How long have Battlecat been about?
Rick: We've been writing material since January 2007 and began playing live since march. Chall: we've actually been talking about doing a musical project together for about 2 years but it took us this long to get our shit sorted.
How do you think electo is changing the face of popular music and do you see a return to the worship the DJ ethos?
Chall: I don't know. I think a lot more bands have been starting to use more elements of electro and dance, by using samplers and synths and whatnot.
Rick: I like the idea of people combining genres like indie with electro, drum and bass with metal, hardcore and trance, I find it more exciting than usually genre specific bands.
Chall: Everyone can have access to more tech savvy methods of producing music, like when I was a kid I wanted a sequencer and they were about 400 quid, which is a huge amount and now you can make electronic music for free with just a pc or a playstation or a gameboy.
Rick: I think dj's have to be more of a one man band now these days, so in answer to the dj worship ethos, yeah there might be a return to it possibly but the dj will probably have a live stage show, or even a laptop dj set with elements being performed live.
Chall: We don't like this question, we are but simple men…
Is Battlecat based on He-Man's tiger or is there a deeper meaning?
Chall: No. wait should I make up some story about how we went to chessington world of adventure and ended up saving a small child from an escaped lion with only an pencil with a rubber on the end which we purchased from the gift shop.
Rick: No. We were called By The Power of Greyskull, but changed it to something shorter, then we were worried about copyright so we added some explanation marks.
Is most of the music you perform on stage pre recorded or live?
Chall: Some of it is pre recorded but there is only 2 of us and some the things would be near impossible to recreate live, there’s one track in one of the songs that's controlled feedback, we did loads of takes and ended up settling on the one that fitted the song. I would dread having to recreate that live.
Rick: All the guitars are live, the main vocals, live synths and live guitar hero. When we write we take rough recordings of jam sessions and base the tracks around that. Mostly it ends up sounding totally different to what it started out like.
Chall: then we work backwards and figure out what we want to play live and
Are there any advantages/ disadvantages in this?
Chall: It’s good because we record stuff before playing it live which means you can have it on your mp3 player and listen to it for a few days and anything that's not working we can take out or change so by the time it comes to playing it live we're really comfortable with the music.
Rick: Anyone who's heard our recorded stuff and then goes to see us live will know the difference we're quite raw and aggressive
Chall: We're definitely heavier live than on CD I feel.
You’re playing with Does it offend you, yeah. How did this come about?
Chall: We're playing one gig with them. At the Town Mill in Mansfield with We Smoke Fags. Rick: We can't wait. We keep getting some good signed supports with local venues as we've found out ourselves when trying to put gigs on that there aren't many bands doing what we do, so when people need local supports we've been quite lucky getting to play locally with Hadouken! and Colonopenbracket etc…
What's your favourite childrens television programme and why?
Rick: Biker Mice from Mars, He-Man, She Ra had more ballacks than most men… Good old fashioned cartoons with big swords, none of this ‘I'll knock the neville out of ya with my playing cards’ yugio ballacks you get these days. Of course Chall wasn't allowed to watch these sort of cartoons, he was forced to watch episode after episode of Tintin.
Chall: Tintins a bigot now isn't he. Captain Planet's a good one ‘drop a coke can and I'll snap ya neck’. Although I can never remember what any of the morals about environmentalism were. Ghostbuster's was a cracker. They carried particle accelerators round on their backs, which you wouldn't be able to do these days thanks to the EU Health and Safety guidelines.
Which bands are you currently listening to most both locally and nationally?
Rick: Locally I'd say The Skagz, Winterlong and Not So Pretty, but my favourite has to be Mel Gimpsuit, awesome local grindcore. Not locally Gallows, Dillinger Escape Plan, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Buck65, and Test Icicles at the moment.
Chall: Locally, definitely Mel Gimpsuit, very technical, very humorous live, same as rick really on the local front. I think that Test Icicles have been a main influence for us, I really like Hot Club De Paris at the moment and I've been trying to get hold of some Foals stuff (I have but two songs), I Was A Cub Scout are also great and local too.
What’s next in the pipeline?
Chall: Gigwise we're playing at Oxjam in Nottingham at the Rescue Rooms in October and the I'm not from London festival in October in Nottingham also. Anyone who wants to put us on feel free to contact us (shameless plug alert).
Rick: We might be doing a few remixes but they're not 100% confirmed so we can't say who its for, apart from that, we're writing new material, which we are constantly doing all the time (we have about twenty unfinished tracks), playing gigs and putting on our own night at the Town Mill in Mansfield..
La La Lepus and Battlecat play LeftLion presents at the Orange Tree on 4 November.
Battlecat on MySpace
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