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ListenOut Exclusive: Family Force 5 Talk UK Shows, Influences and Stage Costumes at Sonisphere FestivalListenOut - 5th Aug 10 at 1:46PM (Rated 10 / 10) |    |
We teamed up with Fashion Capital and spoke with Joshua "Phatty" Olds, Jacob "Crouton" Olds and Nathan "Nadaddy" Currin from Family Force 5 at Sonisphere Festival 2010. So how does it feel to have opened main stage at Sonisphere this year? "It was pretty amazing - It's our first time here at Sonisphere so it was awesome." Who are you looking forward to seeing this year at Sonisphere? "Motley Crue and Rammstein. We wanted to try and make it back for Iron Maiden but I don't think we'll be able to as we're at Underage Festival tomorrow night." Have you guys only recently started playing here in the UK? "Yeah, we were here last year with a band called Cobra Starship. Right now we're playing some festivals over here and then we're going to be playing a few club shows around London." So how well have you been received in the UK? "It's been awesome; the kids are nuts over here. We just played at Glasgow and it was crazy - a lot of bootie shaking going down." The lyrics in your first album were very Christian oriented whereas your latest album seems to have veered away slightly from this. Would you still call yourselves a Chrisian band? "We still believe what we believe but we love to play music - we don't really feel there needs to be a line drawn anywhere there." As your music contains both techno/dance and alternative elements, what would you say your main influences are? "They kind of bounce all over the place; the reason it really works with us is because we're all into different things. A few of us grew up loving The Beastie Boys and Rage Against The Machine, whereas Chap Stique (guitar) was more on the metal side. We've all grown up on hip hop and RnB too so there's a heavy influence on dance beats." How well are you doing here in the UK compared to the US? "We're doing really well over in America but we're a brand new band over here - we've never had any real distribution in the UK so it's really cool to see kids come out to the shows. It's grown a lot since we last came over so we really hope we can come back and make this our second home." What advice would you give to unsigned and up-and-coming bands to help get their name out there? "The music industry at the moment is kind of in a weird place, and the only way to get your music out there is to play shows all the time and give your music away. That way you'll have a loyal fanbase that starts following you and they'll end up buying t-shirts and anything else you can come up with. So our advice is to give the music away for free." What would you say inspires the way you dress onstage? "I (Crouton) usually do a lot of the clothing. We usually change it up every tour - last time we came over we wore American football uniforms on that were blinged out and gold, and we had the eye makeup and everything. Next time we had a kind of hockey theme - it was kind of our ode to Michael Jackson with the whole knee pad thing. When we came over with Cobra Starship a guy named Ray Brown contacted us - he makes clothes for Muse and Judas Priest. He really wanted to work with us and so we got some designs going. As we were playing Sonisphere we asked for something a little bit metal / dance. So this is the first day we've worn these kind of space cadet outfits - we had some armadillo shoulder pads and stuff - it's been cool."  
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