We’ve covered Cold Summer before on EP, their singles ‘Bear Eats Wolf’ and ‘A Time Imagination Forgot To Inspire’ are powerful and thoughtful songs, which suggested to us that the band who wrote the them would be equally interesting. We weren’t wrong.
Ahead of our review of their EP, ‘Fight To Survive’, which was released at the beginning of April, we were privileged to ask Cold Summer to tell us a bit about themselves.
EP:Â What’s the story behind the name of the band? Who came up with that, and what is its significance?
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CS: Yeah this is a bit personal for me really. A few years ago my mum was battling some health issues during the summer where we pretty much started the band, and obviously I’ll be honest like the best times of my life have been in the summer so theres obviously positiveÂ
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EP: Tell us something about yourselves. Who are you, where do you come from, what’s your style of music.
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CS: OK then the band is made up of the four of us Dan Feast (Vocals), Chris Harrison (Guitar), Chris Hepworth (Bass) and myself (Justin Eastwood), Drums.
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We’re all from Yorkshire in England and we base ourselves around the Leeds & Wakefield area.
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Our music is quite a wide mix of genres I guess, we kind of fall close into the brackets of post hardcore/rock music as certainly in 2016 it does sums up the type of bands we’re influenced by, for me it has to be bands that really do interesting things with a hardcore punk rock rooted ethos and take inspiration from a lot of other genres as well too and not being afraid to do that.
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EP: Your EP, ‘Fight To Survive’, is out now. Talk us through the songs – what is it about? Is there a common theme running through the songs? What do you hope the listener to come away with after hearing them?
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CS: ‘Bear Eats Wolf’ starts the EP and this is quite a personal track to Dan about positively overcoming anxiety and depression. The wolf is a symbol of the negative state of mind, a powerful and determined animal that can’t be outrun and is hard to overcome, whereas the bear emphasises the strength that needs to be found to overcome the troubles caused by the wolf.
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‘A Time Imagination Forgot To Inspire’ really touches on how there can be a lack of inspiration to take from and also lack of integrity/honesty in some areas of mainstream music today, or more specifically the music industry that sells it. It just feels to us that we are living in a time imagination forgot to inspire, and we advise people to look away from their TV screens, inspiration is out there just not spoon fed in front of you. The last track ‘Something, Nothing, No-one’ also covers this subject closely as well.
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Simply ‘Car Crash (In Progress)’ just sums up the state of the nation and I guess the state of the world, it is literally a car crash in progress. ‘Waiting’ for me is a call to arms for an at times apathetic generation, I think a few of our songs really have a motivation tied to them that we hope inspires the listener I guess. ‘Coins Fall’ touches on materialism and money kind of running peoples life, kind of first of all accepting that how it is but then deeper when it really starts to take over peoples lives, them being consumed by greed, I feel we all on varying levels try our best to not fall into this traps that modern day life throws at us.
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EP: What, if anything, would you do differently in your career, and why? Or why not?
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CS: It’s quite a double edged sword saying this but I think in terms of wanting to do this as a purely career thing, we certainly would have had people involved with the band from day one, manager, booking agent, press etc that 100% believe in the band to get us more involved, more high profile in the UK scene when you look at from that perspective as doing it a career to earn a sustainable income from your recordings and touring, we’ve seen friends bands who’ve done this to great effect.
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We’ve really stepped away from it, and just got on with life, it hasn’t necessarily had a bad effect on writing the music or the band in a creative/inspirational sense, it’s rather influenced it and driven us to do what we’ve done while holding down full time jobs. The main thing would obviously the desire we’d all have loved to have spent more free time to be able to write and also to tour more as well.
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EP: What’s your opinion on the current state of the music industry?
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CS: Mixed, seriously mixed. It’s maybe quite naive of me to think an unsigned band with very limited financial resources in 2016 can ‘break through’ to some mainstream success in terms of exposure and record sales and its quite often the case to see a lot of talented artists fall criminally under the radar.
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As a band we certainly have an attitude and a drive that says, hey if this magazine/radio show won’t feature us, we’ll certainly find someone who will, we certainly find that smaller magazines, more rooted in the DIY scene actually care about your band and we have a lot of mutual support and respect for that enthusiasm for music that we also have.
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There’s also a lot of issues that need to be addressed further in the industry including sexism, feminism, equality and for us we feel rather strongly about integrity in music as well.
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EP: Who are your musical influences? What about your influences in life?
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CS: As a drummer like my favourite drummers (to pick a small selection) would be Jon Bonham (as you can maybe tell with the Ludwig Vistalite kit I own!), Danny Carey, Josh Freese, Dave Grohl, Dave Turncrantz (Russian Circles).
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I like hundreds of bands to really narrow that down, I’m really into …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Converge, Beastie Boys, Pink Floyd and the bands the drummers I’ve mentioned play/have played in.
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The past year I’ve really been inspired by a couple of bands we’ve played with over the years and I’d mention Self Defense Family as a major one, with how prolific they are with releases and just trying different ideas, my mates in Milk Teeth massive shout out to them as well for been quite inspiration for how they are doing their thing on their own terms in a music industry that you’d think would make them do otherwise to ‘succeed’, their new album is one of my favourites of the year.
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EP: What will Cold Summer be doing this time next year? What about in 5 years?
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CS: At this moment in time we’re working towards and writing our next release and trying to get a few shows/hopefully tours under our belt following the release of ‘Fight To Survive’ and we hope they continue well into next year. Five years from now we’d all love to still be doing this, we’ve worked hard over 5 years and I’ve always felt the longevity of the band has been a key factor in our success in always moving forward, the only thing we have changed has been a healthy development as a band over the time we’ve been playing together.
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EP: What question do you wish someone would ask you in an interview, but nobody ever does?
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CS: As a band we’ve done quite a few interviews over the years, it’s very rare we get asked about our gear? at the risk of being ‘called out’ for product placement its very very rare anyones asked about what we use and why we use it as it certainly helps our sound, I certainly can give a bit of a run down of my gear, pretty much all of it is second hand and with some history beyond what I’ve used it for and other people I’ve lent it to have used it for.
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