Shoreditch regulars Dead Red Sun may write seven-minute instrumental epics, but you mustn’t call them post-rock, writes Steve Anderson.
Ollie Bremner, Tom Murphy and Mike Guppy make up the New Cross three-piece. Photo: Alex Harley.
“Sausage sandwich and a morning breakfast, extra beans?” The waitress slams the two plates down in front of Mike Guppy and Ollie Bremner, guitarist and bassist with instrumental rockers Dead Red Sun. Completing the trio, drummer Tom Murphy has settled on a slightly healthier option with a glass of orange juice.
The noisy, greasy-spoon café in New Cross, where Dead Red Sun live, is a world away from the trendy bars and clubs of Shoreditch, that the band have so often frequented in the year they’ve been together. After all, aren’t alternative art school types supposed to eat only the finest organic lentil and celeriac soup with a seeded loaf on the side?“Nah, it’s all about the fry-ups,” says Guppy. “I couldn’t be a vegan, I just love bacon too much.”
Dead Red Sun have come a long way since their first gig at Camden’s Lock Tavern last March, when their cheap equipment exploded on stage. In October they played to a sold-out Old Blue Last in Haggerston, supporting Japanese trio Mice on the Keys, a gig that they count as one of their top achievements.
“We went downstairs for a cigarette and there were nine people there, and then we went back upstairs and it was just full of people,” says Murphy.
New records
After recording a couple of demos and releasing first single “Facility” to critical acclaim at the beginning of the year, the band are working on their debut EP.
“Facility” is a six-minute whirlwind of atmospheric sounds layered to reach a massive crescendo that is as brutal as it is intricate, but how much variation can this lyric-less troupe offer with their new material?
“If you heard’ Facility’ and thought all of our songs were like that, you’d be really surprised when you heard ‘Temple’, the second track on our EP. It’s seven minutes long and doesn’t have any structures,” says Murphy.
The band reveal that there will even be some vocals on the new release, although so effects-laden that they will just become “another instrument.”
So kind of like Sigur Ros then?
Bremner is defensive: “I suppose, but no way as airy fairy as that.”
Not following the crowd
Despite their lack of a lead vocalist, the group say they would never describe themselves as post-rock and are keen to distance themselves from the genre, claiming they were introduced to American sound-scape giants Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor only after they had began writing themselves.
“’Boring’ is the wrong word, but dynamically, there’s a lot of similarities between different [post-rock] groups, and it sort of pigeonholes itself,” says Guppy, whose guitar is the leading voice in the band.
“Because we weren’t aware of it, we just started writing it.”
So having never heard the expected influences, what artists drew the three art students together?
“We’ve all got varied tastes, but things changed when Mike got me into Radiohead,” says Murphy.
But Guppy is keen to point out his band mates’ guilty pleasures. Although Murphy admits he does have a soft spot for early-noughties nu-metal, it is Bremner who gets the biggest rinsing for being a self-confessed Coldplay fan.
With the EP pencilled-in for a May release, do Dead Red Sun have their sights set on Chris Martin-scale success then?
Apparently not, according to Murphy, “We just really like playing music. It’s not like ‘Oh my God, we want to play Reading in 2013!’ We just want to see where it goes.”
For a band whose songs are laced with such epic grandeur, the people behind the music seem disproportionately humble.
Check out Dead Red Sun’s first single “Facility”
