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Quirks Behind The Music - MOUSES



For those readers who aren't familiar with you and your music, tell us a little about yourself and your sound.
We are Mouses – a lo-fi punk rock duo from Billingham. We play noisy distorted garage pop songs about religion and vampires and stuff.

Which artists have influenced your personal tastes and as a band?
Between us our favourite bands are The White Stripes and Green Day, so I think in some way we’re a twisted hybrid of the two, with a lot of influence from fuzzy bands such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Wavves, Times New Viking, Neutral Milk Hotel. And Weezer – we love Weezer.

So you recently filmed a dramatic music video for your track 'Hollywood'. What was that experience like and what was the inspiration behind the song and the video?
It was a somewhat rushed but really fun experience haha. We had less than a week to put it all together and trying to make something quick and easy soon turned into trying our luck making our own Hollywood movie. The film Sunset Boulevard heavily inspires the song and evidently the video too. It’s about the darker side to fame and how far craving it can take you.



How has your sound evolved? Did you think you would sound the way you do when you first started out?
There’s definitely a lot more energy in our stuff now than there ever was when we started. I think that’s just a natural progression with the amount of gigs we’ve done over the past couple of years and how much we put into our live show. I think things were a little more calculated before and now there’s a lot more noise and we just let things flow a bit more naturally.

In September you're releasing your debut album. How are you feeling? Do you have any interesting stories from the making of the album?
We’re feeling super excited about it! It’s taken a while to get everything together and now that we’re closing in on the date we just can’t wait to get it out there! We recorded the whole thing in 3 days and decided not to use a click track as we wanted to try and capture the feel of our live show, and we found out – definitely with some of the songs – that we played them way too fast. We had to make the sudden decision towards the end of the last day to re-record ‘Hollywood’ as the original cut was almost unlistenably fast haha. I’m glad we did now!


Do either of you have a favourite song to play live or on the album?
Mine is definitely ‘Green’. It’s what we always play last and I play it as if it’s the last song we might ever play. I just feel as though I can let go and put every ounce of everything I have into it because I don’t have to worry about playing another after it. I love that feeling. I just drop down at the end of that song every time haha.





Apart from music, do you have any secret party tricks or other talents?
Nath can complete a Rubiks cube in 2 minutes and 27 seconds! I once had to help my little sister learn the cup song out of Pitch Perfect and I now have the burden of being insanely good at it.

This summer you're playing at Reading and Leeds Festival, which is absolutely fantastic! How are you feeling about it? Is there any aspect that excites you the most? (Be specific - of course playing will be awesome!)
Absolutely over the moon! I went to Leeds Festival about 5 years running when I left school and have such good memories of it. It’s always been a dream to play and when we got the email through it just seemed absolutely ridiculous. We really couldn’t be happier! Nath has never been to a proper festival before so I think he’s just excited about all of it! I think just the thought of getting there and seeing all the signs is going to blow us away. It still doesn’t feel that real yet haha.


 Are there any local bands that have caught your eye recently, who would you recommend seeing?
There are so many amazing local bands around at the moment but Avalanche Party and Velvoir put on an unbelievably good live show. If you haven’t seen them already - see them! And literally anything Dave Saunders does (The Black Sheep Frederick Dickens/Goy Boy McIlroy) – I love watching Dave do anything.

 Any final words? What can we expect to see from MOUSES in the future?
We’ll be touring our album in September, writing a second this Winter and hopefully touring Europe next year – before it’s too late!!

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