5 Minutes With THE RACE

Their new single COMFORT COMFORT is released on March 19th on Shifty Disco Records but you can pre-order it for a smashing £1.99 at HMV.

To hear more from The Race, visit their Official Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/raceuk or catch the band at one of their upcoming shows.

Hey Dan, The Race are great - how did you all come together?
We came together in Reading over the last few years. We did it through various friendships. James and Jess are married so they came as a pair.

Where did the band name come from?
Well…I dreamt of going to see a band called The Race, I woke up and decided it was a keeper.

We’ve seen you on the gigging scene for quite some time but what have been your best and worst gigs?

Our best gig was the Reading festival last summer. The place was packed and the crowd were fantastic.

As for the worst gig, that was Beacon Court in Gillingham - we had a rebellious soundman…Helpless!

Picking our top five most suffering moments is a game we like to play on long tourbus journeys….Especially at 3am in Sheffield when we need to be back in Reading for work at 8.30am.

Have you come across any crazy fans yet?
Definitely! It seems the younger they are, the crazier they are, also the more remote the town is, the crazier the crowd.

Once we played a show abroad, in Barcelona, it was a festival to over 10,000 people who had never seen or heard of us before….After we played we spent the next half hour or so signing all sorts of things through a security fence. That was pretty cool. They probably thought we were a big name.

What inspired your latest single, ‘Comfort Comfort’ ?

It’s about not being content with being comfortable. Not being content with having money and a boring job but going out and doing music. It’s about being skint and sleeping on bloodstained floors, eating in ASDA restaurants and guarding our bus whilst on tour over the last couple of years. But all our songs are nice, you should take a listen.

Bloodstained floors?!

Yep! This happened up in Wigan where we ended up sleeping on the floor of a friend of the promoter who had put us on that night. We didn’t actually meet this friend because he stayed cooked up in his bedroom all night listening to heavy metal music. Then he left the house at 7am for work. The floors of the house were sticky and there were bloodstained mattresses left for us to get comfortable on. We didn’t sleep much, still we were thankful to save the money for a Travel Lodge the next night!

So does that explain the beatings in the video then?
The video was our friend Alex’s idea…He is a legend. The whole thing cost £54 to make and we are very proud of it. The shoot involved trashing up the set then quickly tidying it up again whilst he checked the playback. Everything was shot in just ONE take over an afternoon. The removal people are the rest of the band. It shows how people try to maintain order but often, the situations overcome them. We love it.

There were no major injuries!

You can see the video below

So what do you think makes your music stand out from the rest of the crowd?

Hmmm…That’s a hard one, I’d like to think that we mean what we are singing about, it’s not just catchy crap that you can dance to and play all over the radio. Sure making that kind of music would be much easier…But it’s a huge compromise.

So what’s in store for you guys after the single release?
Our album (Be Your Alibi) is being released in Germany, Italy and Spain from April onwards so we’ll be doing various bits of promotion for that. More importantly we will be writing lots more songs, potentially for the next album…We’re also planning some weeks off over summer!

And finally….This is Music Mog…So do you own any pet cats?

Yep James and Jess own a cat called Jasper, they had another can called Reuben but an old woman nearby kind of adopted it.

Special thanks to Dan and The Race for taking the time out to chat with us.

UPCOMING SHOWS: