Eva Spence from UK Progressive Hardcore band Rolo Tomassi
Calling from her home-town of Sheffield where the local music scene is “not too bad” vocalist Eva Spence was enjoying some rare time at home. But she also spends a lot of time in Manchester cause that’s where all her friends live, and she, like most English musicians, also spends alot of time in London because London has "the best of everything.., but yeah Sheffield’s is not too bad”
Besides relentlessly touring, Eva has been keeping busy, running her own clothing & homewares business called Night of the living thread. As well as hitting soundwave in February this year, something she’d "never experienced before!", they are playing a round of gigs across the country before heading back to europe for shows and then back for Soundwave in february/march. She remembers having a day off in Melbourne really clearly, but dosen’t remember too much of Adelaide. Perhaps this ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74gZcoSjuxA ) video would refresh her memory…
Her business is evidenced by this facebook status update..;"Going to Australia now, UK we're playing Corp in Sheffield on the 12th with Gallows, Hatfield on the 18th with Enter Shikari and our London show on the 19th. Australia we will be with you in about 30 hours (ish) for the next 10 days. Hope to see some of you there! ox"
Eva started paying attention to music at age 10, getting fixated with Blink 182, as alot of people seem to do at that age,
“before that it was just like, whatever was on the radio, I’d be singing along to…
we started our first band when I was about 11, I used to play bass guitar and sing with Rolo Tomassi’s keyboard player and guitarist,” (RT’s drummer and bassist were in another band at the time) “We’ve all known each other since we were about 4 or 5 years old and we all grew up together. We started drinking at the same time, the 5 of us each took the same musical steps together and we spent a lot of time listening to the same stuff and bonding, so we grew up musically together.”
So how did you all end up in the same band?
“Well we kind of didn’t really like the kind of music we were playing any more, our tastes moved on to different things and that’s about the time we heard Dillinger escape plan” (who they ended up touring with) when I heard Dillinger for the first time I was just like what the hell is this music!?, it’s like nothing I’ve heard before, the Mars Volta were also quite a big influence for us, so we were into American bands like that. Everyone else felt the same way so we started a new band, heading in a new direction.
Other Musical Influences?
“At The Drive In - they are like definitely my favourite band ever! They were a big influence for me wanting to be involved with music. They push the boundaries out a little bit, but for myself in terms of performance and writing lyrics and everything like that ATDI are my favourite band.”
What do you think about heavier music such as Meshuggah?
“Our guitarist loves Meshuggah! I went to go see them at soundwave this year and I enjoyed it, but like I said before the heavier music that I listen to is the music that I listened to when I was a lot younger and it’s kind of stuck with me.. These days I listen to a lot of softer stuff.
It’s kind of hard having your whole life revolve around really heavy music! Sometimes I just want to listen to something really nice, you know, when you’re performing really heavy music every night you just want to listen to something light hearted! It’s like a form of therapy I guess. I love performing heavy stuff, and likewise with the performance, I do enjoy having a bit of a sing inbetween all of the heavy parts! ;P”
Is it difficult for you as a singer to change between brutal heavy vocals and softer more melodic parts?
“It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to train myself to do, I’m still not 100% confident as a singer. Screaming on record is just so easy because I just went in in the morning and did a day of screaming then a morning of singing then an afternoon of screaming and I did all of the vocals in 2 days.
I’ve heard some other singers say ‘no you’re not supposed to do more than 2 hours a day’, and all this other stuff, but I was just like you know, once I get into it (26:26) I just want to get on with it!!
In regards to changing between 2 styles of vocals I have heard from a lot of other singers that is one of the hardest things you have to train yourself to do but it’s really just practice and confidence. First it was all about practice for me, but now that I’ve got the ability to do it I can just get up on stage and scream all day. On stage I’m not thinking so much rationally, but just getting caught up in the energy of it. Sometimes when we’re performing on stage I forget that there are people there watching it all..!”
...So is anyone in the band musically educated or trained ??
“Our drummer and bass player are both grade 8 musicians & our guitarist is grade 8 classicaly trained on guitar. He’s really into classical music too! And then there’s me and James who have a few years of piano lessons each. I was so really dreadful and awful at piano, I had no idea what I was doing, I played for about 7 years and just got no where with it so I kind of gave up on that!”
Once they are written how do you arrange the order of the tracks on the album? Do you try to create a story/message?
“On cosmology the songs weren’t really written to go in an order. There was 2 songs which were written as a pair, but other than that they just sort of grow. Our guitarist Joe composes the music for the band on his laptop so that everyone has a sort of cheat sheet infront of them, then they learn the songs, present the music to me as a demo and I get to take away a recording of it and listen to it in my room and think about what I want to sing or scream about.”
A message in the lyrics?
“For the first album I had so many sets of lyrics because I just felt like I had this open door write anything I wanted. The songs were all personal, about experiences and things that I think about, it was kind of like everything from the beginning til that point I could have free reign to say
As for cosmology, for me the name Cosmology represents the universe, and mankind’s place in the universe and at that time I felt like the band was the centre of my world and everything kinda just worked around It. You know? It can affect relationships and it can cause problems at the same time we were just making music and performing music and doing it all, so a lot of the songs are kind of about that”
How was it recording the new record?
Well we heard that the producer Diplo mentioned our name in an interview, and that he really liked our stuff. So we dropped him a line and he’s a really nice guy...
“I did all the vocals in 2 days, I had all sorts of singers telling me not to do that”
Any pressure from the record company? Anyone who likes the kind of music that we do, the record company couldn’t really expect us to tone it down could they?!…
Rolo tomassi was a charcter from LA confidential>? Was there anything about the character that you particularly identified with that you wanted to be associated with?
Rolo Tomassi is the name given in LA confidential to anybody who gets away with the crime, Rolo Tomassi is the person who gets away with it in any crime committed… And we just named the band after that because it was cool, it wasn’t really anything , it doesn’t really reflect on us or anything, we were just like that’s a really cool name for a band!
What’s happened since the 2nd album?
I still feel like me, I guess we get recognised a bit more from all the press that we did for the album. We did quite an intense press campaign for the release of the album I kind of like the fact that I can still walk around and people don’t know who I am, cause I don’t really look like the kind of person that would be in the band that I am in I look quite normal I think, and I like that, we all still go sign merch every night and walk around the show, it’s not like we’re hidden back stage you know, I’ll speak to anyone who wants to talk to me.
You played the Reading Festival recently?
That was in august. We used to go to the festival every year, it was awesome to play it as a band, we were supposed to be playing the alternative & heavy music stage but when the offer came through it was actually to play the second biggest stage, this tent is soo big! And it was so amazing to be given the opportunity to play on the stage that I’ve seen so many of my favourite bands play on, you know I’ve spent so many weekends going to see bands on this stage and to actually play on this stage that I’ve seen so many of my favourite bands play on, it was just an amazing Experience! We were on quite early in the day so I thought that not many people would turn up cause its so early on. At Reading you’re camping in tents over the weekend and every night Is a pretty full on night, so I thought that not many people would rock up but I don’t care cause we’re doing it! I can’t believe we’re finally here playing this festival! So I didn't look out into the crowd until we were ready to go on and when I did look out there was over 10,000 people there, it was the biggest crowd we’d ever played to.
Did you get good crowds at soundwave this year (2010) aswell?
My boyfriend was on the side of the stage taking photos and there is one of us walking off and the crowd is just like maybe 4 times the amount of people we played to the first time we played Soundwave. So you can only really expect it to be bigger and better this time?
Is there anything you would like to say to fans or to people who have maybe never heard your band before?
I run a webstore online called ‘night of the living thread’ we make and sell hand made homewares and accessories and kind of apparel and stuff, its all hand made by me so that’s what I do when I’m not on tour.
www.thenightofthelivingthread.com
The band is also doing a 5-night tour of Australia, with architects and come back kid and this is hell during which they will be stopping in Adelaide on December the 7th to play an all ages night at fowlers... "then we have a couple of days off to enjoy in the sunshine before coming back home. I think we get 2 or 3 days off, we fly out on the first but the flight is like 20 hours so we’ll get there probably on the second, then shows start on the third, we have a day off in the middle and I think a day off before we fly home" That’s fairly brutal.., "pfft! It’s fine! I don’t think I’m gonna get over the jet lag the entire time we’re there so I’m just gonna power through, sleep as much as I can, as long as I’m awake to play the shows I can handle it."
The art work?
Simon Moody is the art man ( www.linedwithghosts.com ). We met him through one of the first bands that we ever toured with. He was managing the other band and did all their artwork & designs, t-shirts. We're really close friends now. He hadn’t done any full albums of his drawn work before, so we propsed it to him, he accepted and did all of hysterics. We loved it so much he came back for the second album and he’s done loads of t-shirt designs for us aswell (look out for them @ the show). We are actually in love with him and his work is absolutely amazing.
What’s in your cd player right now?
I’ve been listening to play bells? I really like Lil Wayne, I love him actually, also Cockney (blue) roses, which is just a girl on her own who is my favourite singer I think, I love her she’s just so amazing so I’ve listened to her albums so often. I don’t really listen to a lot of heavy stuff, especially while we’re on tour, I like to stuff that is relaxing.. sometimes I listen to old man tom...
Do people go nuts at your shows?
Yep! We were just touring with Dillinger escape plan across England for 10 days and that was the best response we’ve ever got from our shows!! And when we did Reading and Leeds aswell in the tent there were just thousands and thousands of people in there and we had a massive wall of death there's a video of it on you tube that’s really funny (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DUTjHyNa90 ) it’s like hundreds of people running into each other
Moshpit survival?
Well I don’t go into moshpits, I’m too scared, I never go into crowds when we play either at one show, the underage festival in England, James jumped into the crowd, as soon as I jumped down into the pit between the stage and the barrier they just started grabbing at me and I was just like oh my god I really wasn’t expecting this, and James comes out like ripped shirt, missing shoe, and I was just like that's it, I’m never doing that! It just kind of frightens me , I can get quite claustrophobic and I don’t know what to say about our pits! Usually there's people bouncing but I don’t kind of tempt them aggressively or try and get people to be aggressive , I don’t think they’re that bad really, I’m not really sure..?
So you’re general advice would be that if you’re claustrophobic and famous stay away from moshpits?
Um, not really, but if you’re famous and if you care about you’re clothes, and I do! Or if you care about your shoes take care... OX
Besides relentlessly touring, Eva has been keeping busy, running her own clothing & homewares business called Night of the living thread. As well as hitting soundwave in February this year, something she’d "never experienced before!", they are playing a round of gigs across the country before heading back to europe for shows and then back for Soundwave in february/march. She remembers having a day off in Melbourne really clearly, but dosen’t remember too much of Adelaide. Perhaps this ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74gZcoSjuxA ) video would refresh her memory…
Her business is evidenced by this facebook status update..;"Going to Australia now, UK we're playing Corp in Sheffield on the 12th with Gallows, Hatfield on the 18th with Enter Shikari and our London show on the 19th. Australia we will be with you in about 30 hours (ish) for the next 10 days. Hope to see some of you there! ox"
Eva started paying attention to music at age 10, getting fixated with Blink 182, as alot of people seem to do at that age,
“before that it was just like, whatever was on the radio, I’d be singing along to…
we started our first band when I was about 11, I used to play bass guitar and sing with Rolo Tomassi’s keyboard player and guitarist,” (RT’s drummer and bassist were in another band at the time) “We’ve all known each other since we were about 4 or 5 years old and we all grew up together. We started drinking at the same time, the 5 of us each took the same musical steps together and we spent a lot of time listening to the same stuff and bonding, so we grew up musically together.”
So how did you all end up in the same band?
“Well we kind of didn’t really like the kind of music we were playing any more, our tastes moved on to different things and that’s about the time we heard Dillinger escape plan” (who they ended up touring with) when I heard Dillinger for the first time I was just like what the hell is this music!?, it’s like nothing I’ve heard before, the Mars Volta were also quite a big influence for us, so we were into American bands like that. Everyone else felt the same way so we started a new band, heading in a new direction.
Other Musical Influences?
“At The Drive In - they are like definitely my favourite band ever! They were a big influence for me wanting to be involved with music. They push the boundaries out a little bit, but for myself in terms of performance and writing lyrics and everything like that ATDI are my favourite band.”
What do you think about heavier music such as Meshuggah?
“Our guitarist loves Meshuggah! I went to go see them at soundwave this year and I enjoyed it, but like I said before the heavier music that I listen to is the music that I listened to when I was a lot younger and it’s kind of stuck with me.. These days I listen to a lot of softer stuff.
It’s kind of hard having your whole life revolve around really heavy music! Sometimes I just want to listen to something really nice, you know, when you’re performing really heavy music every night you just want to listen to something light hearted! It’s like a form of therapy I guess. I love performing heavy stuff, and likewise with the performance, I do enjoy having a bit of a sing inbetween all of the heavy parts! ;P”
Is it difficult for you as a singer to change between brutal heavy vocals and softer more melodic parts?
“It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to train myself to do, I’m still not 100% confident as a singer. Screaming on record is just so easy because I just went in in the morning and did a day of screaming then a morning of singing then an afternoon of screaming and I did all of the vocals in 2 days.
I’ve heard some other singers say ‘no you’re not supposed to do more than 2 hours a day’, and all this other stuff, but I was just like you know, once I get into it (26:26) I just want to get on with it!!
In regards to changing between 2 styles of vocals I have heard from a lot of other singers that is one of the hardest things you have to train yourself to do but it’s really just practice and confidence. First it was all about practice for me, but now that I’ve got the ability to do it I can just get up on stage and scream all day. On stage I’m not thinking so much rationally, but just getting caught up in the energy of it. Sometimes when we’re performing on stage I forget that there are people there watching it all..!”
...So is anyone in the band musically educated or trained ??
“Our drummer and bass player are both grade 8 musicians & our guitarist is grade 8 classicaly trained on guitar. He’s really into classical music too! And then there’s me and James who have a few years of piano lessons each. I was so really dreadful and awful at piano, I had no idea what I was doing, I played for about 7 years and just got no where with it so I kind of gave up on that!”
Once they are written how do you arrange the order of the tracks on the album? Do you try to create a story/message?
“On cosmology the songs weren’t really written to go in an order. There was 2 songs which were written as a pair, but other than that they just sort of grow. Our guitarist Joe composes the music for the band on his laptop so that everyone has a sort of cheat sheet infront of them, then they learn the songs, present the music to me as a demo and I get to take away a recording of it and listen to it in my room and think about what I want to sing or scream about.”
A message in the lyrics?
“For the first album I had so many sets of lyrics because I just felt like I had this open door write anything I wanted. The songs were all personal, about experiences and things that I think about, it was kind of like everything from the beginning til that point I could have free reign to say
As for cosmology, for me the name Cosmology represents the universe, and mankind’s place in the universe and at that time I felt like the band was the centre of my world and everything kinda just worked around It. You know? It can affect relationships and it can cause problems at the same time we were just making music and performing music and doing it all, so a lot of the songs are kind of about that”
How was it recording the new record?
Well we heard that the producer Diplo mentioned our name in an interview, and that he really liked our stuff. So we dropped him a line and he’s a really nice guy...
“I did all the vocals in 2 days, I had all sorts of singers telling me not to do that”
Any pressure from the record company? Anyone who likes the kind of music that we do, the record company couldn’t really expect us to tone it down could they?!…
Rolo tomassi was a charcter from LA confidential>? Was there anything about the character that you particularly identified with that you wanted to be associated with?
Rolo Tomassi is the name given in LA confidential to anybody who gets away with the crime, Rolo Tomassi is the person who gets away with it in any crime committed… And we just named the band after that because it was cool, it wasn’t really anything , it doesn’t really reflect on us or anything, we were just like that’s a really cool name for a band!
What’s happened since the 2nd album?
I still feel like me, I guess we get recognised a bit more from all the press that we did for the album. We did quite an intense press campaign for the release of the album I kind of like the fact that I can still walk around and people don’t know who I am, cause I don’t really look like the kind of person that would be in the band that I am in I look quite normal I think, and I like that, we all still go sign merch every night and walk around the show, it’s not like we’re hidden back stage you know, I’ll speak to anyone who wants to talk to me.
You played the Reading Festival recently?
That was in august. We used to go to the festival every year, it was awesome to play it as a band, we were supposed to be playing the alternative & heavy music stage but when the offer came through it was actually to play the second biggest stage, this tent is soo big! And it was so amazing to be given the opportunity to play on the stage that I’ve seen so many of my favourite bands play on, you know I’ve spent so many weekends going to see bands on this stage and to actually play on this stage that I’ve seen so many of my favourite bands play on, it was just an amazing Experience! We were on quite early in the day so I thought that not many people would turn up cause its so early on. At Reading you’re camping in tents over the weekend and every night Is a pretty full on night, so I thought that not many people would rock up but I don’t care cause we’re doing it! I can’t believe we’re finally here playing this festival! So I didn't look out into the crowd until we were ready to go on and when I did look out there was over 10,000 people there, it was the biggest crowd we’d ever played to.
Did you get good crowds at soundwave this year (2010) aswell?
My boyfriend was on the side of the stage taking photos and there is one of us walking off and the crowd is just like maybe 4 times the amount of people we played to the first time we played Soundwave. So you can only really expect it to be bigger and better this time?
Is there anything you would like to say to fans or to people who have maybe never heard your band before?
I run a webstore online called ‘night of the living thread’ we make and sell hand made homewares and accessories and kind of apparel and stuff, its all hand made by me so that’s what I do when I’m not on tour.
www.thenightofthelivingthread.com
The band is also doing a 5-night tour of Australia, with architects and come back kid and this is hell during which they will be stopping in Adelaide on December the 7th to play an all ages night at fowlers... "then we have a couple of days off to enjoy in the sunshine before coming back home. I think we get 2 or 3 days off, we fly out on the first but the flight is like 20 hours so we’ll get there probably on the second, then shows start on the third, we have a day off in the middle and I think a day off before we fly home" That’s fairly brutal.., "pfft! It’s fine! I don’t think I’m gonna get over the jet lag the entire time we’re there so I’m just gonna power through, sleep as much as I can, as long as I’m awake to play the shows I can handle it."
The art work?
Simon Moody is the art man ( www.linedwithghosts.com ). We met him through one of the first bands that we ever toured with. He was managing the other band and did all their artwork & designs, t-shirts. We're really close friends now. He hadn’t done any full albums of his drawn work before, so we propsed it to him, he accepted and did all of hysterics. We loved it so much he came back for the second album and he’s done loads of t-shirt designs for us aswell (look out for them @ the show). We are actually in love with him and his work is absolutely amazing.
What’s in your cd player right now?
I’ve been listening to play bells? I really like Lil Wayne, I love him actually, also Cockney (blue) roses, which is just a girl on her own who is my favourite singer I think, I love her she’s just so amazing so I’ve listened to her albums so often. I don’t really listen to a lot of heavy stuff, especially while we’re on tour, I like to stuff that is relaxing.. sometimes I listen to old man tom...
Do people go nuts at your shows?
Yep! We were just touring with Dillinger escape plan across England for 10 days and that was the best response we’ve ever got from our shows!! And when we did Reading and Leeds aswell in the tent there were just thousands and thousands of people in there and we had a massive wall of death there's a video of it on you tube that’s really funny (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DUTjHyNa90 ) it’s like hundreds of people running into each other
Moshpit survival?
Well I don’t go into moshpits, I’m too scared, I never go into crowds when we play either at one show, the underage festival in England, James jumped into the crowd, as soon as I jumped down into the pit between the stage and the barrier they just started grabbing at me and I was just like oh my god I really wasn’t expecting this, and James comes out like ripped shirt, missing shoe, and I was just like that's it, I’m never doing that! It just kind of frightens me , I can get quite claustrophobic and I don’t know what to say about our pits! Usually there's people bouncing but I don’t kind of tempt them aggressively or try and get people to be aggressive , I don’t think they’re that bad really, I’m not really sure..?
So you’re general advice would be that if you’re claustrophobic and famous stay away from moshpits?
Um, not really, but if you’re famous and if you care about you’re clothes, and I do! Or if you care about your shoes take care... OX