interview with Tooms

What´s the name of your band? Tooms

What made you call the band "Tooms"? We are named after The X-Files Season 1 villain Eugene Victor Tooms.

How was the band formed? The band was formed by Idene, Karl and Eddie back in 2008. Phil joined a few years later on guitar.

Can you tell about your band? Tooms are a metal band that use influences from hard electronic dance music. We fuse the genres together in a mashup style but still retain our punk/hardcore ethics when writing songs.

Where are all band members from?/Who does what in the band? We are all from Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. Karl is on drums, Idene and Eddie on vocals and Phil on guitars.

What was the ambitions of the band when you started? We wanted to make the music we wanted to hear. A cross between all of our favorite styles and influences.

Could you explain your music to someone that haven't heard you? Tooms are similar in concept to The Prodigy but where they have punk influences, we have a lot more metal.

Where was your first gig? Our first gig was playing at The Cluny 2 in Newcastle back in March 2011

Where was the latest gig? Our next gig we have booked is at The Northern Line playing the Butchers Block Records party supporting Paul Blackout and DJ UEP

Who writes your songs?/Who writes the music who writes lyrics? We all pitch in ideas and then work on them until they are ready to go. Depending on who’s coming up with the concepts, then they usually finalize the track.

Who has the best since of humor in the band? Most definitely Eddie.

What's good/bad with the band?/What genre do you feel you are? What’s good about the band is that it appeals to how hard we want the music to be, what’s bad I guess is the difficulty we have to overcome to project the sound live. We can do it of course, it’s just not simple like in previous bands where you would plug in and play. As for genre, there’s a whole new underground movement happening with this and the actual genre title is still not defined. It could be that we are Electronic Dance Metal, or Electronicore, Digital Hardcore would probably be the most fitting title for the genre.

Why did you pick that particular style?/What are your songs about? We didn’t pick the style, the style choose us. It’s just the natural sound of the music we make. Our songs are mostly about the world around us. We cover socio-political subjects and write about them in a more upfront and easily digested manner. We have themes that run through all of the lyrics based around statements and that’s something we’ve been carrying through all of the tracks we write.

Do you write your own material or mainly covers? We write all our own material. There has been talks of doing some covers, mostly just silly ones for fun. Whether that will happen is something we will need to wait and see.

Have you made any albums?/If yes what are they? Right now we are still in the releasing EP/Singles mode. We have material enough to do an album so hopefully soon we will get that sorted.

Do you have any clips on YouTube? Yes we have our debut video Disgraceland here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h32mFNd-JkQ

Best/worst gig you've played? We played a show in Leeds once where no one had come to see any of the bands. That sucked, but we’ve also had great shows so not all bad. You have to take the rough with the smooth in the music world.

Is it always the same songs live? We have different set lists for the types of slot that are available at shows. So if we headline we will probably try to fill the time slot, if we’re down the bill we’ll play our 30 minute set or as appropriate for the show.

What has been the best/most promising gig so far? We were given the opportunity to support Bam Margera and Fuckface Unstoppable when they came to Newcastle last year. That’s definitely been one of our favorite gigs we have played.

What are the plans for the rest of the year? We have our next single coming out which is a collaboration between ourselves and Industrial Strength Records main man Lenny Dee. This also features a remix from hardcore master Unexist and should be out mid-2014. After that we will be working on the follow up and progressing work on our album.

What are your goals with your music? We hope to educate, inform and inspire in equal measures and to provide a great mosh-pit of course.

Is it easier to get your inspiration from older bands or from bands more modern? It’s a bit of both, older bands inspired us and influenced us to be who we are today. The modern bands are showing us what not to do and what we should be doing. We have to keep ahead of trends or else we get stuck in a time warp.

What are your sources of inspiration? Dance music and metal.

What's the first step when making a new song? It can start from a straight up beat or it can be a bassline or a guitar line. Whatever gets us excited, we go from there.

What would be your dreams for the band? It would be cool to get on some big tours and get out there to the wider world. Play shows to audiences that are new to electronic music in general or audiences that want to hear something completely different yet fully in your face.

Besides your own music, what genres and bands do you listen to? We all listen to a broad spectrum of genres and bands. Ranging from black metal, hardcore metal, hardcore dance, drum and bass, techno, metalcore, doom, djent. We could literally go on all day about what bands and producers we all listen too.

When you are on stage, what do you fear most then? I guess the audience walking out would suck which thankfully hasn’t happened.

What would you do if there was no music? Live a very sad and miserable life.

How important are your fans? Very important, they are the crux of what we do and having a fan base motivates us to keep going.

Where do you rehearse? We rehearse at Downcast Studios in Gateshead. A great practice room with everything we need to get a great rehearsal done. Check them out at http://www.downcaststudios.co.uk/

Name 2 of your own songs you like at the moment? Mask Architect and Pitch Black.

What do you feel is the best live band you've seen? There are too many to mention but a notable one was definitely Machine Head when they played Newcastle O2 Academy a few years ago. They brought their won sound system and you could really tell. The sound is notorious for being dreadful in there and Machine Head stood head and shoulders above everyone else that’s ever played at the venue because of their own rig.

What drives a band that isn't all that famous and renowned to try to make a living on their music and to keep playing? Simple, we don’t try to make a living from it. It’s our hobby and something we enjoy doing and if someone wants to help us along the way with some cash investments they are more than welcome too.

Do you have any webpages? Yes we have our main web hub which is www.toomslive.co.uk and from there you can find links to our soundcloud, facebook, twitter etc.

Any pearls of wisdom for all other bands out there? Never give up and always work on the creative output of your music.

Describe your show, visually and musically? Our shows are old school hardcore in terms of visually and musically, they are an intense sonic force. We have to use 2 PA systems when playing smaller venues due to the systems available not being able to handle all of the sounds that project. So in comparison to most bands, we are very loud. Bring earplugs to the shows or don’t…either way you’ll feel the force of the music.

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