This City

There can't be many bands who can honestly claim to have met at a tattoo convention. But then, there can be lessstill whose bass player has the principle characters from Star Wars across his arm and whose guitarist claims to have an unspecified image branded on his willy. But this is the world of Brighton's This City, who, through mutual friend and inksman Woody, decided that they should form a hardcore band because "everyone else in Brighton was in one". And they might have remained a hardcore band, were it not for guitarist Arran Day's Test Icicle obsession, singer's Chris Purr's propensity for jerky dancing (imagine a Thunderbird with a nasty wasp sting, only cooler) and the rest of the band's capacity for mischief. Bassist George Travis explains: "At our first practice, we tried to write epic music, but then just suddenly took the piss out of it and made it really catchy, fast and dancey. We were laughing for the whole practice, but then we realised this was the music we wanted to do." Indeed, in frantic beat-bombs like 'Romantic' and new single 'We Move', they've mined something that's as much informed by Bloc Party as At The Drive-In, sitting alongside bands like The Ghost Frequency and Butterfly Collective.
It's been a fast rise. Completed by guitarist Grant Coleman and drummer Nick Burdette, their first solo show in Brighton sold out on word of mouth alone. Within a year of forming, they'd been hand-picked to open the deified post-hardcore heroes Rival Schools on their reunion tour and summer has seem them become the toast of everywhere from The Camden Crawl to Latitude, exemplifying their odd crossover sound.
"It's different, but we all had such a good time doing it that after our first gig we were like, 'Let's do it next week' and the band was formed. Nobody wanted to leave it because it was just so... good." Well said. Words: Dan Martin.

*see pictures section for cutting of this feature. - NME

"We're masters of the band food game," boasts This City singer Chris Purr. "You take a band name and make a food-related pun so you get things like Rage Against The Cuisine, Tofu Fighters and Toast Of A Thousand. We'll be driving to a show and someone will invent a new one and we'll all go mad for the next hour trying to top it."
It's not exactly the kind of rip-roaring road tale you might expect from a band of young men who met at a tattoo convention, but then This City will happily admit, they're really a bunch of geeks at heart. Forming in Brighton almost three years ago and bonding through a shared love of Thursday and Hopesfall, Purr and guitarist Arran Day enlisted the help of bassist George Travis, guitarist Grant Coleman and a succession of sticksmen (including Architects singer Sam Carter) until recent recruit Nick Burdette made the drum stool his own. After initial flirtations with the conventional post-hardcore sound, a happy accident in rehearsal changed things forever.
"We were messing about and put a dance beat over the music for a laugh," explains Purr. "After about an hour we weren't laughing so much, realising we had hit upon something a bit different and stuck with it."
A steady schedule of touring has since taken the band up and down the country and seen them share stages with Sparta, Biffy Clyro and Rival Schools, building a fan base in preparation for their in-the-works debut album. With big dreams of "cracking America, being big in Japan and finding the perfect sound," tempered with the realistic expectancy of slugging it out for a while at grass roots level, only one question remains: what are This City in the food game?
"Oh, we're Crisp City," the singer laughs. "Probably good old-fashioned ready salted flavour, too. Everyone likes ready salted, right?" Words: David McLaughlin.

* See pictures section for cutting picture - Kerrang!