Post War Years
Charlie Ashcroft | Wednesday, 03 June 2009
The band's familiarity with Ocean Rooms will stand them in good stead however, as they are already well aware of the venue's potential perils and hazards. Simon can sum up the place's relative lack of interior lighting pretty accurately: "It's so dark in there – you walk in from outside and you're blinded. I almost broke my face."
The guys also know that playing a gig at this particular Brighton venue normally goes hand-in-hand with an excursion to the nearby Market Diner café, an infamously popular haunt for anyone in search of a late-night fried breakfast. With the menu in there boasting a meal known as the 'gut buster', Fred admits that the place caught his attention last year, when he completed a personal hat-trick.
"I did three fry-ups in one day!" he says. "And that place was the third of the day, at midnight. It was brilliant."
Once the gig's over and the gut busters have been digested tonight, Post War Years will set about self-releasing their debut album 'The Greats And The Happenings' and subsequently be heading off on an extended tour around the UK. With some of their earlier material not having made it onto the record's running order, DMG asks how the record came together.
"We found a different way of working," Simon says. "We just changed our style a bit I think, writing some songs which all sat well together."
"We get fairly bored of stuff quite quickly as well, like some of the stuff we've played at gigs for years," Tom adds. "Controversially we didn't put our first single on the album. That was more because we felt it was time to stop putting it out there. It's a bit of a hassle for us to feel like we have to play it all the time."
As Henry points out, the process of self-releasing the album has given the band a greater sense of control over the whole affair. Simon explains how this policy has extended to the album artwork.
"We did really stupid things with the album!" he says. "We were like 'How about we don't put the title or our name anywhere on the album sleeve?' So it's just a picture of a tiger on the front. Just that. We wanted it to look a bit more intriguing."
"For the second album we're going with the back of the tiger's head," Fred adds.
The quality of the debut speaks volumes for how Post War Years' collective songwriting has progressed, ever since their demos first started floating around Daily Music Guide towers last year. Just look out for the black and white tiger in your local record shop and you'll be well on the way.