Hotly tipped local band - The Chapman Family

Despite their name The Chapman Family firmly insist that they are NOT a cult. After openly admitting that they named themselves after Mark Chapman - The band received death threats over the Internet from angry fans accusing them of supporting john Lennon’s murder. But despite this shaky start the band has been hotly tipped as a band to watch this year. 

Forming in 2005 the band has built up an avid fan base in Teesside. Having played sets in local clubs, bars and festivals. They toured in April 2009 as part of the NME radar tour with the likes of La Roux and Heartbreak – being the only unsigned act to perform.
Despite being unsigned they have successfully released two singles and have been hotly tipped by NME who describe them as:’…magnificent north-eastern rockers’.  As well as being backed by Kerrang! who call them: ‘Noisy and energetic, they are the battering ram that pushes at a wall of indifference.’
Although they are based in Teesside the band has played big events throughout Europe. Including Glastonbury and Pukkelpop – a Belgium festival.  Surprisingly it’s only now that they are headlining their own tour. 

As the tour started I interviewed the leading man, Kingsley Chapman, to get the details on how the tour is going…

First things first. For anyone that hasn’t heard of you before could you tell us about how The Chapman Family came about?
Basically quite a lot of things all came together at once. I’d just left my horrific job in a call centre telling pensioners that they couldn’t have their late payment fees back; I’d only recently moved into Paul (guitarist)’s loft to help him pay his rent; and we’d both been getting really bored with the bands we’d been watching when we were going out. We started writing songs together in the middle of the night in the hope that the things we came up with would be fun for us to play and interesting for people to watch. We eventually managed to find a drummer (Phil) and after a year of gigging with our original bass player (Lucy) and wearing a lot of black we hooked up with Pop who helped take our sound onto a different level with his love of all things noisy. And we wore even more black than before.

Now that the introductions are over how’s the tour going? According to the great source that is Wikipedia it’s your first headline tour any messy events you’d like to share with us?
It’s going fine thank you. We’ve only had a couple of disasters so far with stuff like amps stopping working, being too drunk to play or getting lost in strange northern cities, but it’s been OK. We do tend to break an awful lot of equipment ranging from guitars to door panels falling off our tour van (which happened when we toured with La Roux) so we really have to try and take it as easy and gentle as possible to guarantee we get to the end of the bloody thing.
So as well as the tour you’re about to release your second single, Virgins. Is there any chance of an album soon?
Hopefully we should have an album by the end of spring 2010. Hopefully… It’s all about money really. We’ve got more than enough songs to fill two albums but probably only enough money to do two songs. It’s really difficult for a lot of bands at the moment due to no one willing to fund anything that isn’t guaranteed to sell a couple of million units or win a few Brit Awards. Plus most of us are still working so trying to find time to work, write songs, promote our band, gig around the country AND record all at the same time is sometimes pretty hard.

You’ve played at big events such as Glastonbury. How does this compare to playing smaller venues and which do you prefer to play at?
Weirdly the bigger the show the easier it is. I had more difficulty in organising gigs for local bands upstairs in Doctor Browns than we had playing at Reading Festival in front of a thousand people. Sometimes it’s a little too easy though - we played a massive festival in Belgium called Pukkelpop and they really help you out so much it’s untrue. We got carted from the car park to the hospitality area by minibus and then taken to the stage area by golf cart which was a bit of a first for us all. Our backstage dressing room was equipped with everything we could have possibly needed from booze to fruit to food to towels and they even brought us a couple of pizzas after we had finished playing! They really were far too good to us. And how exactly did we repay them? Drunk too much vodka and got ejected from the festival for being lairy during Placebo. Well done us. You can take us out of Teesside but you can’t take Teesside out of us…

The lyrics in your songs are quite strong. Where do you get your ideas from? Do any other bands influence or inspire you?
As far as I’m concerned every time anyone with any sort of creative urge whatsoever decides to write, it should always be from personal experience or personal observation. So my inspiration isn’t necessarily from bands I listen to (although that obviously does play a part) but from everything I see and do from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. That could include some nonsense on the news, some crap about Jordan in Heat magazine, a particularly slow driver on the A66 making everyone’s life a misery, a strange plane flying overhead, some kids bullying a shopkeeper, my neighbour drinking cans of Stella at 10am, a rubbish film on in the middle of the night on BBC2 etc. Not everything that you do or see will be “inspirational” but I think you have to keep your eyes open just in case something interesting comes along.

And finally, anyone who has you added on MySpace will know full well that your passionate about politics. Ever thought of running for local MP?
Ha ha! Unfortunately not, my degree was in Fine Art not Politics… To be honest I’m not even sure that I’m actually “passionate about politics” either; I just enjoy the fact that I can have an opinion and go on about it as much as I feel necessary. Plus my MySpace or Twitter ramblings and rants aren’t usually solely focused on political issues, they’re usually about the cult of celebrity or the fact that Middlesbrough are playing a little bit shit. However, I do think people should take an interest and have at least a vague knowledge in what’s going on in the world around them - be it political, environmental, cultural etc. We’ve got to realise that there’s more important things in this country than X Factor and that the Jeremy Kyle show isn’t some sort of freak show we can all look down upon and mock as in reality it’s one of the most accurate representations of where this great country is right now. If we don’t react we’ll become a completely apathetic nation who doesn’t seem to care that far right groups can hold seats in Europe or Parliament by actually polling less votes than when they were defeated at the polls a few years previously. If everyone just lies back and thinks of England and the only people who are interested in “politics” are extremist groups then we definitely have a big problem. Similarly if people don’t recognise the complete and utter shambles of Woody Allen et al defending Roman Polanski on his 30-year-old rape conviction then we might as well build a spaceship and get off the planet as soon as we can, as we’re obviously all fucked.

Ahh I love them…definitely a band to look out for in the future.