Bandoliers

Having played in various bands together since their early teens, Newcastle-based trio Jonny
Sabiston, Tommi Evans and Harry Jenkinson know each other’s music inside out. Parting
company with the bass guitarist from their previous outfit, the boys have stripped their Maximo
Park and Futureheads-inspired art rock down to its purest form; bass, drums, guitar and vocals.
Named after a Them Crooked Vultures track, Bandoliers are a band apart. “It’s got nothing to do
with the song,” says guitarist Sabiston when asked about the origins of the band’s moniker. “We
just liked the name. We were saying today that it seems like a three-piece name. Like three
Mexican people going to war or something.”

With little more than four gigs under their belts, including an impressive support slot at The
Cluny with rising North East starlets Polarsets, Bandoliers recently unleashed their debut
single; a double A-side featuring the tracks ‘May’ and ‘Time.’ Recorded in drummer Jenkinson’s
garage, Bandoliers have honed their sound to perfection for this first release. “When you’re
doing it at home, if it’s good but you think you can do better then you can do it again,” Sabiston
explains about the band’s decision to eschew the studio in favour of self-recording. “I mean, we
spent about two months recording two tracks. Just adding harmonies.”

With angular guitars and metronomic drums shooting it out with crisp Geordie harmonies, ‘May’
and ‘Time’ are some of the tightest power-pop songs to come out of Newcastle in a while. “I
think what we try to do as a band is put weird time signatures in and just try to make it as
interesting as we can,” Sabiston continues. “We’d never really had harmonies on tracks but
because we’re a three-piece now we have to them just to build it up. Because obviously just
having one guitar can sound really bare. We added so many harmonies when we recorded, I
mean, there’s four-part harmonies on there.”

Excited by the opportunity their new beginning offers, the trio are determined to get things right
this time. “With our previous band we had a name locally, now it’s like starting again which is a
bit frustrating,” explains drummer Jenkison. “But I like that as well because then people are a
bit more surprised. When we did our first gig it was like ‘yeah, this is our first gig.’ But it wasn’t. It
was like our seven-hundredth, really. The idea was to not have people go ‘I saw them ages ago
and they weren’t that good then.’”

With heaps of blogosphere hype and a write up in NME's Radar section already heading their
way, there’s little danger of that. “Because we’ve been in bands so long, this time we’re trying
to do it properly,” says Sabiston. “We’re getting played on BBC 6 Music and we’ve got a video
out. I mean, we’ve been a band for eight years but we’ve only been a band for a month so, you
know, you’ve got to start somewhere.”

And what a start. - Toby Rodgers