VICE / NOISEY Germany did an interview with our boys in Up River, here is an english version !
UP RIVER are a bunch of desperate, wasted aging Emo Kids who love Metal-Core and even more love to crash their tour van into Polish trees. The rest of their time they spend shooting melodramatic videos in forests. Because their lives are just so fucking hard in the British Mid-West. That’s why they made a video to their song “Hardship”—in black&white. Just because everything is unbearably tough for these kids. I wonder, what shall become with this spoilt, post-industrial, sissy youth? I don’t know. If you wanna know more about their terrible psychological condition, buy their latest record. Digital only. That about says everything.
NOISEY: hey river-boys, how’s it going? I will ask you all the boring stuff first to make sure no one reads the interview. So, when will you guys be back on tour?
Hey there, The next time we’ll be officially on tour will be around the summer July/August time promoting the new record. We’ve just done a bunch of dates with Black Shapes which was a lot of fun.
NOISEY: Terribly interesting. How do you guys practice? Do you just get awfully drunk and start yelling at each other?
Haha, only our drummer Sam! Actually the rest of the band aren’t big on drinking that much, our drummers from the north so…it just makes sense. We used struggle with practising, transport used to such a big pain, like getting trains and buses to places. Now one of us has a car we just go to our drummers house and we practise in the bedroom on an electric kit. It’s a lot more intimate and we can get ideas flowing. If we had a pre-tour practise we’d do it in a proper rehearsal room, just to tie up any loose ends.
NOISEY: Growing where you did, would you say that your area has any influence on your music? What’s it like there? After Thatcherism.
Well we started out in Brighton and there was a lot of great bands from there, There was a small community of hardcore bands/kids who were all sharing music and I think we found what was right for us. There was a lot of bands coming out of there that we didn’t like and we felt that they sucked, and It inspired us to write/be angry. I think that shows a lot in our music. Where we are based now, in the West Midlands, There’s not much going about apart from maybe in the second city Birmingham, but where we’re from, it’s all small towns that have nothing going on, well not for us anyway, Kids don’t form bands they don’t really go to many shows it’s pretty bleak so it inspires us write about that.
NOISEY: Tell us a bit about the video and the song.
The video was put together by a friend of ours called Michael Dickinson, at Thrash Photography. He filmed our set at The Old Blue Last, in London. We had spoken before hand about which track we wanted to use. We chose our track “Hardships” because it’s a fast and energetic, you know, quite balls to the wall style. we wanted to show that’s what we’re like live. We put the video in black and white because the song can be quite visual in it’s own right, It’s very important that the music complimented the song.
NOISEY: Why didn’t you make a video of you guys standing in the forest being really serious about everything and looking like young emo-BonJovis?
Haha, Oh god not one of those videos! It just seems to be the flavour of the week. Every video that bands put out around us do it in a fucking forest! Their trying to be artistic but it’s just not done well at all. Plus it doesn’t help that the music is awful too. It’s meant to be heartfelt but like it’s just a gimmick, a lot of metal-core bands do it because it’s “epic” and saw a bigger band do it. It’s just lame. We’re a serious band but that’s just ridiculous.
NOISEY: I heard that you once had a terrible car accident in Poland while on tour. Tell us all about the blood and pain!
Well we skidded off the road and our driver went through the windscreen and got impaled on a tree, we had to separate the van from his body, it was awful, we were all throwing up on the hood of the car…and then filmed it. We’re not proud of it. Nah it wasn’t that bad, it was pretty scary at first because the van turned on it side slightly and I thought we were gonna topple right over. luckily we were kinda wedged with the gap in the field and the road, we had to get the emergency services out to help us. We got the promoter to drive to us in his van and put all our gear in his van and go to the show and leave the driver to sort everything out, You hear horror stories of band members dying because of stuff like that an all their equipment being completely smashed up. Thankfully it was like 4 on the crash scale of 10.
NOISEY: What do you hate most about the Hardcore scene? And why the hell does every European Hardcore band hate their own scene?
Thats a tough question….personally I hate bands that have over night success. Like they just get big for being “cool” It’s frustraiting because a lot of bands put so much hard-work into what they do and yet their not discovered, yet another band arrives on the scene for like a day and then their off touring with big UK/US acts. I guess their stuff appeals to people then they put the “hardcore” tag on their music and suddenly it’s an epidemic, this is mainly shitty metal-core bands that claim their hardcore I guess. A lot kids who live by the hardcore lifestyle get upset with it because it’s almost erasing the roots they grew up with. I’ve personally felt effected by it because it’s not the way I remember it. A lot bands are very money-hungry, “A merch band” Whether or not that band is good it’s upsetting people only buy your merch because of your designs, obviously they’ve gotta attract people, but they don’t buy your records or come see you at shows, It’s pushing your art aside and bringing in fashion….I don’t know it doesn’t rub well with me. I’m not sure why every european hardcore band hates their own scene if I’m honest, from my experience, they don’t wanna see their own local acts, they want international touring bands from the US/UK. People won’t come see their friends play shows. You get some good and some bad shows over in the UK too, Even if you’re playing with a big US band thats on a great record label. Whereas when they come through Europe kids go absolutely nuts for it, because they know their not gonna get many chances to see that band. A lot of promoters in Europe get their shows funded by the government so they make the money back, and I think it’s good but bad because they know their gonna make it back, and their putting on local bands they don’t really wanna put it on but they have to and they lack passion to put the shows on, so no kids wanna come out or even hear about it. In the UK if you loose money on the show…..you loose money, and kids who wanna put on shows are scared to put on shows and then face the consequences. It’s sad because it just snowball effects and then bands don’t come and play or even happen.
Interview by Johannes Niederhauser
