For the readers not familiar with you and your music, tell us a little about yourself. A whirlwind biography of APEX if you like.
H: I’m Harry, singer and guitarist in Apex, we’ve been a band for 3(4?) years now. We started out playing covers in a practice room at college, and now we’ve got our debut E.P. ['Smooth Talk'] out with more on the way and we’ve played gigs all over the north of England.
D: Yeah, we started out as something to fill the summer holidays, we enjoyed playing together, and we got offered a slot at a gig and we haven’t really looked back since. Except Caz though, he’s new!
Which musicians or experiences have influenced you the most? Both personal tastes and the band's sound.
H: A lot of names sort of spring to mind regarding our sound, Little Comets and The 1975 are bands we really appreciate and i feel like that's reflected in our music.
D: Like we hear their tunes and think, yeah we like that. It’s evident in our music really, you can see who influence us in our songs.
H: On a personal level though like, for me listening to Biffy Clyro really got me into my guitar playing, and like trying to experiment with my own style.
D: I started playing bass around the same time I started listening to the early indie bands like Kings of Leon, and The Strokes. Those bands were kind of the reason I wanted to start playing. I’d say that Jared [Followill, Kings of Leon] was one of my main influences and probably still is, the way that he takes a bass line and makes it stand for itself while still keeping it rhythmic.
C: As far as guitar playing is concerned, Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Adam Jones, which is worlds away from what we play as a band. As far as my influences towards writing, they definitely lay with bands like The 1975, Tiny Moving Parts, Tame Impala, things like that.
What's been your favourite memory from being a part of the band?
H: There’s a lot of moments we’ve loved, like its hard to pick one. I do think though that there’s no feeling like when you’re playing and people are just buzzing of your tunes, like it’s a real kick.
C: We did a stint of shows in the space of about a week between York and Preston. Even though a couple didn’t go well, it was quite fun. We just played FIFA and drunk a lot in our down time! We also played a show for Uni of York freshers week the other weekend and that was a ton of fun. No one there knew who we were but they all seemed to love it, but that may have been the booze.
D: I think the best thing so far was selling the first copy of our E.P. ['Smooth Talk']. We got 50 physical copies of the E.P. for our release show back in April, and we all hand numbered them. Being able to sell a copy to someone was nice, because it was the physical embodiment of our past 12 months as a band, the tunes that we’d rehearsed in a tiny little rehearsal space in Darlington. It’s what I could imagine sending a child off to school is like. You’ve done what you can to raise it, then you send it on it’s way!
How have you and your sound evolved developed? Did you have a set idea of what you wanted to be?
H: I think that we never set out with an end goal of what we wanted to sound like, I mean we started out covering Arctic Monkeys tunes, which couldn’t really be further from where we are now. I think that our sound evolved as we grew as musicians to be able to play something more than just loud and fast indie rock tunes and as I said earlier, our sound just reflects the sort of music we enjoy listening to and enjoy playing.
If you could support any act, who would you choose and why?
D: I think we’ve both discussed this before, it’s got to be The [Rolling] Stones. C’mon, it’s the Stones! Like, if you’ve supported the stones, you have nothing to worry about.
H: Yeah, The Stones would be good.
C: Yeah, I would quite like to support the stones, I don’t really like them however it would be fun!
D: Imagine Jagger coming up to you and being like “What’s up, love your tunes”. You’d just melt, could you imagine that.
H: Like, I would be more than happy to support a smaller band though, like, I would love to support someone like Blossoms, that’d be sick
D: Yeah, I like Blossoms, that’d be pretty good!
C: Someone like This Town Needs Guns, or American Football or something like that for all the shoegazey indie stuff.
So you're recording a Christmas single this month. What was the inspiration behind this and what do you hope to achieve from it?
D: Yeah, so we’re doing a Christmas tune! We were in the studio doing our second E.P, and there was a little LED Christmas Tree on the top of the computer, and it projected loads of colours when it was plugged in, I took a fondness of it for some reason, and after recording, I got withdrawal symptoms early on, and I was itching for an excuse to get back into the studio, and we didn’t have enough new tunes to get in for another E.P., so I thought about a Christmas tune! The tune is going to be for charity [St. Theresa’s, Darlington], and all proceeds from the tune will be going directly to them.
C: We’re playing a show at The Forum in Darlington. We’ve got a few local bands to get involved and all play a Christmas tune, with us releasing ours there too! We’re hoping that we get a good turn-out and people like our tune so we can raise some money for a good cause, it may not be loads of money, but hopefully it will be enough to do something!
Any final words? What's on the horizon for APEX?
H: Onwards and upwards really, we’re going to keep writing more tunes, we’ve got a new E.P. to hopefully look forward to before the end of the year, Watch this space.
C: Looking forward to keeping up with writing new stuff, see how things evolve from where we’ve already taken them and hopefully we’ll get on at least one festival slot next year.D: Yeah, we’ve got a couple more shows to do before the year is out, we just want to get ourselves out there as soon as possible!
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