The Beacons

Tell us a little bit about the history of The Beacons. When, why and how did you end up coming together to make music? We’ve all known each other from school and were regulars up at the skate park (not that any of us were any good at it…). We formed in late 2010 with just the intention to jam and have a bit of a laugh, and it’s ended up being a full-time hobby of ours!

Your last release was 2012’s The Dark Room EP. What can we expect from your new EP? Will it be more of the same or are The Beacons taking a different approach? Our new EP, Between Heatbutts And Heartbeats, (ready for release in January 2014) has been a real journey for us (literally, we had to travel to Plymouth everyday!). We’ve grown so much as a band over the last year and have experimented with new sounds and structures. It’s been very exciting for us! We also made it a goal of ours to spend as much time in the studio as possible this time, really getting it to sound exactly how we wanted. We had actually recorded a whole other EP last year but we ran into a few problems in and out of the studio and unfortunately it never got finished. This new EP is by far our most adventurous and certainly one we can’t wait for you all to hear.

As an unsigned band do you ever feel like living in the South West, somewhere that can feel a million miles from anywhere, puts you at a disadvantage to those bands based nearer major cities? It has it’s ups and downs really. We gig quite often up and down the country. Obviously places such as London, Manchester & Liverpool have a huge and thriving music scene. However, we’ve played with a lot of fantastic bands from those places and they’ve never really got the recognition they deserve due to the overwhelming amount of other bands in and around their area. Living 10 minutes away from Exeter in a small seaside town like Exmouth gives us a platform to be able to play a couple shows and draw in a large crowd which then go and spread the word in a smaller community, creating a buzz. Saying that though, we’ve had some awesome shows in Bristol. That place has got it going on!

Hollyoaks has a general reputation for being a little bit shit, but it has a great musical legacy, having featured music from bands including Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead, The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand. How does it feel to now be included in these ranks? If we’re being real honest here, none of us watch it at all. We only found out due to receiving texts from our friends claiming they’d heard a couple of our tracks being played. It was a welcome surprise for sure. For 2 weeks afterwards we then became avid fans! Does anyone else think that Ste (Hollyoaks “actor”) scarily looks like (Liverpool “footballer”) Jordan Henderson?! Blows my mind.

You have a pretty impressive list of people you’ve supported, but if The Beacons could choose one artist to have as your support act who would it be? Mambo no.5.

And a final, horribly generic question: who are you guys listening to right now? Little Comets, The 1975, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Two Door Cinema Club, Peace and Stevie Wonder.