Dinosaur Pile-up (Interview)

by Alf Cowan on 6.09.09

Anyone who has ever played in a band will immediately be able to tell you the group that made them want to buy a cheap guitar and plug it in for the first time. Only a handful of bands every generation have a way of making music so effortlessly inspiring, honest and addictive that millions of teenagers around the globe decide to go and do just that. Today 4Q Magazine are in Manchester’s Night & Day Cafe with Leeds based three-piece Dinosaur Pile-Up, who are not only one of the best unsigned bands we’ve heard this year, but are probably one of the most likely to take us out of the dark age of limp-wristed indie rock and back to the future of chunky distorted riffs coated with beautiful growling pop harmonies.

The band made a name for themselves when they hit the live circuit in Leeds in early 2008 and started building up a fan base. They then went on to release their infectious first single ‘My Rock n Roll’ at the back end of 2008 and began receiving accolades from Radio 1’s Hew Stephens, Steve Lamacq and Zane Lowe. The follow up single ‘Traynor’ helped with building them a cult following in early 2009 as they started getting rave reviews from the NME and Kerrang making a name for themselves as one of the best underground live acts in the country. As a result they started getting snapped up by the majority of the major festivals in the country for the summer including Leeds/Reading Festival and T in the Park.

It all began as a bedroom project for singer and main songwriter Matt Bigland following an short lived attempt to go to university. He recalls “I ended up moving to Leeds originally for university but quit before the course started… The main reason why I chose Leeds though was because there was a good music scene there, in a way it was kind of a lucky break”. Rather than dwelling on his failure to make his first university lessons, he set about conquering the local music scene with his first band Mother Vulpine. The band ended abruptly in 2007 following the release of their first EP alongside a successful tour with Eagles of Death Metal. Matt went into hibernation and unknowingly recorded the songs that would later make up some of Dinosaur Pile-Up’s current setlist, as Matt explains “DPU didn’t start out as a band; it just started out with me writing these little songs in my room. It was the first time that I had tried to write songs with awesome melodies, where I was genuinely saying what I wanted to say, it was something I never did in my previous bands”. As time went on, the list of songs got larger as did his aspirations for them and he recruited Tom Dunford (Bass) and Steve Wilson (Drums).

The bands’ sound is timelessly brilliant, a combination of influences from the groups youth ultimately stemming from Matt’s instinctive love of big riffs with pop melodies and ear-killing distortion. You can hear glimpses of early Foo Fighters and Weezer in with the humour of Presidents of the USA and Rage Against the Machine’s conviction. Ultimately they are very much their own device, but thanks to some lazy journalism have already been pigeon-holed into the nu-grunge category, something the band are trying to avoid as Matt points out. “This band is not a grunge revival band because grunge was essentially a rebellion against hair metal bands in the Eighties. These days good metal doesn’t seem to be happening because its become really generic, and in some ways the hair metal thing has been reborn in the current metal scene, all the bands sound the same, they dress the same and they all act the same way. On the other side you have the keyboard indie bands which everyone is bored of hearing”.

Dinosaur Pile-Up are by no means trying to create any kind of front or myths about themselves either in order to achieve fame, however what makes them quite interesting is how cautious they are of what could have happen if they do start to ascend rapidly up the rock ‘n roll ladder, as Steve states “We are all really aware of the possibility of becoming really big and we talk about how we would deal with it quite a lot.” Matt chips in “The most important thing for me with the band is to be a genuine, honest good band so people can relate to us and think ‘They’re ace!’ when they see us. The difference is that when you watch some bands it feels like they are above people and getting into playing bigger gigs I can understand why bands might end up getting like that, I just really don’t want to end up like that”.

It’s probably one of the funniest parts about being around these guys at this stage in their careers, as conversation flits from the Dinosaur Pile-Up’s immediate plans to how the band might end. “One thing we do talk about quite a lot is knowing when to stop,” says Matt. “It must be really hard for some bands when they get to a certain level and their priorities change, for them to know when their music is being affected. If things start to change for us then I would like to think we would be sensible and know when to call it quits. For me Rage Against the Machine stopped at the right time because they never got bad whereas the other guys carried it on and it wasn’t very good… we really don’t want this band to become shit”.

Thankfully the band aren’t quite at that stage in their careers yet and have recently been on a large string of dates around the UK. “We’ve been playing constantly for a while now, we just ended up doing a large string of dates that weren’t intended to be a tour but somehow it ended up feeling like that because we never ended up going home. It’s been pretty gruelling at points”. The bands live shows haven’t lost their intensity as a result either. On watching the band live the gnarly vocal harmonies from the recent recordings are gone and you hear the band in its most exciting raw form. Visually they are their own beast; On one side of the stage you have bassist Tom head banging whilst thumping his bass to a pulp, and on the other side you have Matt screaming delicately into the microphone whilst busting out some super fresh riffs. Somewhere behind the chaos is Steve relentlessly pumping his over-sized drum kit into the ground. Altogether it makes for incredible viewing. After the gigs however, they like to behave in a refreshingly grounded manner for a band that can be found on virtually every media source at the moment. “We love chatting to people that come down to our gigs” says Tom. “We walk around the venues most the time talking to people, at the end of the day we’re just three guys that make music, there’s nothing more to it.” Somehow amongst all the gigging they have managed to fit in time to record the follow up to their first two singles and are about to release an EP titled ‘The Most Powerful EP In The Universe.’

Interestingly the recording of this release meant taking a step back in time for the group in an effort to preserve some of the qualities they initially had when Matt used to record the old songs in his room. It was entirely recorded by Matt playing all of the instruments on all 5 tracks in a studio near Leeds. “The EP is very home grown in a way and I just felt it was necessary to start back at the beginning again, coming from the roots of the band… Its my favourite part about being in a band is the writing and recording. I find songwriting really therapeutic. A lot of the time what I’m singing about is me working out problems. By the time I get to the end of the song I feel like I’ve sussed out whatever it is I’ve been thinking about. It’s something I didn’t really want to lose that at this stage”. As a band, this way of working might seem unusual but if their system keeps churning out great stuff like the incredibly catchy title track “Summer Hit Single” then record companies certainly won’t be complaining. It’s definitely the most commercially viable and upbeat release from the band to date but as with many great pop songs has a slightly darker underside to it. Matt explains “It’s largely written about me spending a lot of time underground and shutting myself away to write songs, being away from the sunshine, your friends and its about that process of how, in order to create something, you have to lose a lot of stuff”. Out of the darkness of this song Matt has created an extremely diverse EP with a humorous salute to the Presidents of the USA in the middle called “Cat Attack”, a song about drummer Steve being accosted by giant ninja cats and his battle against them. If these songs aren’t the soundtrack to your festival season then we can only imagine the highlight of your year was the Big Chill.

This is only the beginning for Dinosaur Pile-Up but nothing is stopping them at this stage from becoming the band that inspires a section of a generation to start making great passionate, loud, honest music again. It shouldn’t be too long before they follow up the release of the “The Most Powerful EP In The Universe” to becoming “The Most Powerful Band In The Universe”.

The EP is released on the 17th of August and the band will be supporting Dananananaykroyd on their forthcoming tour.