to Germany we take the band with us and, yeah, we became great friends during the tour so I’m looking forward to it.
This year was your first time in the USA. Did it go as well as you expected?
That was just amazing. We had such a wonderful time there. We had great tour managers with us who showed us a lot of real American stuff. We saw great landscapes, we had American bars we could go to. The people who came to our shows, they were so thankful for our show and we spoke to a lot of people and they all had been waiting for four or five years. It was such an amazing experience for all of us and we had great shows and great times there.
Would you say that the USA was your favourite place to tour?
There’s a difference. In Germany we get better shows because more people know us there, but in America you have everything. If you want to go to the beach there is a beach, if you want to see mountains there are mountains and so, so many different cultures and it’s very, very exciting. Yeah, actually after this tour we thought about moving there because we love it so much.
You released your new album, ‘Goldkinder’, with Pledge Music. How was that experience?
We had this idea because it took a long time from the last album to ‘Goldkinder’. We were looking to research a way where we can be nearer to the fans, more contact with the fans. That was the idea behind it, to get directly in contact with the people who want to listen to our songs. There was also this EP, ‘Projekt Herz’, and the idea behind it was that we don’t want to sell just posters and merch we also want to give music to the fans which is made 100 percent by us. We think everything we give to the fans and to the people should 100 percent be made by us.
Do you think it has been successful so far?
That’s a hard question. I can’t say myself if it was successful, but it helped to release some things like music videos so it was a good step for us.
What do you think is the best track on ‘Goldkinder’?
I think every one of us has his own favourite. Mine could be could be ‘Pyroman & Astronaut’ or the fourth song ‘Ohne Herz’ because it has, I think, the most beautiful melody we’ve ever written. Also the last song ‘Kind im Brunnen’ but everyone has their own favourite.
For me it’s ‘Viva Mariposa’; I love the drum beat at the start particularly.
Yeah, it sounds very international.
I’m sure you get asked this in every interview, but what is the origin of the name ‘We Butter the Bread with Butter’?
There are some ideas behind this name but the most important idea is that in heavy music, in hard rock ‘n’ roll music you find all these evil, bloody band names. You find these dark, death, bloody, thunder bullshit.
Like Slayer, that sort of thing?
I mean, they are good bands but it’s just not authentic to make everything evil and just yelling at everything and everything bloody. We are very normal guys, so if we would just choose a name which is very dark and evil just to act like a big rock star that wouldn’t be us. So we decided to pick a name that is actually quite normal to strike against this all this different kind of music. That was the main idea behind it – to pick a name that describes ourselves, the fact that we are very normal people who just want to make music and don’t act like big rock stars.
What would you say are your biggest influences musically?
We have a lot of influences in very different genres. You can find it also in our music because it’s not only one genre, it’s mixed up, different stuff. We love a lot of classical music; we like a lot of piano players like Rachmaninoff. But we also like good pop music; that’s great too. We love things like Lady Gaga or Jessie J, which has very good melodies and good singers but we love also great rock and roll like Avenged Sevenfold or Slipknot or Rammstein maybe. We really love Muse.
Muse is actually my favourite band.
Actually it’s our favourite band too because there are no better melodies than what Muse are doing. So yeah, something like that; very mixed, very different.
Do you have other, non-musical influences?
Yeah, we are watching good movies and series all the time. Everybody in the tour bus is watching Breaking Bad and movies and other stuff.
When you are not performing or creating music, what do you like to do?
Everybody does different things. I’m very interested in vegan food; I’m a vegan and I’m very interested in all this animals, nature. I just go out for walks, thinking about stuff. Our bassist, Max, is very interested in art, and our drummer, Can, goes to the cinema every day.
We Butter The Bread With Butter’s new album, Goldkinder, is out now and available here.
