Miscellaneous - Interview

  by Anthony Strutt

published: 5 / 11 / 2010

intro

London/Brighton-based psychedelic/shoegazing band One Unique Signal speak to Anthony Strutt about their ten year history and playing shows as the backing band with one of their main influences, the Telescopes

One Unique Signal are Nick Keech (guitar), Bryon Jackson (guitar and vocals), James Beal (bass), Dan Davies (drums) and James Messenger (Guitar) As well as recording and releasing their own material, they have also recently been playing dates with one of their main influences, Telescopes’ front man Stephen Lawrie, working as his backing band as he tours again with ‘Taste’, the Telescopes classic 1989 shoegazing debut album. PB: Where are you guys based? NK: West London. Bryon's originally from Brighton and now lives in South East London, but the rest of us are based around Brentford and Hounslow. PB: The sound you guys are making is such that you must have been in bands for years and years. NK: We have all been in various bands. I was in the now defunct URSA for about a day! The drummer from that band, Khyam Allami, is doing pretty well now. He was doing the proms last week! JB: I was in a band with Dan at school. We never made it past the local pub. PB: How long has One Unique Signal been going? NK: Almost ten years. The line up as it is now has been together since the end of 2006. Only James Beal and I remain from the original line up. PB: How did you all meet? NK: James Messenger was in another band at the time called ‘Fur’ with my girlfriend Anji and my sister and knew his mate Jim was looking for a band. We jammed for a few months, playing a lot of experimental noise stuff down at the now closed Riot Club in Hounslow before hooking up with drummer Lee Barber. Bryon joined about six months prior to the current line up after answering our online classifieds SOS. BJ: I came to London and started to hang out with people through the Lonely Musician dating agency and, after blind dating them; it has kind of gone full circle. We all got together through that. PB: You remind me of bands like Spacemen 3 and Loop. You could be described as being both Shoegaze/NuGaze or psychedelic. How would you describe yourself? JB: Experimental. Someone also said Shitgaze the other day. There are lots of influences. There is a shoegaze influence definitely, lots of psychedelia. It came together in an organic way. BJ: There are lots of different areas that we like. NK: We are happy to rip off any band we like because you never sound like them in the end anyway. You can't help but put your print on it. It’s all about our interpretation of the music that inspires us. JB: We just make a noise really. The centre point of what we all listen to is freakout, noise and it sort of overlaps. PB: What are your releases to date? NK: We had a single out in 2003, ‘Lowry’, which sold out. To be fair it sounds nothing like what we are about now. Our debut album, ‘Tribe Castle and Nation’ in 2005 is pretty much the same although there are similarities if you listen hard enough. We then released ‘Dismemberment’ ourselves in 2007 which still makes it into our live set and followed that up with ‘Villains to a Man’ on Genepool Records in 2008. A few weeks ago we released ‘Gora’, a minute and a half free download for which we did a limited edition floppy disc hard copy. PB: While some of your songs are short, others are a lot longer. When you write do you go in and say this will be a long one? NK: It is just repetition. We are happy to stay with two, three or four chords. In short form, songs constructed like that can be boring and uninspired. If you take the same formula and play for ten minutes, it then can become something magical. If you listen to our songs there aren't many parts to them? PB: And then you hooked up with Stephen Lawrie and are now his Telescopes? How did that happen? NK: Stephen sort of half knew us from us accosting him after shows and chatting music with him. We then booked The Telescopes for a show we put on back in 2008. After a lot of Byron telling Stephen we could play ‘Taste’ better than anyone else he called our bluff. He is a friendly guy and the whole setup just seems to have clicked for both parties. Basically, he had played some dates doing ‘Taste’ material with 93 Million Miles From the Sun. Seeing this gave us the confidence to suggest we have a go without having to worry he may be offended that we wanted to hook up doing older stuff. PB: What are your future plans? NK: We are booking gigs in France and Spain for next year and have been approached by Dream Machine records to get a seven inch out before then. There will be lots of writing going on over the winter hibernation! PB: Thank you. More information about One Unique Signal can be found at http://www.oneuniquesignal.com and http://oneuniquesignal.blogspot.com

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