MANCHESTER RISING BAND HOLLY HEAD CHAT NEW SINGLE, BBC6 MUSIC AND WRITING FROM A JAIL CELL
INTERVIEW | HOLLY HEAD by Tom Jenkinson
Meet Holly Head, the latest band to emerge from the thriving music scene of Manchester. With their unique raw blend of indie rock and post punk energy, Holly Head emerge from their BBC6 Music live debut which seen them play a recent in session jam on the stations New Music Fix Daily last month. Set to play alongside label mates Martial Arts this weekend (16/11/24) at YES (Pink Room) in Manchester, Joe (vocals/guitar) and Oscar (drums) from Holly Head chat to Northern Exposure about their new single ‘No Gain‘, politics, and writing lyrics from a jail cell.
Firstly, how did the band meet?
Oscar: I moved to Manchester about 3 years ago, then I met Joe through my housemate, and we started jamming together. I think ‘Jungle‘ – the song we played first in the session at BBC6 – was one of the first tunes we wrote.
Joe: I think it’s the same with [current single] ‘No Gain‘. Those were the first two we wrote.
Oscar: That’s why we’re getting those released now so we can explore a different direction with our sound. Those tracks are rugged and raw, and they are melodic, but not quite as melodic as what we’re making now. What you hear on Spotify and BBC6 so far is what sums us up musically our best.
Your sound is sound very raw, very energetic, but there is some real technicality and musicality sat underneath that.
Oscar: I think a lot of that stems from my interest in different drumming styles, particularly different Latin styles. I’m also a jungle producer and I love that sound and bring that to Holly Head. You can hear Afro rhythms in ‘No Gain’, that’s taken from Latin drumming; I love drawing influences from those different styles and then placing them in our own context. I feel like our music is more groove based than it is anything else.
Joe: Yeah, I guess we’re kind of carrying on from the lineage of bands like A Certain Ratio, and even rhythm-led bands like Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses.
You mentioned your new single ‘No Gain’ which is what led me to discovering Holly Head. How did that song come about?
Oscar: Liam [Bass player] has a sort of innate groove. When writing ‘No Gain’, he came up with the bassline and the feel was just instantly there. I feel that most of the songs we write we don’t sit down and meticulously create a piece of music. We will jam one idea, record the whole thing on our phones, and then listen back as a band, and pick the bits we liked [and discard] the bits we don’t like and put it in a coherent, 3-minute piece. Everything we write is “in the moment” and then we try to capture it.
Lyrically, ‘No Gain’ feels very political, and your fee from your 6 Music session was donated to a charity supporting the people of Palestine. Are Holly Head a political band?
Joe: Well, it’s half-and-half really. Half is political commentary, and then the other half is how I feel emotionally, on a personal level. In a way they sort of fuse into each other. How I feel is largely affected by what’s going on politically, but obviously politics is not just a subject at school. It’s real life.
Oscar: It’s more of a personal thing rather than like shouting “we’re political, look at us!” It’s not really about that. Any writer writes about stuff that personal to them and when something like politics is so close to you and you’re so involved in it, it’s just naturally what you’re going to write about.
I understand that the lyrics for ‘No Gain’ were conceived in a jail cell; how did that come about?
Joe: I’ve taken a number of direct actions with various activist groups, so you may have heard of “Just Stop Oil”. The one that I was [with] is called “Animal Rising”. So, at the Scottish Grand National in March 2023 we were protesting the cruelty that we see in horse racing, and we tried to disrupt the event and stop it from happening, but we knew we were going to get arrested from the beginning.
In a jail cell you can request a pen and paper to pass the time, and I just wrote, “I may not see what I want before I leave here, but I can’t regret in the cell I sit” which became the beginning of ‘No Gain‘.
And was the song already in formulation at this point?
Joe: It must have been because ‘No Gain’ came from the first jam session we had, which was about October 2022, 3-4 months beforehand, but I think we had our first gig booked so I started writing lyrics because I’ll only finish the lyrics to a song once I’m on a deadline.
[Our conversation turns to Oasis, and the upcoming reunion gigs in 2025]
Joe: I love Oasis. A lot of people shit on them. I understand people don’t like the Gallagher’s and that’s maybe fair enough [but] being from Manchester we’re into all the indie stuff. We like The Stone Roses, and Oasis, and Happy Mondays, and the Charlatans. A lot it is very melodic songwriting with a big wall of sound, like ‘Listen Up’ or ‘Slide Away’, but it has so much energy which is what I try to bring [to Holly Head], because I play rhythm guitar and write the lyrics.
I’ve heard Noel Gallagher in interviews say that his songs are always melody focused, which is why they’re so memorable, and then everything kind of falls into place afterwards. Do you have a similar approach?
Joe: I don’t know, I think I learnt to write songs from listening to Oasis, to be honest. I don’t know if it’s as universal as that, but it definitely influenced the way I write, because I learnt how to write songs by just listening to ‘Half the World Away’ and that’s always the way that I’ve done it.
Holly Head’s new single “No Gain” is available now on all streaming platforms under the Akoustic Anarkhy label. Their four-track live set for BBC6 Music can be listened to on the BBC Sounds App HERE.
They play YES (The Pink Room) in Manchester on Saturday 16th November 2024 with labelmates Martial Arts for Akoustik Anarkhy’s 25th anniversary show. Any remaining tickets can be found here.
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