interview with Tone Fish
Have any of you played in other bands? We all played in different bands before. Rock- / Heavy Metal- / Classic-/ Kleszma-/Punk-Bands
What are your names? / Who plays what? / How old are you?
Stefan Gliwitzki -guitar / bouzouki/vocal
Jochen Siepmann - cajon-drum-set
Bianca Kaup- flutes / accordion
Michaela Jeretzky - vocal / flutes / guitar / percussion
Did you make music even when you were young? We all make music for many years now. Starting for different reasons, music is an important part of our life.
Where are you from?We are from Germany / Hamelin - Home of the Pied Piper
What year did the band form?We started in 2013
What's your style of genre?We call it Rat City Folk - our own style of folkmusic
What inspires you? We are inspired by the different genres we did before and the love to accoustic music.
How often and where do you reherse?We rehearse once a week in a former nuclear fallout shelter
How have you developed since you started with the music? We started with songs from other musicians. But more and more own songs, written by Stefan, found
their way on our set list.
Are you looking for a booking agency, and what are your thoughts around that?We have a booking agency: lautstrom by Olaf Menne
Are you looking for a label, and what are your thoughts around that?Many greetings to our label: Prosodia by Max Heckel
What made you decide to make this music?It's the mixture of telling stories, using voices to transport contents. It is something different to
play own songs and seeing people who love it.
What are your songs about? Absolut love, dogs, sons, mothers, war, dates, sisters, freaks
Who does the composing and writes the lyrics? Stefan is the one who writes lyrics and the music.
Do you start with the music or the lyrics? Most of the time he starts with the lyrics.
What language do you sing in? We sing in English but there's one song " The Pied Piper" which we sing in German.
What are the least and most people to attend one of your gigs? 7 and 2000 - and both gigs were great!!!!
What ages are most of your concert attendants? Well, they all have at least a drivers licence.
Do you always play the same songs live, or do you vary? We vary sometimes, because we have to possible programs: Irish and our own songs. So we can vary - depending on the gig.
What was your first gig like? Our first gig was in a small cafe - 80 people. It was a very very nice evening. All these open minded and open hearted people. A special evening for us.
Have you had to cancel a gig? Once, because Stefan was bad ill - fever and no voice to sing.
Where have you played live this year? We played from the north of Germany ( Sylt, Föhr , Lübeck, Kiel) to the South near Mainz. Round about 70 concerts so far.
Where do you plan to gig the comming year? We will be in the north again, because we all love the sea. But there will be concerts all
over Germany
When did you start to sell merchandise, and what do you have for sale? We have Cds and t-shirts. We started in 2015 with our first CD " On the hook"
Is it easier to find inspiration from older bands, or bands that are more active today? I think it is easier to find inspiration from older bands. Older bands an musicians made the music they want to not the music most of the people want to hear - they were more authentic. Nowadays there is a lot of music that sounds like the other. The musicians are dressed like someone wants them to look like.
But of course, there are still very good young artists!
What have been your biggest obstacles? The stairway from our band room to the car, when we have to put our equipment into our cars ;-)
What advice would you give other bands or artists? Do what you love - work hard - find people with the same goals and dreams.
How do you get psyched for a gig? We try to calm down - breathing.
Do you have any new material? We have two new live CDs - "The Traveller" and "The Celtic Experience" - both published in May 2016
What are your web sites? www.tone-fish.com
How can people reach you? You can visit our homepage, our facebook site https://www.facebook.com/Tonefishtunes
What are your plans for the future? We'd like to play our music for as many people as possible.
Do you have something to add? Bianca does not like to eat fish - is that strange? ;-)
