The Edge chatted to Will and Ian of local rising stars Creeper before their recent set at Takedown Festival. It’s already been quite a year for these guys, in the past 12 months they’ve toured with heavy hitters like Bury Tomorrow and Funeral for a Friend, been announced for Download festival and still found time to put out their debut EP. I caught up with them to discuss what else they’ve got going on this year, how the band got together and why exactly they call themselves Creeper.
You guys looking forward to your set today?
Will [vocals]: Yeah, we’re really excited for it! It’s a beautiful sunny day in Southampton, and we’re playing indoors, which is perfect for our band, obviously, as the sun does burn our delicate vampire skin! [laughs]A bunch of our friends bands are playing as well, which is nice. Moose Blood are playing, and we’ve toured with them, Decade are on later as well, and we know them, so today is just a day of mates for us really!
Do you play a lot of festivals?
W: This only our first year as a band, so we’re doing lots this year. We’re doing HevyFest, Camden Rocks, Download Festival and the Great Escape as well. So we’re doing absolutely loads!
How did the band get together?
W: Ian and I used to play in another band before called Our Time Down Here and we toured for such a long time! We must have played every city ever! [laughs]After that we broke up and one of the guys from a band called Hang The Bastard left and asked us to start a band. We said yes and did some demos and it all went from there!
Ian [guitar]: It was really organic, all of us just forming a group together.
Why are you guys called Creeper?
W: Well, I came up with the name actually.
I: It was a really long process though, wasn’t it?[laughs]
W: Yeah, it was a bit! I wanted to call the band Ghost Cat for ages.
I: Yeah, and I wanted to call it Coven.
W: Yeah, he wanted to call it Coven, but we just couldn’t make up our minds. Creeper sounded like a Stephen King novel though, it sounded like a bit of an adventure. And we also liked that it didn’t have any specific genre attached to it. With some names, you can immediately tell that it belongs to a metal band or a punk band, and we didn’t want to have that. We wanted a more malleable name that we could use for anything, and that would let us be flexible with our sound and do something that people wouldn’t be expecting.
I: And we wanted the name to be a little bit timeless as well, something that wouldn’t just fix us to this year.
How would you describe your music to someone who’s never heard it before?
W: Well, we’re from the DIY punk community, so first and foremost I’ll always consider our band a punk band, because there’s so many avenues you can go down with that. I wouldn’t want to nail us down to one specific genre, because at any time we could change everything depending on what we’re going through. I suppose overall though we’re a dark, theatrical punk band. We’re not pretty boys, we’re a punk band!
Are there any bands you’d really like to tour with?
W: We toured with Funeral for a Friend earlier this year and that was a bit of a dream come true for us, they were great guys. Honestly though, we’ll tour with anyone who’s nice. We don’t want to tour with the kind of rockstar wankers that don’t want to talk to anyone, and think they’re too good for it all, but apart from that, we’ll tour with anyone!
Any sign of a full length album from you guys soon?
W: We’re doing another EP, because we want to have more songs and we’re doing so much stuff that it’s difficult at the moment to take time out to record. We’re doing another record though, and we’ve written some songs for that at the moment. A full length will be coming at some point and it’s going to be great, we’re really excited for that!
E: Yeah, that’s something we’re really looking forward to, but we don’t want to give it all away just yet!
W: So, yeah, there’ll be a bit of a wait for the full length album because we don’t want to rush it, but we’ll have a new EP coming out relatively soon, which we’re really excited about and we have loads of other stuff going on. We go on tour with Bury Tomorrow next month, and we’re doing a couple of headline shows before that as well. It’s very busy; we’re doing all sorts of things. The way things are going, it’s going to be harder to avoid us than it is to see us! [laughs]We just want to be able to get out there as much as we can, if people want to see us somewhere, we want to be able to get out and play to them. We want to tour for as long as we can and play to as many people who want to see us as we possibly can!
