Interview // Babeshadow

Babeshadow are a band that I’ve loved since about December of last year now. You always know that a band’s special if you can remember where you were the first time you heard them. I remember when I first heard Babeshadow I was walking to the library wearing a white fur coat and the ridiculous  biker boots that I almost fell over in about ten times during the course of my journey because of the ice.

I seem to have a tendency of interviewing bands in unusual places, a few months ago I interviewed Steven Ansell from Blood Red Shoes in a monochrome shower and now I’m interviewing Tom and Dave from Babeshadow in a vacant disabled lift in Wolverhampton Civic Hall, after the rude security lady in her suit refused to let me go into the dressing room (in case I did a Mark Chapman and shot Florence?).  It is here that we cover the topics of Girls Allowed naked, Joe Jackson as a bald guitarist and the band’s desire to move into the Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s ‘Tunnel of Love’ with their caterer.

Introduce yourselves
T: I’m Tom Cawte and I play guitar, sing and play keyboards
D: I’m David Thornley and I play guitar and sing… And play keyboards

Is the name ‘Babeshadow’ or ’Babe Shadow?’   I’ve seen it written as both.
T: Well, it’s a bit of both at the moment because everyone thinks it’s something different.

I was introduced to you as Babe Shadow when I downloaded your demo of Sea Serpents in December from Fucking Dance blog, it has the bit on it at the beginning where you’re talking about William Hill
D: Ha, yes

How did you come up with the name Babeshadow?
D: We saw a band playing in Shoreditch once who were called Babe Shadow years ago and we thought it was a good name.

How did you get involved with LuvLuvLuv records?
T: Hannah, one of the founders of LuvLuvLuv (there’s Hannah and Mairead), heard about us from two different online bloggers in one day so she thought, ‘oh they must be good’ and she came to one of our shows but we know Mairead through other people we know.

How long have you been together?

T: Well as a full band, just over half a year, we’ve been together since about October of last year.

K: When did you realise that you could start a band?

T: Well, us two have been playing together forever and we’ve always had whatever band we could gather up and now, we have our current line-up. It’s always changing, we’ll probably quit like next week, but then reform again with the same members!

How was the 6music session the other day? Did you enjoy it?
T: That was good, that was at Maida Vale.  I snapped a string on the first song but it was still good.  It was nice having a live audience there too.
D: The weirdest thing was that we’d been watching the ‘Adam and Joe Show ‘all day and at the venue as the light went out, Adam and Joe did the ‘no smoking announcements.’ It was like Adam and Joe were introducing us to the stage.

Are you enjoying being on tour with Florence and The Drums?
T: Yeah, it great. We’ve just spent 3 days in Blackpool and we didn’t know what to do so we went to the theme park and that was fun.
D: Yeah, we wouldn’t want to be at home right now, we’d just be paying rent for now reason when we could be on tour.

Which musicians do you find most inspiring?
T: Buddy Holly
D: And then there’s your slightly embarrassing one
T: Oh yeah, Madonna, I really like Madonna.
D: And Girls Aloud are great naked.
T: Buddy Holly is probably our main influence at the moment but if they all started a band together, “oh my!”  We often just listen to the same record about 50 times until we’re sick of it. I just listened to the Beatles for a year and then I moved onto someone else

Any future releases?
D: Yeah, we have an EP out at the moment; you can buy it on iTunes now.
K: Which songs are featured on it?
T: ‘Sea Serpents’,’ Darling’,’ Heart’ and ‘For Me’, and then we’re going to be releasing an actual 10” limited edition vinyl and then a 7” after that, so fix your needle!

(I have already told them the story of my broken record player needle.)

What are your views on illegal downloading?
T: I think it’s great, I think that it was bound to happen to there’s no point in trying to control it.
D: I’ve done it and I don’t feel bad about it
T: I think that the thing is, now, everyone has got an iPod with iTunes on it and everyone should download it through that and if you don’t want to download a crappy quality one from the internet then you can buy it off iTunes. It’s not as bad as it was at one point, iTunes sales in the past year have gone up by 100%.
D: Yeah, don’t do it, but do it!
T: Vinyl’s are coming back anyway, everyone I know has vinyl records.
D: Yeah, I think iTunes is dated now; vinyls are the new thing

Are you playing any festivals this summer?
T: Yeah, we’re playing: Glastonbury, we’re supposed to be doing Reading and Leeds and we’re doing 1234 festival in London and maybe The Secret Garden Party, it’s all in the email process at the moment.

Any aspirations for the future?
T: To really, really, really sell out.
D: The caterers that we have on this tour, I just want them to live in my house. And where we were yesterday at the Pleasure beach, we went into the Tunnel of Love which was great; I’d like to live there.
T: So, basically, we want to move into the Tunnel of Love with our caterers.

Babeshadow’s ‘Sea Serpents’ EP is out now on iTunes.