Making Friends With Better Enemies

We recently reviewed the self titled debut album of Scottish band, Better Enemies, and after catching up with them, we felt they would make better friends than enemies. Here’s our interview:   

EP: What’s the Better Enemies story? Who are you, how long have you been around, where do you come from?

BE: Better Enemies is made up of Jamie Mackie, David Temple, Rhys Jones and Chris Sutherland. We have been a band for around 5 years but have only just changed out name to Better Enemies and have started a fresh sound for 2016. We are based in Aberdeen, Scotland and have been since we started. We describe ourselves as energetic pop/rock with heart.

EP: Your eponymous debut album was released at the beginning of the month. What’s the reaction been to that? How are you feeling about it?

BE: Our self titled album ‘Better Enemies’ has been genuinely well received. We have heard nothing but positive feedback and we are so proud of the record we have produced. We also played the tracks live for the first time at our album launch, and how our album comes across as a live show is hugely important to us and our launch night could not really have gone any better. We got such a great reaction from our local crowd and can’t wait to take the album all across the U.K.

EP: ‘Get Me Out’ is a nice rocky number – what’s the song all about? Is it written from experience? 

BE: ‘Get Me Out’ was actually the last song written for the album, around 2 weeks before gong into the studio, so it almost didn’t even make it on the album. We are super happy that it did though and we even made it the lead single from the album. The song is about how we can develop our own little worlds of comfort such as routine jobs and lifestyles and can end up ignoring what we really want to do with our life. The song demonstrates the inner conflict that we all can experience when trying to leave that comfort zone.

EP: You were formerly known as Suburban Saints – what brought about the name change? What’s the significance of ‘Better Enemies’?

BE: We decided to change our band name mainly based around the fact the new record was so different from the old material we had previously released. We pushed our sound further towards rock on this record as we tend to really enjoy the heavier moments live. ‘Better Enemies’ was just the first name that in the space of 2 weeks of trying to think of one, we all agreed on haha. We think it has a nice ring to it.

EP: If you could meet anyone, living or dead, who would it be, and why?

BE: I think meeting someone like Dave Grohl would be great. He’s had so much experience not only in making great music but in the music industry itself. I’m sure we could learn a lot from speaking to him.

EP: What’s your take on the current state of the music industry as it stands? And what advice do you have for anyone wanting to get into music as a profession?

BE: The music industry is always changing and progressing. We feel it’s incredibly exciting that our music can reach a huge amount of people thanks to online streaming and social media. Although online services can make it easy to get your music out there, our advice to anyone wanting to get into the music industry would be to perfect your live show and play as many gigs as you can. Nothing can beat seeing a good artist or band live.

EP: If you could do it all again, what, if anything, would you do differently? And why? 

BE: I don’t think we would change much to be honest. We may have made some mistakes along the way but the memories and experiences we have had are ones we wouldn’t want to replace!

EP: Who are your influences in life, and in music?

BE: As a band, we are definitely inspired by aspiring Scottish acts who are making an impact on a global level. Bands like Twin Atlantic and Fatherson give hope to bands from Scotland, if you put in the hard work like they have done, you can make progress.

EP: What question do you wish someone would ask you in an interview, but nobody ever does? 

BE: That’s a tough one, maybe being asked what it’s like to be such a handsome group, because that’s certainly never been asked before hahaha.

You can buy their album, ‘Better Enemies’, on iTunes, and Google Play.