The year is 2008, you have a ridiculous amount of hairspray on to keep your emo fringe intact, hanging off your wrist are five rubber bands representing different musicians and one probably saying “I love boobies”. Play Dream and other gaming sites in the day while listening to your favourite bands. You and your friends are known as the weird kids in school and your music playlist contains the song “Made Up Stories” by the band Go:Audio.
Fast forward twelve years and after a long period of silence, that very band have surprised and delighted us all by releasing three new songs to enjoy from days gone by. So, what sprung that? I decided to find out!
Hey guys! Thanks for chatting to us today. How are you doing?
Yeah good! Just adjusting to life outside of MySpace…
This whole Covid-19 situation has been pretty surreal, huh? How have you been coping and what have you been doing to keep yourself preoccupied during lockdown?
Crazy times! Hopefully it will all be over soon, but yeah we’ve been releasing new music and chatting with fans. The reaction has been fantastic, so just been keeping our heads down, really, and making sure we’re doing all we can to keep people around us safe.
So, it’s been over 10 years since “Made Up Stories” came out, did you anticipate it having the impact that it did while in recording?
We always knew the song was special, as soon as we wrote it… The head of the label came down to the studio and gave us the biggest praise and we thought this must be great as he very rarely gives compliments unless warranted. But we were really blown away with the response, being playlisted on Radio 1, making it into the Top 40, but more importantly the reaction from the fans when we played it live! As far as the Made Up Stories album goes, that was originally due out in 2008 but it got leaked… Damn you torrent sites! So basically we went away and added some new tracks to it and released it the following year.
How do you feel when you look back on that period of your life?
I think when we set out it was more of an “it would be great if we could play a show to people that actually came to hear our music” to “wouldn’t it be great to get a record deal” to “wouldn’t it be great to shoot a music video and have our music in stores” etc. We learned the more you do the more you want, human nature I guess… But looking back, we are so proud at what we achieved. You always take things like that for granted – it’s every musician’s dream to play sell-out shows and we have amazing memories of it.
What have you been doing with your lives since that time?
We’ve all stayed in and around music… Josh is a songwriter / producer who’s had tracks out with 1D, Tiesto, 5sos. James works in music management, Andy lectures in commercial music at University and dabbles in music management also. Zack does digital marketing (business head) and Nick has his own music project called Amberlake, check it out – it is awesome!
You recently provided us with new tracks “Why”, “Smoke & Mirrors” and “Doesn’t Really Matter” which are sounding class! What prompted that to happen?
We always spoke about putting out the music we didn’t have a chance to release the first time around as it was just sitting there on a hard drive. I guess lockdown gave us the time to actually get round to doing it – it’s been really exciting to see the reaction from fans and chat to everyone again!
What does the future hold then? Does this signal an intention to return to music from you guys? We’ve seen plenty of calls for it on social media!
Never say never, it’s great to see there are people still out there who are loving our music after all this time… So for that, we thank you!
