I meet with Kris Tunmore and Tim Love from The Great Statesmen in a rowdy but pleasant pub in Oxford Circus. Between the beers and the hang-overs I get some truths from the normally reluctant boys, and manage to coax them from behind their fringes and cheeky grins.
BCR: How are you guys feeling today?
Tim Love: A bit bleary eyed. A bit hung over. A friend of mine made me drink Long Island Iced Teas all night.
Kris Tunmore: Made you? At gun point of course. A cold beer in the afternoon should sort us out.
BCR: You’re studio is just around the corner, is that where you’ve come from?
Kris Tunmore: Yeah, it’s just four doors down. We’ve spent a lot of time here over the years….
BCR: It seems like you’re on the road to an album, because you’ve been recording since half way through last year?
Kris Tunmore: We do things in little stages, we try and record three to six songs in a year. With what we’ve got at the moment we’ve got a full albums worth of material but we still have to re-record. We did one recording in 2006, and two last year and then the recording we did at the end of last year has followed through to the stuff we’ve been doing this year.
BCR: So, when do you think you’ll release? ‘Cos you’re not signed yet…
Tim Love: No. Not yet.
Kris Tunmore: We’re hoping to get something out towards the middle of the year.
BCR: Well, a self-release is nowhere near as hard as it used to be.
Tim Love: Not at all, with things like Myspace and Facebook and all those downloadable places it’s definitely easier than ever before.
Kris Tunmore: We’d still like to get a deal with a label and re-record the album…
BCR: Who would you like to sign with?
Kris Tunmore: I quite like Transgressive or Fierce Panda.
BCR: Not only have you got enough for an album but you’ve been gigging loads so…
Kris Tunmore: We reckon we could get it completely sorted in two months. The one thing we want to do now, before we get a deal, is to try and write as many songs as we can in the next six months and have enough material to pick and choose and then, also, have enough to make another album.
Tim Love: I think bands tend to put all their best stuff on the first album and then have nothing to work with when they have to do the second album.
BCR: So… you’ve been getting quite a few rather exciting accolades recently…
Tim Love: They’re notching up, yeah…
Kris Tunmore: The XFM thing was really good. And the timing of it was brilliant. I was in Texas at SXSW standing next to John Kennedy when I got a text saying “we’ve won XFM unsigned” to which John Kennedy said “was there any doubt?”
BCR: I’ve got a lot of respect for Kennedy and Lamacq, who also lauded you, how do you feel about that?
Kris Tunmore: The Lamacq thing came as quite a shock. We played Dublin Castle last year and our guitarist met Steve [Lamacq] and gave him our CD and had a bit of a chat with him. Another three or four weeks went past. We weren’t expecting anything and we weren’t waiting on anything and we got this email out of the blue from this guy who said “hello mate, I work with BBC radio 6 and the Steve Lamacq show. Could you do an interview in around three hours from now?” I ended up doing it in the corridor of the Comedy Store.
BCR: So what are you’re hopes and dreams for the year seeing as it’s started so well.
Kris Tunmore: I would really like to get the new tracks recorded and sorted out and also to get the album done and sorted. I was talking to a mate of mine who’s doing really well and I sort of said to him, how are you doing it? What’s the secret of your success? And he said, the first thing you need to do is get the album done and sorted. Have that album as an available package. And he’s right because a lot of the print press won’t take you seriously till you’ve got a release out there. The radio press won’t take you seriously. So before we have that, it’s harder to get any traction.
Tim Love: I think we’ve already got that package, we’re already a unit.
