The Thrills

The Thrills

The Thrills - Daniel Ryan - Interview

Daniel Ryan, The Thrills
Friday 12th November, Carling Apollo Manchester

When Jemma met Daniel…again

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The Thrills The Thrills - Interview How long have you been over in LA for?
About 3 weeks now we have another 2 weeks of recording left to go, we don't have any time to be outside, we are always stuck inside it's a shame because the weather is so good and we haven't seen much of it at all yet.

How did The Thrills come about?
Well basically I grew up beside Connor, I have lived next door to him ever since I was born and when we were 15 we wanted to put a band together we got Pad in through his sister and Kevin was in school with Connor then Connor met Ben outside a school one day and as the conversation went on discovered he was a drummer then he joined the band, so by the time we were 17 we had the whole line up complete and for the next year or two while we were in school we just messed around and played a few gigs. We all then went off to college and we let the band take a back seat for a while then in 1999 we all went to San Diego together and we spent a couple of months living their on the beach and we had our instruments with us so really when we got back from America we started to take it really seriously again. We started practicing quite a lot and that is really where it all started!

It must have been quite an experience for all of you to go to San Diego together?
Yea it was really great, we lived in a really small apartment there was only 2 bedrooms and eight of us living there and it was right on the beach and we had so much music we listened to loads and loads; we messed around with guitars and that kind of thing. We were listening to such a mixture of music like the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye and Neil Young all that kind of music. All of that music came from that of America and I think then we just kind of realized what we wanted to do. We wanted to do it since we were 15 and once you have wanted to do something for that long you really really really want to do it after so long.

For people who haven't heard your music how would you describe it?
It's American influenced 70's classic sound but with a modern edge to it, we love bands like Air, Beck and the super Furry Animals so we are not a retro kind of band we try to bring everything forward when we record, I think we are quite a different sound, unlike most other things that are out at the moment. The Coral and Electric Soft Parade are both great bands and they are quite different and cool there is a lot of the garage thing going on at the moment.

So how do you go about writing all your material?
Well everyone kind of pieces bits and pieces together, a lot of the time Connor comes in with the main idea and then we all work on it for awhile so we all do our practicing together and we just bash out ideas together, sometimes something can come together really quickly but other times it could take us a week or two, everyone gets very involved in every individual part we put a lot of time into arranging the songs which is really important. At the end of the day it's a group thing.

How did your record deal come about?
We were really lucky we sent out a couple of demos to some small Irish record companies and one of the guys really liked it but the others weren't too keen, but he called us up and he said he would manage us and he looked after us and got us recording a few songs and we sent some around, at first we only got one or two calls but then with in about 3 weeks we got a huge amount of calls and we were really lucky because we were able to choose from some really huge record companies so at the end of the day we went with Virgin. The MD signed Air and he is really into our sound, I think it was just the right deal for us, we were afforded big deals with big advances but we just wanted to get with the right people and I think that is more important than anything.

Continue reading: The Thrills Interview