We are always keen on exciting, local talent here at The Midlands Rocks, so when the opportunity arose to speak to Fangs Out at this year’s 2000 Trees festival, needless to say we jumped at the chance. Of course, we are no strangers to the band, having reviewed their last EP (here) but this was our first chance to speak to the guys in the flesh. Here’s what an excited Jay (bass) and lead vocalist Mikey had to say:

Your fresh off stage. How was it? Are you a band to analyse your performance?

Jay: Yes, I’m more the analyser. Coming off stage, I had the feeling that that performance, and I think I speak for the whole band, will stay with me forever.

Mikey: I’m not ashamed to say this, but I have cried four times today. We were originally booked to play the Nu Stage some point in the afternoon, but when the clash finder came out we found out that we were opening The Cave and it changed the dynamic of what we were expecting from the day. Playing on a stage that features some real top dogs has been amazing. It’s been two hours and I still can’t process what’s happened. It was absolutely amazing.

Your set looked really on point, but how do you psych yourself up for a gig at 11am?

Jay: It was hard, but I think that for Mike it was most difficult.

Mikey: I’ve never had to scream so much at 11 o’clock in the morning. I felt great after a couple of songs.

Jay: It’s the first time I’ve felt nervous for a long time. We’ve played a lot of shows, but most of them have been local, but when you are playing to 2,000 people…

Mikey: It was weird because I didn’t see people coming in, it was more like a snapshot, every time I looked up there was more and more people in the tent. In this ocean of bands we are a tiny drop, but when you have people singing back lyrics to your songs there’s nothing like it. It’s a massive kick up the ass and makes you think there’s something happening.

Now you have a lot of adrenaline to burn off. How will you come down from this?

Jay: I’ve started to come down now, but I’ve still got images of looking out from the stage and seeing a sea of heads. It’s was an amazing experience and there are no words to do it justice.

I find your lyrics are deeply personal. What’s it like inhabiting those songs and bravely bare your soul?

Mikey: I draw deeply from personal experience, but there was bits in the set today where I hadn’t thought about them for a while, but singing them today in this environment made me frame them in a new way. What I’m trying to say is that we rehearse every week, we wrote those songs, we recorded those songs, we’ve played those songs a million times, but today was something special.

Jay: But when we write our lyrics, they are personal to us, but we write them in a way that other people can relate to. But we want people to take their own meaning from them.

Mikey: They’re also very tongue in cheek.

Fangs Out are proudly from the West Midlands. It can be a very harsh post-industrial, brutalist environment. Does that shape your sound at all?

Mikey: We’ve got a song called ‘Sabbath Town’ and it’s literally written as a homage to Birmingham. I’m the only actual guy from Birmingham, but the rest of the guys are from the Black Country, but we’ve all grown up as Birmingham as the hub in terms of going to shows. Someone asked earlier if we feel the weight of the musical history. But I said that there’s no weight, but what we want to do is get people to look into Birmingham for the modern music that’s being played. We’ve got friends in bands who are extremely talented; there are some bands now who are amazing but I don’t think Birmingham gets credit for the current scene, so hopefully by playing these things we can help shine a light on the scene.

You’ve released three EP’s. Will the next step be an album and if so, how will you approach it?

Mikey: We want to stay current and we have written some new music and we hope to go into a studio by the end of the year. We’re going to release a couple of singles to keep us out there, but we said we are going to record an albums worth of material, but how we release it, we don’t know yet. I think all of us are from the school of albums. Personally, I don’t like being drip fed music, I like to listen to albums and I think we could do a body of work, eleven songs that’ll take the listener on a journey.

Jay: Time is also a factor. We all still have day jobs, the word “hobby” has been thrown around, but this band is more than that, it’s a passion. We squeeze the band in more than we should, often to the detriment of relationships and mortgages.

Birmingham is a very diverse city, so will you incorporate other elements into your sound?

Jay: I think we’ve found our signature sound now, so that’s not a direction we want to go, we more want to “level up”. We’ve technically got three guitarists in the band, I play guitar, Mike plays guitar, and obviously we’ve got Ben our main guitarist. So, between the three of us we write and put songs together, but we just want to kind of take that next step up.

Mikey: We played in February with our good friends in The Blackout at The Kentish Town Forum and our songs went down really well. But when you see bands like The Blackout play their songs in those rooms you kind of have a lightbulb moment. We’d never sell out, but we all love a chorus, and I’m trying to sing more, I still like a scream but we’re all into harmonising and we could definitely go in that direction.

Jay: We’re challenging ourselves. I like singing, but I don’t have too much confidence at the moment, but between Mike and me, we do like to do a big chorus.

Mikey: You can’t play things like today and The Kentish Town Forum without taking something away and think; if we ever do something like this again, our next set of songs has to be ready for it.

So what are your influences? Is there Jay band who unites you all?

Mikey: There was a band called Every Time I Die. That’s the Jay band we all agree upon and it’s a bond for us. At the beginning we were called Birmingham’s answer to Every Time I Die, but to ever be compared to the gods…of course that’s in us because we listen to that band, but we can do more than that.

Jay: I’m more a metalhead, my personal influence is Alexisonfire, I’ve got their tattoo. Mastodon, the heavier side and then I veer towards pop-punk; Four Year Strong, and that goes back to what we were talking about choruses.

Mikey: I know every band will say this, but there’s a big melting pot of everything. But recently I think we all know what we want to do next, there’s an unspoken vibe.

It seems like you have a real chemistry developing.

Mikey: I’m so proud of these guys; I couldn’t do what I do without these three people. We couldn’t play that stage without all four members of the band. We are all different in our ways, but we’re all the same in so many ways.

Jay: We all agree on which direction the band will go. Before we walked on that stage we all mouthed to each other “I love you”, and we do.

It feels like 2000 Trees was a bucket list item for you. So, what’s next on the list?

Jay: Download, definitely. A friend once asked me where do you see yourself in five years time, and I said playing Download. That was two years ago, so I’ve got three to make it.

Mikey: That is a bucket list, because we all frequent that festival. But at the moment I’d be happy to come back to Trees.