Q&A With Hackney Colliery Band

Hackney Colliery Band make their Hare & Hounds debut tomorrow night, co-headlining the bill with DJ Format. We had a chat with band leader Steve Pretty to delve deeper into what’s in store…

There are nine of you in the band, how did you all come together?

Some of us were at university together, some at college, and others we just met through the London music scene really. Doing badly-paid functions up and down the country for years means you get to know a lot of great musicians!

What’s the creative process? Do you have any one individual who usually comes up with the initial ideas?

We have three composers in the band: myself and our drummers Olly Blackman and Luke Christie. So we bring in music which we’ve written and which then goes through quite a lot of tweaks and changes once we start playing it, and especially once we start gigging it regularly. I tend to steer things generally, but with lots of input from all the guys so that we’re all pretty much on the same page with what we’re doing.

Lots of people know you for your covers of artists including Blackstreet, Prodigy and Kanye West, how do you choose which tracks to rework?

When we first started, it was really just what people brought to the table, but now we think about things a bit differently. When people suggest covers to us they’ve usually got loads of brass on, but actually it tends to be the tunes that don’t have brass which work best. What we love doing most these days is bringing an element of surprise to our covers: when we play Goldie’s Inner City Life, for example, it sometimes takes a while for the penny to drop, but once it does, people who grew up with that tune go absolutely nuts. Ditto our Prodigy Medley.

Do you prefer writing your own material or concocting a cheeky cover?

We like doing both, but these days we’re very much about original work. About 70% of our last album Common Decency was original material, and our recent EP was entirely focused on originals and remixes. We like to think we’ve got a pretty distinct sound these days even though a lot of our original music is drawn from a huge range of influences – electronica, contemporary rock, Balkan brass, afrobeat, contemporary jazz, even techno – so it’s always fun bringing our approach to those styles.

Your new EP A Bit Of Common Decency was released last week complete with a number of excellent remixes, did you pick the remixers yourselves?

Some of the remixers came through our label, and others we found ourselves. Fedka The Irritant is a friend of the band who is supporting us on some upcoming dates and does incredible live remix techno trombone stuff which is as bonkers as it sounds.

What is your favourite gigging experience?

Cliche though it might be, we have a lot to choose from. We gig a lot, and it’s pretty rare that we don’t have a lot of fun.

But possibly the highlight of recent years is when we were on tour in Kosovo last year and played a double set to an absolutely packed club. It was really incredible that all these hundreds of people had come out to see a brass band from London, and they were going absolutely crazy, particularly after we lead everyone outside for a big party mid-set.

Can you tell me about how your New Material Mondays* have been going?

They’ve been incredibly valuable. I find it interesting that more bands don’t do this really. I work a bit in the comedy and theatre worlds, and it’s very much the norm to preview new work before you launch it fully, but there is a weird kind of mystique around it in the music world. It makes perfect sense to us to get the new stuff on its feet and in front of an audience. Because a lot of our music is originally written quite traditionally, it undergoes a huge transformation when we play it live, so we really need to bed it in before we record it. I’m writing this having just finished a very intense few days in the studio recording all the new stuff, and it would have been totally different if we hadn’t had those gigs.

*New Material Mondays are weekly sessions HCB have been running over the last few months whereby they trial new and unfinished work in front of a live audience at various venues around London.

I spotted that some members work with some very high profile artists outside of HCB, can you tell me a little more about some of the highlights?

Yeah, we’re all working freelance musicians, so whilst HCB is very much central to most of our careers, we all do other stuff too. Our sax players haven’t been around much recently as they’ve been off doing big pop stuff with the likes of Bonobo, Jamie Cullum and (ahem) Gary Barlow. And I was touring with Kelis over the summer. What was amazing though was I played a big festival with her somewhere, then came off stage and someone ran up to me and said ‘aren’t you from the Hackney Colliery Band?!’. I felt very smug that they were more excited about that than they were about the big pop gig I’d just done…

Ultimate gig – HCB headlining, who would you have supporting?

My favourite artist at the moment is probably Sufjan Stevens or, on the brass front, Christian Scott who is an incredible trumpet player from New Orleans. But I’m not sure we could ask either of those to support: I think it’d have to be a joint headline where we collaborate at the end. That would be totally mega!

Finally, what’s next for the band and what can we expect tomorrow night?

We have a lot of big plans for the rest of the year and 2015. We have a big show for the London Jazz Festival on 15th November, then Jazz Cafe in London on 9th December, and a couple of weeks of touring in the north of England in November. 2015 is already shaping up to be a lot of fun. We’ll be releasing new music sometime in the early Spring, and touring more than ever, particularly in Europe. This will be touring the new music, which we’re properly excited about. Some fun collaborations in the pipeline, too.

Thanks for the support, everyone. We love playing for you, and we can’t wait to raise the roof at the Hare and Hounds on Friday!

Massive thanks to Steve for taking the time to speak with us. There are still some tickets for the show available at £12.00 each, and you can pick yours up here.

For further reading check out our Q&A session with DJ Format, who is also part of tomorrow night’s bill.