I think I’ve got a bit of a band-crush on Standard Fare. It’s getting a bit out of hand, if I’m honest. I think I’m just a sucker for several things, various little trigger points in my head that close the series of synapses that leads to me to completely forget myself. Stuff like boy-girl vocals, clean choppy guitars, start-stop drums, and buckets of vim. That sort of thing. Hence, I guess, the crush. Seriously, they’re fucking brilliant. There’s no point arguing the toss with me, either, it’ll be like you said something about my sister. Just a delight from top to bottom, a bloody great grin put to vinyl, one that has never yet failed to cheer me up when I hear it, and for those unfortunate souls who know me, that’s some fucking achievement given the towering mood I’m normally in. Aces, just aces.

Standard Fare are:
Emma on vocals & bass
Dan on vocals and guitar
Andy on sticks & drums

Where are you all from?
Dan: I’m from Buxton, in North Derbyshire
Emma: I’m from York
Andy: and I’m originally from Buxton, but now live in Sheffield through studying at Uni.

How did you meet? What made you stay together?
Dan: I first met Emma at a gig where a mutual friend was playing in a band. We got chatting and not long after, our different bands at the time played a gig together. Anyway, those bands fell apart but me and Emma starting playing, and when we needed a drummer my Brother introduced me to Andy.
Andy: Yeah I was playing in a band with Dan’s brother at the time but this soon took over
Dan: it was good cause my brother didn’t really seem to mind!
Emma: it took a bit of work to stay together when me & Andy moved to different universities but we still really enjoyed it and relocating the band to Sheffield gave us loads more places to play.

Why are you in a band?
Dan: When we started out we played dozens of gigs to just the other bands and the sound guy, but I still got a kick from it, and now we’re starting to play to crowded rooms and to people who’ve gone out of their way to come see us, those kicks just get bigger.
Emma: I am in a band because music is a massive part of my life and playing with the same 2 people for a number of years means you have a connection to them that is different to friendship and it feels amazing when we’re writing together and all on the same wavelength.
Andy: One thing lead to another really, it stems from me tapping on school desks, spending a lot of my dinner times in the music department, to now playing with Standard Fare.

How come you sound like that?
Andy: I think the different types of music we grew up around plays a part in where we get our influences from. My parents listened to a lot of country music and although it’s different to what I listen to now, it still draws me in.
Dan: for me, the band that got me into music was Green Day. I heard them when I was about 12 and their sound was so different to anything my parents listened to and it just blew my mind.  That sparked me to pick up a guitar and I still haven’t managed to put it down!
Emma: for me it was Blondie, Fleetwood Mac and Sam Cook that had the biggest influence on me, alongside my mother playing music in bands. It all influenced the way I wrote songs when we first starting playing together.
Dan: Yeah, when we started out we had some songs that sounded a lot heavier and raunchier and some quieter ones, but as we managed to smooth the contrast between the songs we found a sound that just seemed to work better for us.
Emma: But it’s not finished yet, we’re still working on it!

Where do the songs come from?
Dan: Sometimes me or Emma will bring a song we’ve been working on and it can be nearly complete, but other times one of us may have idea and we just play around until it becomes a song we’re happy with.
Emma: they’re mainly about our own experiences, Dan’s are sometimes stories about friends. It’s really trying to say something that you couldn’t say at the time or daren’t say now
Dan: and somehow the emotions you feel about saying them always find a way through.
Andy: We sometimes get a basic structure of a song putting together different ideas, and then play it over and over until we get what we want. And sometimes get something that’s completely different to what we started with.

Does it ever get boring/repetitive playing live, or recording or rehearsing the same songs over again?
Dan: Every gig is different so at the moment i’m not worried about things becoming repetitive.
Andy: It’s quite scary just how many times we’ve played some of the older ones!
Emma: We had a good time recording ‘Night With A Friend’ and its also good fun to play live. I generally get excited about the newer songs we’ve written but performing all the songs is good fun I always find myself getting in the frame of mind I was in when I wrote a song when I perform it.
Dan: The guitar parts on ‘I Know it’s Hard’ are probably my favourite bits, and the recording sounds nice and raw.
Andy: I think ‘Dancing’ is my most favourite and best creation, I tried to create a beat people could dance along to, also wanting it to be quite funky and disjointed.
Andy: ‘Wow’ really takes you through a journey, It starts so slow and quite unusual, and then by the end of the song the pace really quite fast and energetic. ‘fifteen’ is my most fun song to play, really bouncy and there’s quite a lot of stops in it too, I’m practically dead by the end of that one!

Why will people hate you or your songs?
Andy: We just enjoy to play really, we don’t mean to make any kind of statement, so I think people will either like what we do or just not take interest.
Dan: I thought more of my friends would have a problem with us being associated with a city we’re not originally from, but they seem ok with that..I’ve probably just started this one off.
Emma: There can be backlashes if people get overly complimentary about us then other people will think its unjustified or over the top and that can be annoying to them. I don’t think we are really doing anything revolutionary and so people could say we are boring or unoriginal.

Tell us a story from your life that sums you up?
Emma: I think we all just came from small towns where there wasn’t much to do and although we all began to really love music there was not much live music around. We started learning our instruments and then found each other and the rest came easily.

Is it hard to stand out these days?
Dan: It’s a lot easier for new bands to reach more people, but with more bands doing it makes it a lot harder for any one band to do well. It proper scares me that we’re one of several million bands all doing a similar thing.
Emma: But the technology side of it has to be a good thing, the amount of positive coverage and gig offers etc we’ve had through the internet has got us to where we are now.
Andy: Getting in to a music scene of a city of where you’re not from and also building a fan base has been quite a long process, using the internet has made things a lot easier, finding bands and then being able to message them within minutes.

Have you been to SXSW before?
Emma: No, first time for us all. It’s our first time over to the states as a band so we’re really excited about the whole trip. Getting to meet some other bands and make some contacts will be great, and I’m sure we’ll want to go back!

Standard Fare have the single ‘Fifteen’ out at the moment. There’s a bunch of gigs round the UK planned for the next few months (see myspace.com/standardfare). The album is released March 29th in the Uk and March 16th in the USA. They’re playing a bunch of gigs in the north east of the US in March before SXSW where alongside our showcase gig we’ll be doing a couple of day parties and other bits and pieces. They’re also playing at Indietracks and FarmFestival in July.

URL
myspace.com/standardfare

MP3
Night With A Friend

Video

Standard Fare – Fifteen

A biscuit off being Single Of The Week this one. This Sheffield three-piece have been together for a while now, although this is the first time I’ve come across them, and with a single “Dancing” out last year (video below) on Thee Sheffield Recording Company and an album due later in 2010 following this single, it looks like they’re finally getting busy. Normally, indiepop can just all blend together in a twitching great pile of steaming vintage clothing. Standard Fare seem somehow to make it all seem a bit more… well, grown up. It’s like a band with years under their belt who have decided to have a bit of fun for a change – there are some astute songwriting chops in here, and no mistake. This single relates an infatuation with a no-doubt pale and pretty teenage indie boy, with short, choppy Housemartins-y guitars, and Emma’s vocal veering between spoken-with-a-raised-eyebrow and a banshee wail, it’s just one of those records that’s fucking right-now immediate. Charming, charming stuff. The album’s called The Noyelle Beat, and it’s out in March – brilliantly for me, they’re also playing SXSW, so you can guarantee we’ll be trailing this lot around like baby bloody ducks.

VIDEO: STANDARD FARE – DANCING

The Fresh And Onlys – Second One To Know

From Sheffield indiepop to San Francisco garage psych, with The Fresh And Onlys. Taking a whopping cue from the 60s – specifically, and to an almost bonkers level, The Who – The Fresh And Only nevertheless still manage to come up with a song that’s catchy enough to cut through the rigidly fashionable wave of ‘cooler’ records this week., despite sounding like it genuinely was recorded forty-plus years ago. I always find bands that ape such an old sound to such a huge degree to be a bit weird – in this case though, it’s actually just plain old refreshing.

Campfires – Stormy Late Fall

Thought I’d listened to a taster of this but – in fact – it genuinely is only one minute and eighteen seconds long. Admittedly, it’s 78 seconds of booming and crashing drums, clanging and vastly distorted guitars and vocals being beamed in by phone filtered through a plane crash, so it’s not exactly light on substance. It is also deeply, deeply addictive. I must have listened to it twenty times today, and it’s genuinely made me question why all songs aren’t this short. Their lo-fi shoegaze (honestly, it’s a good idea),  all comes together like My Bloody Valentine channeling Japanther, which I think you’ll agree is pretty a tasty proposition. The only thing that’ll get annoying is getting up every minute to get the needle back to the start.

THE SINGLES THAT’RE WARDING OFF THE COLD THIS WEEK:
Campfires – Stormy Late Fall
Fresh And Onlys – Second One To Know
Fyfe Dangerfield – She Needs Me
Good Shoes – Under Control
Lyrebirds – Closer
Plan B – Stay Too Long
Standard Fare – Fifteen
Voice Of The Seven Thunders – The Burning Mountain
White Rabbits – Percussion Gun