A Quote by Dan Smith
When we started out in the U.K., there were songs that we made, we put them on the Internet, and we immediately started touring the U.K. We borrowed our friend's mum's car, and drove ourselves around for, like, a year playing gigs in pubs and tiny little venues. In that respect, we're pretty grass roots as a band. We've done all that together.
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Guitar gigs were everywhere in the '50s, and I started diddling around so I could keep working. Playing honky-tonk, simple stuff. I took a few gigs with an organ band that put me out front.
We were friends for a year before we started playing music together. We both think it's pretty important. Tyler's my friend before he's a guy in my band, and when we talk to each other about things, it comes from a friend standpoint, not just a business standpoint.
It was 2002, we all got guitars for Christmas and started playing in my garage that summer, rehearsed there and in a warehouse for a bit for about a year. We did our first gig in June 2003 and we played a few gigs in and around Sheffield for a bit then started doing gigs outside of Sheffield about this time last year, recording demos while all this was going on.
I consider us to be one of the first Internet-based bands, especially because we basically started our entire band via the Internet. Before MySpace Music even existed, we had a band MySpace page. We were one of the first fifty bands on PureVolume(.com), and we really built everything from the Internet. That's how we started talking to record labels, that's how we booked our first tours. Without the Internet social networking, like Twitter, we definitely wouldn't be where we are today. It is a huge part of the band.
I'd take out a joint and light it. First, just faking it. Then I started lighting live joints, passing them around to the band, you know. I was great, it relieved all my tensions. And I ended up with the greatest supply of grass ever. Other acts up and down the Strip heard about what I was doing - Little Anthony and the Imperials, people like that - and started sending me the best dope in the world. I never ran out.
I started playing music when I was around 10. I always wanted to be in a band, so I started out by playing drums.
When we first started touring, we were going to these towns we'd never otherwise go to, never otherwise see, and that's sort of why we like being in a band. But we started playing these bigger rooms and not even seeing the towns.
When I was first starting out, I drove myself around the country in my Honda Civic, playing anywhere that would have me. This is a chance to strip the songs down to their roots and let the audience hear them the way I write them.
I opened up my mind as far as playing music. I was at a Cody Chesnutt concert a few years ago, and a friend introduced me to him. We just started talking about music, and he asked me what I did. I said, "I have these songs and I'm kind of nervous to put them out, because I've just kind of been playing blues stuff, and playing other people's songs." He said, "You should just put them out there, man. Why not? It's just gonna bother you if you don't. The easiest thing to do is to just let it go." So I just took that with me.
I started Stripe with my brother John Collison while we were in school together. We first started off building iPhone apps together and using the money we made from them to pay our tuition.
So, it just seemed like it happened naturally. We nailed our live show to some extent in a year or about a year and a half, maybe just a year of playing songs pretty much around L.A. then we went and scheduled a mini-tour up-state on the West Coast and that's when the whole Rough Trade [Records] thing started happening and from there, things just happened so quick. It changed really quickly.
Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.
I started an all-girl band called Helen when I was 15. It wasn't a precocious thing to do - everyone we knew was in a band, and all the bars and pubs in Leeds put on nights.
In September 2012, I got the blues pretty bad, so I stopped playing for a little while. I started to renew my playing by the time February of 2013 came around. I would go up and rehearse to different songs, play stuff like Count Basie records, jazz or rap.
I remember when our first album came out. After one of our gigs, we went across the border to Mexico and the band in the bar where we were was doing covers of our songs. I don't think they understood a word they were singing but they did the songs perfectly.
I started using the Internet heavily right around the time when memes started to become their own form of entertainment. I started to get into every side of the Internet around 13-ish.
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