J: How long have you guys been performing together? What was the inspiration behind your name?
We came together three and a half years ago, in the spring of 2008. We are named after a Bob Dylan song on the Desire album about how humans connect with each other. If you don’t know the story, you don’t care.
J: Your style has often been described as ‘slow’ and ‘brooding’ – what kind of effect is your music intended to have on your audience?
Some of our songs might sound quite simple on first listen but there are things hidden in them, artifacts for you dig down to. During a gig we want people to dance. In our dreams we want them to do so hedonistically, with abandon. We want their eyes to roll back. Their arms to spasm. We want ambulances to be called. Afterwards though, we hope there is something to reflect on, lyrically, musically, without abandon.
J: Although you’ve been performing all across the UK, are there any cities you have been particularly well-received in? How would you describe the typical Black Diamond Bay fan?
There is no typical Black Diamond Bay fan. Some bands hit a scene and they hit it hard and they do very well with that. It makes things easy for everyone involved. You know what clothes to wear. You know roughly how you should move. You probably have a feel for the vernacular, know what words are in, what words are passé. Maybe everyone wears leather. Maybe there are moustaches. Maybe big glasses, whether you need a prescription or not. This isn’t the case with us. Every member of the band comes from a different place. From classical music, from pop, jazz, metal, from hip hop. Our music can come from too many places, like strangers in a room, so perhaps we are drawn to people who cannot connect through those easy avenues of clothes or clubs.
J: Where have you performed in Shoreditch?
We have played at Cargo and 93 Feet East a few times. Our next gig is at the Queen of Hoxton on Nov 24th…
[youtube width=”500″ height=”300″ link=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRlDMtnpA-8″]
Who writes the lyrics to the songs? Are the music and lyrics written in conjunction, or separately? How would you describe your ‘creative process’?
We’re not just a guitar band who plug in and play. A lot of production is needed up front before we can start to work around it with live instrumentation. O’Mahoney writes songs on acoustic guitar and gradually the music and the beats are built around it. Though sometimes this is inverted, as in the case of Lucifer, which Ziapour produced up front, the vocals being added later. However it emerges, we make music along the frontier of the analogue and the digital. In the film Bladerunner, technology is so advanced it creates androids who seem human in all aspects apart but their capacity to empathise. Technology makes us remote from ourselves. So we make music that expresses that, the impossibility of being human in the age of online social networking.
J: What are your plans for the future?
The people who go and see the band are really the ones who have the plans. If people stopped coming to see us, our futures would be cheap rehearsal rooms, un-listened-to demos, disenfranchisement, prescription drug problems, middle age, ignominy. But if people continue to come, maybe we will play bigger and bigger venues to more and more strangers and everything will be bright and shiny and then one day we will wake up and the choruses won’t be there any more and the phone will stop ringing and that will be that. Either way, we’ll look back on it and think, so those were our plans.
http://www.blackdiamondbay.co.uk/