Glastonbury Festival

Long-View: The naked truth

Although having only spent a year in the public eye, Manchurian quartet Long-View have been incessantly touring the UK, including their stints at various UK festivals. Vocalist Rob McVey, guitarist Doug Morch, bassist Aiden Banks and drummer Matt Dobbs provide a celestial resonance that strips back rock to it’s emotional core.

Far from being ‘emo’, reaching to perhaps a limited audience, Long-View’s classically trained background produces a beautiful sound encompassing hope, pain, joy and humanity that every listener can connect to. We caught up with Rob and Matt to quiz them on their successes and get the feedback from their first ever Glastonbury experience...

You’ve been very busy touring and making quite a name for yourselves lately, but have you had time to look back and enjoy the past year?
Rob: Yeah we have a bit. Playing at Glastonbury has been great and probably the highlight so far. Apart from speaking to you now. There’s a special kind of spirit and so many good bands at Glastonbury. When you look at other events... there’s V Festival as well, and that’s always got some pretty good bands there too, but it’s not the same kind of thing.

You made your debut on the John Peel Stage (formerly New Bands Tent) this year. What did it feel like to walk off stage knowing that you’d just played a set at the festival?
Rob: It was f***ing wicked man. I lost my voice from singing and enjoying myself far too much onstage.
Matt: It’s just an amazing place. I can’t believe that with everything else that was going on at the same time as us, around 5,000 people turned up to see us play, so it was great!

As Glastonbury is so different from all the other festivals everyone seems to have a fascinating story to tell. Do you have anything you’d like to share with us now?
Matt: At Glastonbury you just follow the lights into the misty night and become part of the whole Glastonbury romantic vibe. I think that’s what half of the festival is about. The one half is music and the other is just complete madness.

You’ve already released three EPs and your debut album, ‘Mercury’, came out last year. What can we expect from you guys next?
Matt: We have our second album coming out soon. We released our first album just after last years Glastonbury and we just want to keep releasing things. We’re off to America for a while and we’re going to release the first album there and basically do a repeat of everything we’ve just done here in Britain but on a bigger scale!
Rob: In America, I don’t really think they have anything like Glastonbury though do they? Which is a shame. We did a gig in Athens last year though which was amazing. Its very strange though when we look at things like we’ve sold more albums in Japan than we have anywhere else in the world and we’ve never even been to Japan!

Because music file sharing has become such an issue lately are you worried about the possibility of your songs being downloaded for free?
Rob: I think its good for people to hear your music, I think that’s the bottom line. There is the whole argument of exploitation against it but that’s much more of a corporate thing.
Matt: I’d love it if a million people downloaded ‘Mercury’ because that would mean that then a million or more people would hear it. Our last single ‘Before the Dream’ was able to be downloaded for 99p and in the end we went in at number 18 in the charts, so that was pretty good for us on that kind of commercial face value level. The record companies are making money every which way.
Rob: I would just say that people should just embrace it. Everybody’s getting iPods and things like that now and people are downloading because things change and things move forward and you’ve got to just go with it or be left behind.

So as experienced festival-goers now, have you got any tips for the rest of us?
Matt: Well, don’t take any tips from anyone else. That’s probably a good one. In a nutshell, you need to keep your feet dry with covers made out of plastic bags, or wellies, and you need to put your tent in a place where the ground is going to be dry and where in the morning its not going to get direct sunlight. Otherwise it’s going to be boiling and you’ll wake up really, really early, which you don’t want to do.
Rob: Be naked all of the time, it’s far easier to get clean.

So maybe we should end on that note, and perhaps avoid actually standing naked in fields(?) There’s still a chance to catch the Long-View boys in action at home before they get busy in the States: They’re making a special appearance at the Prince Charles Cinema, London on the 10th of November.

Check out www.longviewmusic.com for more details.

Interview by Glynn Pegler and Gemma Curtis. Words by Lucy Gooderidge. Photos: Jack Hobhouse.

Article supplied by: Culture Magazine

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Long-View: The naked truth

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