Get on Your Knees for the Church of Simian
So how long have you guys been together?
Simon: About two years now
James: Yeah about two years
Simon: Maybe just over. Basically we formed in Manchester - this lot were in Manchester already through studying and were living together and had built a little studio and at the same time I was sort of doing my own thing in Bristol - more singer/songwriter type thing and they were after a singer and I was after a band and luckily we sort of had a couple of mutual acquaintances and stuff who swapped our material and things and we heard each others tapes and I went up and we started recording straight away really.
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Real Media: S M L
Windows Media: S M L
What's the philosophy behind Simian?
James: The philosophy was just to kind of not conceptualise too much about it and just kind of get on with it and just try and make the music and do everything as naturally and creatively as we could, and that kind of ended up with us you know, extending how we made our music to the other parts of it and be that kind of trying to make interesting photo shoots or interesting web sites or cover designs and all those things, you know we were really keen to get involved on all those levels.
There certainly feels like a theme...
James: Well yeah obviously, its kind of..
Simon: Its sort of we’re into like, we’re definitely into making atmospheres and moods with our music you know sort of do try and continue that sort of atmosphere in the rest of it, be it the artwork or the video or something. On the last album it was sort of recorded in the dark with sort of twilight mysterious type atmosphere we really liked that sort of slightly strange moonlit feeling.
James: Its also like we kind of made all these things we didn’t wanna you know, we don’t want to tell you exactly what we were thinking when we made the images and the music because that’s for the listener and you to find out and to make your own mind up about it, it means things to us but it might mean different things to you so we don’t want to pin it down too much to be honest.
What about that Church of Simian stuff can you throw any more light on that?
James: Erm...(laughter) I don’t know if we should…
Simon: In as much as its born from live events from like wanting to, I mean we’ve always enjoyed playing our gigs in strange places, be it in cellars, life boat stations all those sort of places and then we moved to London we found it a bit harder to find strange places but, we lived over the road from a church, a disused church and one day we just went in there and immediately you know a light bulb came up and we thought we’ve got to play in this venue and it just expanded from there and then we got all wrapped up in the...
James: Whole idea of organised religion! Its something far bigger than the four of us, its kind of you know obviously there’s a lot of interest and deep sort of things behind organised religion and whatever and you know we kind of liked the whole idea of taking the piss out of it to be honest, but I don’t know
Simon: Its more than an organised religion.
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