Matt Hartless and The Maverick Seven - Interview with Casey Burks

  by Shirley Procter

published: 8 / 11 / 2022

I met Casey Burks at the WOMAD Festival where he was staying in the next tent to us Casey is a session musician and song writer, who is based in Manchester and is also the drummer in Matt Hartless and the Maverick Seven. As we were packing up our tents on Monday morning, I managed to grab a few minutes with him for an interview. PB: Tell me, how did you start as a musician? CASEY BURKS: Well, I’ve been drumming forever. My parents got very annoyed by it, so they decided that. instead of me tapping on tables, pots and pans, they would eventually invest in a drum kit, so that I could make sounds that were vaguely musical. My mum and dad both had guitars when I was younger. Neither of them got super into playing, but they could both play a few songs and knew a few chords. One day my mum sat me down and decided to teach me everything she knew about playing guitar, and she did! I got the bug and forced her to pay for lessons for years. So, there’s a lot of my parents’ love and also a lot of their money that went into my music making! PB: That’s what parents are for! That’s what we do. CB: Yes, love and also finance. PB: Did you start the band, or did you join the band? CB: I joined the band; I’ve been in the band for four years now. I started off playing bass guitar and we had a different drummer. When the drummer left, there was a readjustment, the keyboard player moved to bass, and I moved to drums. Now we don’t have a keyboard player, but it’s okay. We’re making do. The band had been going for six - seven years before I joined, Matt Hartless, the titular Matt Hartless, is very persistent. He’s been in this band for years, with dozens of different iterations, some people staying for a long time, some people only a brief period. The set-up we have got now has been going for a little while, so I think we’re going to stick with it for a while. PB: What type of music do you play in the band? CB: It’s an amalgamation. The title we’ve come up with is Stadium Ska, because Matt Hartless who writes most of the songs, has a big history in bands like Muse and Radiohead that play big, long epic, large scale songs that sound good in large venues, but he’s also into The Manic Street Preachers and ska punk bands, and Shelly, who plays violin, is well into folk music. Traditional folk playing violin in a folk band would be ideal for her, but it’s not a folk band, although there is a folk element. Then me and Matt Crighton, the bassist, are the rhythm section. We like jazz and weird time signatures, so it’s an interesting amalgamation of stadium rock, ska, folk, and we try to sneak in as much jazz as we can, but Matt Hartless is not so into it, and a bit of punk as well, so Stadium Ska is the title, the genre we’ve gone for. It’s also been described as just Festival Music. It’s music you can dance to. PB: Where can you find your music? CB: We’re on Spotify. If you just type in The Maverick Seven, we’re pretty much the first thing that comes up, we’ve got one album out and there’s also a few albums just under Matt Hartless, from before when he had the band properly going. PB: That’s great. Thank you, I’ll look for that. Where and when will we see you performing? CB: We’re playing at a couple of festivals this summer. If you follow us on Instagram as well, we’re posting constantly about gigs we have coming up PB: Thank you so much!

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