After nearly three weeks on the road with Young Kato, tonight at Edinburgh’s Electric Circus is the third last night of the tour for Peasant’s King. There is deep reflection in the eyes of vocalist Danni Lafrombe Evans and guitarist Rhodri Parry, as they look back at their first full-scale UK tour, but they are also looking to the future where a debut album is almost imminent.
The tour is near its end, how has it been?
Danni: It’s been good, been very busy. It’s been our first tour ever so it’s been a learning curve for us. It’s just been awesome to be on the road, playing in front of people who have never heard your music before and picking up new fans – that’s the main thing I think that we’ve benefited from.
Rhodri: We’re quite overwhelmed that it has come to an end now. It’s flown by, but at the same time the first dates seem like a long time ago because you’re doing the same thing everyday. On this tour I think we have learned a lot and it will benefit us hugely when we go on to do the next one.
For those fans you picked up, what sort of reception have you got from them?
Danni: It’s been really, really positive. After every show we get people coming up to us signing onto the mailing list, buying t-shirts, CDs etc. And for a small band coming from Wales, that’s just great. It’s good to play in venues that are pretty much full, if not sold out. Just for people coming up to you and saying ‘you’re doing the right thing’, it’s just really positive for all of us and it encourages to continue as a band, to push through and hopefully get a second tour.
Has there been much writing going on during your time off on tour?
Rhodri: I don’t know because on our time off, there’s a lot of preparing for the next day or exploring wherever we’ve been because we haven’t had much time to do that as it’s just so busy.
Danni: You need to focus on sleeping. When you go on tour, you’re just so busy. There’s this rock star perception of what it is going to be like; it’s completely different to that. You wake up in the morning wherever you are, you then travel, soundcheck, do the performance, then you’re so tired after the performance, you want to go to bed. The odd occasion we’ve gone out and had a drink or chill out. Time off doesn’t really exist.
Sometimes it feels like you go from venue to venue to venue. Luckily we’ve just had some time to explore in Edinburgh yesterday, and it will nice to just chill out and visit the place; view the Castle and look at all the architecture, which is just fantastic.
What is the situation with the new album?
Rhodri: We’ve been sitting on the album for a while now, I think it’s about a year and a half. There’s been the odd bits and pieces there, but the tracks are now going through the process of being mastered and mixed. We’ve had some stuff back in relation to the first single that is coming out and we’re over the moon with it. I think we’re just excited to get that first track out and follow it with the album.
Danni: It feels like it has been a while since we released new material, we got signed to Visible Noise and Wiseblood Management and decided to re-release everything we have ever done. So nobody has really heard anything new from us. Obviously being signed to those two, it has gone to a wider audience. To us, it’s like three or four years out. We’ve been working on this new album for a while now, so we want it to be right. We only have one debut album and we want to be special.
How will this new album compare to even differ to your EPs?
Rhodri: One of the biggest things is that it is just more mature, it is a whole thing in itself. We have actually settled and rounded off what our sound is as a band. We have a sound to name Peasant’s King. First EP we only had one guitarist and a lot of that is quite simplistic. Second EP we moved on a lot, there was a lot of progression there. The album is more professional, it shows us more who we are.
Danni: Those EPs we released were just four songs on each. It doesn’t matter if those four songs are consistent or whatever, it’s a case of releasing our material and seeing what happens with it. The album is written as a concept album: it’s the story of a man as a young boy until he grows up and his lover at the time. It’s not just simple put-a-picture-on-it, it actually has a story behind it. We sat down with videographers and pushed this theme we wanted to create with this album.
After the tour, what does the rest of 2015 bring for Peasant’s King?
Danni: We release our new single on June 1st, which we’re really excited about. We’ve shot the video, the track is mastered, it’s all ready to go. Rhodri has done a remix for it too. We have the new album coming out in autumn, so we’ll be expecting to go on a tour or playing a couple of shows around the UK to support the album. We’ll hopefully be playing a couple of festivals. We’re playing Liverpool Sound City on May 25th, and we’re playing a couple of other festivals that are yet to be confirmed. It’s just onwards and upwards after that.
Freelance and student journalist currently educated at Edinburgh Napier University.
