Interview: Good Shoes

Rajasthan and I were covered in dust, after a road trip through Haryana into the remote village of Pilani, that houses the Birla Institute of Technology & Science. The annual cultural fest and the associated battles of the bands, are a rite of passage for every engineering college and every college band; in the time since my graduation the popular choice of headliners has risen from Daler Mehndi to assorted Scandinavian metal bands. Refreshingly, the BITS festival this year – Oasis, seems to have been run by the most hipster kids in the country. Seven-year-old indie rock band Good Shoes arrived from London on a Sunday afternoon, to play their first and only Indian gig, and witness the traditional battling of young metal bands.

Oasis 2011 operated in a time zone some 12 hours mismatched from the usual, with dying echoes of deodorant spokespersons filling empty grounds through the day and the entire college population waking up in time for dinner. And suicide note writing contests, and band competitions.

Good Shoes @ BITS Pilani

With Lewis Hamilton of Le Shark filling in on bass, the four-piece Good Shoes played a 45-minute set spanning material from both their studio albums, and some mellower new material off the forthcoming third. The auditorium is a haze of Bacardi-cokes and miscellaneous selections, perhaps from the college’s famed plantations, the mist from the smoke machine spills off the stage into the rows of students lining the edge. Their set is followed by the final round of Rocktaves. During Bangalore Hindustani/death metal band Tiffin Box’s first song, Good Shoes’ gentlemanly guitarist Steve Leach joins the throng of students in a moshpit for the rest of the night, while Hamilton sits diligently filling out bands’ scoresheets. The final band of the night, Grimmortal, brought their tight brand of sorta Slytherin-metal, and won the competition – perhaps in part due to their striking resemblance to Dethklok.

We caught up with Good Shoes over cups of tea, and got deets of their album plans, strange Parisian photoshoots, and the warrior stray dogs of Europe.

NH7: How come you decided to play your first gig in India at a college festival in a remote part of Rajasthan
Steve: Well, we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into, but we were just really happy to be invited to Oasis.

Do you plan to play any other dates in India, or check out any other cities?
Tom: We’re gonna see a couple of cities. We’re going to do a little bit of traveling, but this is the only gig we have arranged. We’re going to Jaipur and Pushkar, that’s what we have arranged.

It’s been almost two years since the release of No Hope, No Future, do you have any new album plans?
Tom: We’re working on the third album. We don’t really know when it’ll be released. We’re compiling our music together to kinda get enough together to make a third album. At the moment, our plans are to get it recorded.

When would it be released, tentatively?
Tom: Sometime next year, we hope.

You recorded your first album in Sweden. How did that happen?
Steve: The people we wanted to work with were based in Sweden, and they asked to come over. And it was quite good to go away. It was about three weeks of intense recording, a studio in a place called Malmo – a small town. Actually no, it’s really not that small, probably the second or third largest city there. We concentrated on it pretty hard, Sweden being as expensive as it is we didn’t really have that much fun, so we were either in the studio or in our flat.

Tell us about your first gig ever.
Steve: We’ve got more than one first gig, the first gig was Rhys and I.

Rhys: Our first gig was just you and me, you remember that? We played at The Peel.

Steve: As you can see, it’s hard to really pinpoint the first gig we really had. I guess the first gig with the four of us, we actually played Cambridge University. A friend of ours was lucky enough to uh, conduct his education there. He was organizing an event, and he needed a band to play, and we stepped up. This was at Fitzwilliam College.

Rhys: It was the worst gig ever.

Steve: There was nobody there really. There were people there at the beginning, but then they heard the first song. The band before us, I think they played like Lynyrd Skynyrd, they were a cover band.

Tom: Everyone was having a great time, and then we played.

Rhys: We played our first song, which is incidentally the first song we’re gonna play tonight, and then everyone cleared out. And then the sound guy, he just turned the smoke machine on, until you literally couldn’t see anything.

Good Shoes @ BITS Pilani

Most interesting place you’ve visited so far in years of touring?
Steve: Probably here, we haven’t seen a lot of the place yet but just the drive here. The cultural difference is quite distinct, driving through Europe and through here. So this place trumps anywhere. But apart from here…

Rhys: Berlin, it’s a crazy city. My favorite cities would actually be Hamburg and Copenhagen. You have to go and see them. If you’re ever in Denmark, the drive between there and Norway is quite amazing.

Tom: We had a great evening in Athens. I think it’s the only place we’ve ever seen stray dogs.

There are tons of stray dogs in India. Even stray cows sometimes.
Rhys: Yes, why is that? It’s probably because cows are sacred here, right? And dogs… ?

Dogs only because there are so many of them.
Steve: They can breed like crazy.

Tom: The only place you’ll see them in Europe is Athens. They’re like in packs over there, there are like packs of some 50 dogs together over there – never like one or two. It’s quite nice, they kind of escort you, like your personal bodyguards, they chaperone you. It’s quite unusual. Like they’re warriors.

Any spectacularly bizarre experiences on tour?
Rhys: Usually we’ll get drunk and we won’t remember what happened.

Steve: I think touring in itself is one big bizarre experience. It’s an unusual situation, you’re always meeting new people.

Rhys: We were playing with a band in London, and then we got invited to go back to a farm with them. We just spent the night drinking homemade cider at this farm.

What about the name Good Shoes? Is it like a play on goody two shoes, or is it just about shoes, or…
Steve: It’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s just two words, that happen to be next to each other. Two of our friends were talking about starting a band, and it was either Good Shoes or Free Bar. And we thought, Good Shoes is a really good name for a band.

Tom: We had to go through a pretty bizarre photoshoot in Paris, because the photo-grapher thought we were all about shoes.

Rhys: We wanted to be polite. So we just stood there awkwardly, holding shoes in our hands.

Tom: Sometimes people throw shoes on stage though, which is actually pretty cool.

Steve: Just a few days ago someone pointed on a show, that ‘good shoes’ is actually a very common phrase. People say it in daily life all the time, always talking about it.

What were you doing before Good Shoes, individually?
Rhys: We were really young, like in sixth form. Around 16-18 years old when we started Good Shoes. I did a year of uni, studying Illustration, and then I dropped out. I didn’t really enjoy it, I had to work really hard to get into that school. And when I got into that school I felt like, what am I really doing?

Steve: I was doing my A levels in music. Rhys and I knew each other from school.

Tom: Rhys and I are brothers, and we all just sort of grew up in the same area, had some mutual friends.

Steve: Fate made us meet.

What music are you listening to, right now?
Rhys: I’ve got Bon Iver’s new album.

Tom: Is that how you say it? Only in French, winter is Hiver. So yea, it just means… good misspelt winter. I’m listening to the new Feist album.

Before you started out was there ever something you heard and thought, I want to do what they’re doing, want to sound like that.
Rhys: In London, when The Strokes came out, I was really quite impressed – not necessarily thinking about sounding like them, but they were spurring us on because sud-denly they were everywhere. They were quite a big band.

Do you prefer playing club gigs or festival gigs?
Steve: Well they both have their charms, club gigs can be great if there’s people there, you know? But then again playing a festival, you get to play with your friends – and primarily you get to see other bands.

Currently, your music is this raw and fairly straightforward indie/britpop. Do you foresee a change in your sound with the next album, seeing as a lot of indie musicians and bands are embracing electronica? Or are there any musicians you would want to collaborate with?
Steve: Not really electronic, not in the sense that you mean. We’re trying to do something different, but we’ll take our time.

Rhys: As for collaborations, not musicians or bands – we would like to work with certain producers perhaps. We would be open to trying new instruments, that could be interesting. Imagine us with a piano!

Photos by Rahul De