Eighty Six are an emo-influenced punk band who are tired of playing the game, or so it used to say on their website. I caught up with Dr Graham (guitar/vocals) and James (drums) back in November after being mightily impressed with their live set. The friendliness was excellent.

Who are Eighty Six and why should anyone care?

James: I play drums, I’m James…

Graham: I'm Graham, also known as Dr Graham and sometimes known as Dr Evil, and I sing and play guitar. Carl isn't here, but that might be a good thing cos he's been drinking coffee and he'd get silly and start touching things and fidgeting. He goes crackers on coffee! Collectively we’re a band who just play songs that we think sound nice. Why should anyone care? Cos we care about stuff so therefore we hope other people might care about us.

Carl isn’t your original bassist is he? Obvious question time! What happened to the other bassist?

James: He's upstairs! He's upstairs dead!

Why did you replace him, or is that a taboo question?

Graham: What happened originally… Tom and I had been friends for seven years or whatever, and we were in a band years ago in college. I played guitar and he sang. We did a few gigs with that and then we sort of broke up cos people went to uni. We wanted to carry on doing stuff so for ages it was just me and him and I’d just play stuff on guitar and he’d just sing along or whatever. It was always me writing songs. We needed a bassist and a drummer so he traded in a guitar he had that he didn’t play and got a left-handed bass and learned to sort of play along. I taught him the songs. We got a girl on drums for a bit but she wasn’t very good, so we got rid of her. Then we got James and we were officially Eighty Six. We did originally play pop-punk but as soon as we got rid of the girl drummer I didn’t write any more pop-punk…

James: Yeah, it was never pop-punk when I was in.

Graham: Then Carl is a guy who I’ve known for a bit who absolutely loved us right from the start. He was really, really into us. He’s been at all our shows even when he wasn’t in the band. He drove us down to Scunthorpe. We played in Harrogate and Tom couldn’t make it cos he was in Cornwall.

James: We only found out a day before so we didn’t want to cancel. We knew Carl knew all the songs so we played like that and it was…

Graham: Cos Tom’s in Lubby Nugget as well, and Lubby Nugget were about to be signed by Moon Ska. It was always a bit like Tom couldn’t be 100% into Eighty Six if he was in Lubby Nugget, who were doing really well - better than us. Cos Carl was so enthusiastic, ridiculously so due to the amount of coffee he consumes, and because he already knew the songs and he totally was into it… Tom could play but he isn’t really super musical so he doesn’t really add stuff to the songs, but he was competent at playing the stuff we’d tell him to play. We kind of thought this was a tough situation. We had someone who wanted to be in the band more than Tom wanted to be in the band, but Tom had been our friend for ages. Me and James stayed up for ages at nights discussing it. We ended up just saying that we should just have Carl.

James: Yeah, and we’re quite noticeably better with Carl. We’re playing much tighter.

Graham: And Carl writes… I never have to teach him the stuff to play on bass. Already in couple of the new songs he’s played bits that really stand out which is stuff that he’s come up with. It’s totally added another thing to the band.

Is Carl still doing Mr Rubecki as well?

Graham: Er, he wants to but the bass player quit. He’s in York now, I think. He wants to maybe do a last show, and he definitely wants to get a couple of their songs recorded.

James: I’m gonna record them.

Graham: That’d be cool.

(to James): How do you cope juggling the Pedantics and Eighty Six? Which one do you give more priority to? Or do you just see both as equal entities?

James: Before I was in Eighty Six I was in Buzzkill. That was the first band that I was in that ever played in the scene or anything. Although I played with the Pedantics since I was about 11, we just used to piss about. We couldn’t even play.

Graham: And you’re deadly serious now!

James: (laughs) Oh, yeah! It was always kind of messing about. When Buzzkill broke up very slowly… by that time I was in Eighty Six plus the Pedantics. I didn’t think I’d give Eighty Six more priority but as it’s happened we get a lot more offers for shows and stuff.

Graham: It’s just been ridiculous… the enthusiasm that people other than us have had. We never thought we’d be anywhere.

James: And I’m first and foremost a drummer, so that’s probably the main reason I give it more priority.

Graham: Originally when Tom was still in the band, Tom was gonna be in Eighty Six and Lubby Nugget and…every band, practically!

So it was just like a side project?

Graham: Yeah, Eighty Six did start off as a side project. I was gonna join another band...

James: Homebrew!

You were gonna join Homebrew?!

Graham: Yeah! I went through a period of drinking loads…

James: He practiced with Homebrew!

Graham: I practiced once with Homebrew and a lot of things went wrong, but it was fun!

Andy from Dagobah was going to be in Eighty Six wasn’t he? Why’s that not gonna happen now? Is it a reason you can divulge or not?

Graham: Well, Andy has always been a friend since I got into punk music. Dagobah were the first punk band I saw. We’ve always kept in contact. When Dagobah broke up… I can’t remember how it happened… we just said, “You can join Eighty Six”. We practiced a couple of times and he was really enthusiastic and added some extra bits to the songs and then he just kinda decided it wasn’t really his thing. We hadn’t really talked about it, there was just suddenly this weird mutual thing… although Andy’s a friend and everything, since we’re all living together we’ve noticed that sometimes it’s not as easy to get on with each other cos everybody can be a pain in the arse with everybody else. If he was in the band we’d probably fall out more. We sometimes see different sides to each other. He’s a really cool guy and we loved Dagobah, so at least we’re still all buddies. At first it was maybe because Dagobah were breaking up and he thought “oh good, I can still be in a band” or whatever. We talked and we said “I can’t wait”, we were both gonna write songs together and stuff, and he came up with a few tunes but… I can’t speak for Andy and say exactly why, but we kinda thought that we’d like to do some things differently.

Are you gonna look for another second guitarist or do you think you can do without one?

Graham: Mike who’s living at the house at the moment really wants to play guitar, but at the moment it’s really, really, really good just the three of us. We’re all super-good friends and it all sounds loud enough without a second guitarist.

James: Yeah, we can play powerful enough without a second guitarist.

Graham: At the moment it’s working with three of us, so if it isn’t broken…

Do you think it’s fair to say that you sound a little like Jawbreaker?

Graham: Do you actually think we sound like Jawbreaker?

Yeah, I can see some similarities and everyone seems to say that as well. Do you think that’s a good comparison? Are they your main influence?

Graham: Originally when it was just me and Tom and I was just playing about with songs I was so into Jawbreaker, and I still am, they’re by far my favourite band lyrically and musically. It wasn’t a case of me trying to write songs that sounded like Jawbreaker, it was me writing songs that I would like, and I happened to really like Jawbreaker.

James: I didn’t really like Jawbreaker when I joined! I prefer Alkaline Trio and… we don’t sound like Jawbreaker… well, we do sound like Jawbreaker…

Graham: Everyone’s kinda told us that… for us it’s weird cos when you’re playing the songs you can’t hear the songs for the perspective of people listening for the first time cos we’ve played them that many times and we wrote them or whatever and fiddled with them so to us the songs are just what we play. I guess for other people who say we sound like Jawbreaker… I agree that parts of it are very Jawbreaker, parts of it sound like other bands. We don’t try and say “this bit is going to be Jawbreaker influenced”, we just say “we’ll do this bit” and then “hey, that sounds kinda Jawbreaker”. I’m not bothered. I really like Jawbreaker! Every Jawbreaker reference I read totally makes me happy. Yes! We sound like Jawbreaker! Get in!

What sort of stuff do you write about lyrically? What sort of subject matter do you touch upon?

Graham: Well, like all pretentious emo bands…

James: Being sad and stuff!

Graham: Originally the songs were pretty serious, about being depressed. All of us in the band have been through family situations that have been problematic, so a lot of it is to do with that, and relationships and the way you feel about friends and generally stuff that affects you emotionally, things that you have to deal with. We’re well aware that so many bands labelled “emo” come across as really whiny and pretentious, and we try and get away from that. At the time when you’re writing a song and it’s about something sad and all the pretentiousness is there cos you’re by yourself and you’re being selfish and just thinking about whatever. Writing a song you get it off your chest and have to write a song that you like the sound of.

James: My lyrics are songs about girls!

Graham: The songs are different. One of the new ones is just like…partly it’s references to how we’ve moved house and being on our own. For me, writing lyrics is half of what I do. I’d never write anything that I don’t believe. I try to write stuff that I like.

Do you try and make your lyrics a little abstract, like a lot of emo bands seem to do?

Graham: Yeah, definitely to an extent, cos it wouldn’t fit in the music if you were using words that just wouldn’t sound right. If you were singing pop-punk lyrics over emo music it would sound kinda weird. I’m not saying that you can’t do that or there’s any rules, but I think if the music is genuinely moving, or at least if that’s what you’re trying to achieve, then the lyrics are more romanticised. You try to make them sound nice.

James: Although, I write lyrics with the Pedantics and Eighty Six, and they’re not too dissimilar.

Do you ever write lyrics that you know are definitely going to be for one band and not the other? Like if you write a happy, poppy song do you think ‘oh, that’s going to be a Pedantics song rather than an Eighty Six song’?

James: Yeah, but I normally write the tune first, and it’s kind of obvious by the tune which band is going to get it. If it’s got more than three chords it’s an Eighty Six song!

Which way around does that go? Do you write a song and then think ‘this is an Eighty Six song’ or do you sit down and think ‘I want to write an Eighty Six song now’? Or is it more sort of organic than that?

James: I don’t know, really. I normally just play around with my guitar and it just depends on whatever I come out with really. I can’t really sit down and intentionally go ‘right, I need some more Pedantics songs, I’d better do something’, although I probably could do that!

Graham: For me writing songs is weird sometimes. Sometimes I’ll sit down and I’ll have a riff that… like, some of the new songs have riffs from really old songs that never got played and never really got practiced, and it’s the same with some of the lyrics. I just kept the stuff that I liked and used it for other songs. Sometimes I’ll write a song in its entirety with all the lyrics and then when we practice it and play it live it doesn’t really change much from what I originally wrote, but sometimes, especially now that Carl’s added his coffee-fuelled madness to the band, a lot of times we’ll just take something that I’ve come up with or that he’s come up with and make something that I wouldn’t think about doing, which is really good. We’ve all got ideas for new songs.

James: Carl has new ideas all the time.

Graham: The songwriting’s not as deliberate anymore, which is good cos it means we’re not trying to sound particularly one sound. We’re just kind of making it up as we go along.

Something’s coming out on Bombed Out isn’t it? What’s that going to be? (note to readers: Remember this interview was in November, and the about-to-be-mentioned EP has been in the shops for months now! Sorry for being so slack…)

Graham: That’s going to be a CD with five tracks.

Why are you not doing it on 7”? Would it fit on a 7”?

James: No.

Graham: When it was our second show Steve (Bombed Out) came up to us and said ‘Do you want to put something out?’ and we were totally like ‘Yeah!’ We didn’t even think anybody would like us! Steve and Alex (also Bombed Out) talked and they decided it’d be better to do it on CD cos of the type of stuff we play. It meant we could do more tracks. They hadn’t given us any guidelines at all, really. They just said ‘Come up with the artwork and record however many you want and we’ll put it out’.

James: A couple of our songs wouldn’t fit on a 7” playing at 45.

Graham: We have got some stuff we recorded, the three demo tracks that we did, that we’d like to put out on a 7” if anybody would want to put one out. The new stuff is all going to be recorded especially for the CD.

Are you gonna put out anything else after that?

Graham: Even though they are really organised and Steve knows what he’s doing with Bombed Out, it hasn’t really been much of deal or whatever, he just said if we record something he’d love to put it out.

James: We talk about it to him in the pub when we see him there. We never ring him up and discuss it. If we meet him in the pub then we talk about it, but we never even plan to do it.

Graham: Yeah, the thing is with everything we’ve done so far we haven’t planned to do any of it. We haven’t set any goals. Things have just happened. People have just asked if we’d like to play shows and, in the case of Bombed Out, asked if we wanted to put something out.

James: We’ve had some really good responses. One Car Pile-Up saw our third show and they’ve been really good, and got us to gigs and stuff.

Graham: Wes and Towie especially like us. Got to say thanks to them cos they’re totally enthusiastic about us. Wes is a one-man promotion machine! He totally tells people ‘go and see Eighty Six!’

Which bands would you like to support, if you could choose? I wonder what you’re going to say!

Graham: Right now we’d really, really like to support Jets to Brazil, especially since I love Jawbreaker so much.

James: How many times would you like to say that?!

Graham: I like Jawbreaker, and I like Jets to Brazil. Boy Sets Fire are coming over and we got to know them cos we interviewed them, and they kinda remember us, so they said we could maybe play with them. At the moment we’ve only done local shows, and the responses for those have been really, really good. Anything bigger would be great.

Where do you see the band being in twelve months’ time, if you can see that far ahead? When you started out did you think you’d be where you are now?

James: No, not at all.

Graham: As I say, originally we were just a project to play some songs that I had that I thought were good. We never thought that we’d get asked to do a CD. We never thought people would refer to us as ‘like Jawbreaker’.

James: It’s crazy for me cos I’ve been in quite a few bands in the ‘scene’, and in Buzzkill it was really hard for us to get shows a lot of the time. I’d have to try and arrange them myself or pester people all the time. With Eighty Six we get asked to do whatever we want to do. To get to do an EP so soon, like we got asked after our second show… it’s stupid!

Graham: So many times we talk about it and say we can’t believe it… this is like, as cheesy as it sounds, in all the time that I’ve been involved with music I’ve just wanted to be in a band that sounds like this and as a bonus if people like it that would be good. As it stands we’re so, so happy with the fact that people are doing stuff for us and none of it gets taken for granted, so thanks to everybody who helps out.

So what sort of things do you think you’ll be doing in twelve months time (er, or six months time as it is now!)?

Graham: I dunno. We never even think about it. All that we know is that on Wednesday we’re practicing and playing Liverpool on Saturday.

James: The only thing I can probably say for sure is that we’ll be playing a lot more regularly, all over. It’s hard at the moment cos we haven’t really got any transport (except now there is the Eighty Six van which carts them around like the Kerrang-endorsed rock stars that they are!).

Graham: We can’t say whether or not we’ll be ‘successful’, however you want to use that term, but I think we’ll definitely be more serious about it cos if things continue the way they are doing then it’s worthwhile us playing and getting better. We’re still not the best people at playing our instruments. There are a lot of bands who are really, really amazing that we all look up to. If we continue to get the responses we are doing and if people are into it then it doesn’t matter whatever happens in twelve months as long as it’s good.

Is there anything else you want to say, cos I can’t think of anything else to ask you?

James: I’d just like to say thank you to a lot of bands who’ve been really good to us like One Car and Sunfactor.

Graham: Sunfactor especially, cos they were super-nice guys.

James: And Autumn Year…

Graham: Yeah, everybody in the Leeds scene.

James: They’ve been nice!

Graham: They’ve had nice things to say.

James: The friendliness is excellent.

Graham: Yes! Thanks to Tom. I suppose I could be looked upon as a really nasty friend for kicking him out of the band. Hopefully people don’t think that. Thanks to everybody who’s been as enthusiastic as we are, especially Bombed Out for taking on our little sad emo three piece! And cheers to yourself for interviewing us.

Oh, thank you! Thanks for doing it. Will that do, do you reckon?

Graham: Yeah, I reckon. If anybody wants to contact us they can write to us at the Bombed Out address (P.O. Box 17, Leeds, LS8 1UP), or we have a website at www.geek86.freeserve.co.uk.

(from Scary Sheep #3)

 

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