Revere have been bashing away at making music to move you for some time now and with no backing from any label, PR company or booking agent sold out the 500 capacity Union Chapel in London. No ordinary band can do this. The grinding machinations of the music industry have largely ignored Revere for reasons unknown to this writer and the other legions of fans that have lent their artistic talents and sometimes their wallets to the burgeoning universe of Revere. With an album a year in the making and two hauntingly beautiful videos they’ve been slowly creeping round the back of the music industry’s bike shed to form a solid eight piece extravaganza that will leave any audience breathless but exhilarated. We catch a few of them at Cargo in London under the heaters and amidst the rats…
[All the members of Revere have been tagged with small ribbons on their index fingers much like animals in the wild…]
BCR: Are you tagging band members? Is this the beginning of a cult, like Kabala?
Jonathan Fletcher: I get confused about who’s in the band… If someone’s wearing black I think perhaps they’re in the band…
BCR: The tags might stay on if you put it around your arm… no that’s too Coldplay… and Nazi…
Jonathan Fletcher: It’s a fine line between Coldplay and Nazis…
BCR: So let’s start at the beginning… Where would you say Revere began?
Stephen Ellis: I think it started with the acoustic EP, four or five years ago, we recorded that and it was Andy [Hawke], John [Fletcher] and myself in the band at the time and it was literally just a case of going and putting down some demos. Then we started advertising for other musicians to just play on recordings.
BCR: You found your cellist on the tube didn’t you?
Stephen Ellis: Yeah, I work with these quite disturbed kids and one of them gave me this piece of paper with loads of really rather disturbing drawings on it as a gift. I was rummaging through my pockets to write down my details for Kath [Mckie] so she could come and check us out and I didn’t realise what was on the other side of this paper. The kid who’d given it to me was called Stephen so it said ‘Stephen’s drawing’ at the top and it was these absolutely god-awful pictures of people getting maimed and stabbed and stuff and then on the other side I’d written my name and number and website address… She’d gone home with this thinking oh my god… I came that close…
Jonathan Fletcher: It’s what I’ve been waiting for all my life…
Stephen Ellis: But she phoned twice saying she really wanted to do this, this sounds amazing. Then she turned up to one of our gigs with a lot of her mates and I found out later she was totally scared of the drawings and needed her friends just in case. They all grilled me and I had no idea why they were being so investigative.
BCR: So how did you get to a point where you’re a solidified band, with a core group?
Ellie Wilson: We’ve been this line up for about two years now…
Stephen Ellis: It’s always been a little bit shifting but it seems to have settled on a group of people who actually get on and have similar goals where they want to take the music.
BCR: So how do you go about making the music? Democracy or dictatorship?
Jonathan Fletcher: Neither… We try very hard to be one but it swings far too much in the Coldplay direction.
Andrew Hawke: We’re all far too polite.
Stephen Ellis: There are three songwriters in the band; John, Andy and myself but getting it into an eight-piece just takes a lot of work and there’s a lot of times where things are re-hashed. I think it’s quite important to say that the music itself is not really happy-go-lucky and I do think it feeds into the rehearsal environment because I’ve been in bands where the music’s been much more upbeat. But because it’s quite intense music that’s trying to do stuff it can be quite tiring to string it all together.
BCR: Do you have one thing that brings you all together like a favourite band… or bells maybe?
Andrew Hawke: The bells, haha… I think when we put the material together in the band it seems quite finely balanced at times with the dynamic in the band and that’s partly why it’s shifted members in recent years. We do fight quite a lot and sometimes we can barely say three words to each other without it ending in an argument. But at the end of the day that seems to produce better music. So the process of writing a song is one of turmoil but at the end of the turmoil… err… emerges, um... haha… beauty!
Stephen Ellis: But it’s all about that moment on stage, the moment you get the finished song on stage and play it and that’s the point where you get off and everyone’s as close as they can ever be to each other, loving it. That’s when you realise why you’ve all spent several months yelling at each other in a rehearsal studio.
Ellie Wilson: We did loads of festivals this year as well. That was a brilliant thing for the band because we spent so much time with each other, camping out together and seeing other sides of people. It bonded us more.
