Introducing: iCALLSHOTGUN

In October we blogged about an event called Fashion Vs Football where we discovered our 'new favourite band' iCALLSHOTGUN, a band from Leeds consisting of Iain Bolton, Giuseppe de Luca(Joe), Josh Weller and Graham Robson. I caught up with Iain for a coffee and a chat to find out all about iCALLSHOTGUN and what they are all about.

The story behind the band's early life is really interesting;

"It started when I was at uni, I knew Joe, our lead singer, from college… and then I wrote some music for uni and I just wanted to get a band together, just to play and be in a band again while I was at uni. Originally it was me, Joe, Josh and Sam who was the drummer"

‘Sam and I were at Bourbon (a popular music bar in Leeds) and they had a little ‘Does your band want  to play here’ thing and I just had a chat with the manager and I said ‘I’m in a band’ and I had all my stuff up on Myspace already even though I didn’t have a band so he gave us a gig and I had to get a band together. That’s how we originally started.

Just as the iCALLSHOTGUN story began to gather pace, there was an early, but completely amicable, change in line-up:

‘Sam and I set up a business and Sam wanted to concentrate on that so since the band was my baby I said I could carry it on. Joe worked with Graham so he learnt one of our tracks and came in and we played for the first time all the way through and he was bang on so we asked him to join.’

The speed of the band's rise was something quite remarkable. Very quickly they were winning competitions and playing big events, and being played on Radio 1, things that can take other bands years to achieve:

'We then all started writing together and we did quite a lot of stuff, like we were on Radio 1 and we went over to Austria and played at the Snow Bombing festival  in the King Of The Mountain Competition which was an internet voting thing. We put ourselves forward and we were chosen out of thousands of bands that entered. It was a public online vote that decided. 15 bands got through and then about 8 of those went to Austria for the competition and we won it! We have played a couple of showcases down in London and drummed up a lot of industry interest.We all write the songs now, we got a bit sick of the pop stuff so we wrote the song Evie and that got a lot of good feedback and we enjoyed playing it. It was just cooler. So we decided to keep writing together as a band.'

iCALLSHOTGUN, as Lee said in our previous blog, are ‘pushing musical boundaries’ so it is difficult to categorise the bands music style. We feel like it’s a mixture of sounds that makes them stand out from other bands. I asked Iain to have a go at describing their unique sound.

‘When we started out we were doing sort of power bubblegum electro pop but it was before all that electro pop stuff came out so it was a bit new but then all that electro stuff came out and we sounded really pop’

Now with their new style Iain describes their music;

‘It’s a bit of a cross, I would like to think we have our own style and I don’t think there are any bands out there doing what we are doing but all bands say that so it’s a bit of a cliché…. There’s a bit of dub step in there, a bit of indie-esq in there and a bit of electro in there. Its been described as dub-rock or dub-indie so anything with dub in the title’

Iain says the band think there are some good acts on the Leeds music scene but they wouldn’t class themselves as part of that scene as its more indie orientated and they are something different to that and he believes the UK has a good music scene but more record labels need to see the potential of fresh new acts and stop sticking to safe acts such as the X-factors acts and other manufactured music. I agree completely.

iCALLSHOTGUN have achieved some cool things so far and we predict there are many more good things to come. I asked Iain what he would say the bands greatest achievements are to date..

‘I think going out to Austria when we were just starting out and playing against some bands that had been going for a long time. We went out there not expecting to do anything, we just played and had fun, enjoyed the experience and ended up winning the King Of The Mountain Competition. More recently we got to play at Creamfields this Summer just passed. It was a half an hour set and on the main stage"

 I finished off by asking him about the small house party gigs they continue to put on and why they do it.

‘We play some wicked house parties which are really good fun. At one end of the scale you have Creamfields and Radio 1 but at the other end it’s always awesome to play little house parties where everyone is up for a good time… everyone is in it for the fun.’

I for one am looking forward to more gigs, more house parties and more tracks from this awesome band that stands apart from the rest. Although it’s hard to choose which iCALLSHOTGUN song I love best, I have decided to leave you with a live studio version of Evie, the song which I have been singing along to all day!