Your New Favourite Band: Early Ghost

A few beats of the PULSE back we CULTURED VULTURES introduced you lovely lot to the equally lovely Early Ghost, and well we’ve only gone and snared them for a quick interview in the latest addition of YOUR NEW FAVOURITE BAND.

Early Ghost are six piece based around Brighton who cobble together a wide array of music from sountracks to surf to create a really atmospheric and striking take on folk and country music. Get to know the band over the course of this chat, including some great musical recommendations, plans for the future, and where you might just be lucky enough to catch them live.

First and foremost, hello there and who be I chatting to?
Hello! You’re chatting to Mike, 1/6 of Early Ghost.

We recently covered you guys in an edition of our new music feature, Pulse, but what would you say Early Ghost is all about in your own words?
Thanks for the feature. I don’t know if I’d be able to say what we’re about, as I guess we don’t know the answer to that ourselves…we just like writing and playing music and we’ve found our niche in certain aesthetics. I like composing and arranging songs but some of the others are all about the tasty riffs.

You’ve got an eclectic and evocative sound, capturing folk, country, surf, and spaghetti westerns, what have been some of the biggest musical influences and inspirations for the band?
The influence of Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks has been undeniable in the past releases, and we always liked the link between spaghetti western music and surf music – its basically exactly the same thing, maybe with slightly differing atmospheres. I can’t speak for the others but in terms of country music Gram Parsons has to be one of my all time favourite artists. To be honest though we kind of try and keep the folk aesthetic on the fringe of our sound – I like the way Grizzly Bear do things – they’re happy to incorporate an acoustic guitar but feed it into pedals and effects that turn it into something else entirely. And in terms of right now, I’m going crazy for Arthur Russell. He was creative in a way that seems so uninhibited and I’m a little envious of that.

For our readers to get to know you, outside of the band, what else drives your or inspires you aside from music? Any other big passions?
Karl and Sam (Allan) both spend a large amount of their time on illustration and Karl is currently doing a lot of freelance illustration work. You can check his work out on his Facebook page. Other than that we mostly just sit around and play Status Quo songs.

You’ve toured with some big names, like Beirut and First Aid Kit among others, what’s been your favourite tour? Any good tales from the road?
Things have been a little misquoted by blogs – we haven’t toured with those bands but we have opened for them on shows. They were really amazing shows for us. A few months ago we opened for for Neutral Milk Hotel – that was literally a teenage dream realised. If my 14 year old self could have seen into the future to that moment he would have gone nuts. In terms of our own tours, we’ve actually not embarked on a tour ourselves yet but we likely will this summer. It’s been a long time coming that we take ourselves north of the M25.

Speaking of touring, where can you be caught live in the foreseeable?
We’re playing shows scarcely at the moment, but we’re playing Drill Festival in a few weeks which is a multi-venue festival in Brighton. It’s their first year but the line up is excellent – it includes Wire, Toy, Courtney Barnett, The Wytches, Theo Verney and some other great bands. The next show after that will likely be January.

You released the single ‘Everything Goes With It’ earlier this year, what else is on the horizon release-wise for you guys? EP? LP?
We’re just going to keep releasing singles for a while – It’s much more exciting for us for the moment rather than working towards the standard EP/LP, and it means we can spend more time on individual tracks. It’s also nice when each track can have it’s own sound going on without having to be constricted to being part of a big release. We’ve got another one on the way really soon.

For our ever eager readers out there, are there any bands/artists, up and coming or otherwise, that you’d recommend they hurry on up and give a listen to?
There are some great bands and artists from the Falmouth area at the moment….The Black Tambourines and The Golden Dregs are both really amazing. Also check out A House In The Trees, Sean Nicholas Savage and…I’ve just discovered Country Teasers so go through their discography if you get the chance.

Finally, and most importantly, if you were to have a pet vulture that turned out to be especially cultured, what would you call it?
Let’s go with Andre, because I just read an article about Andre the Giant and he seemed like a pretty sweet guy.