Thomas Needham interviews The People Assembly after their gig at The Big Difference in Leicester on 11/01/25.
“Can you walk us through the journey that led you to where you are today?”
Narborough Road –> Stayfree Music -> Pub–> Someone’s kitchen –> Narborough Road
Repeat for a decade or until a broadsheet newspaper calls you “chaotic excellence in songwriting that belies their years”
“How would you describe your creative process?, has it changed over time?”
Sometimes someone would bring in a song structure written on the back of something that was not paper. Now we simply watch the sounds bounce off the walls and the song comes together in mere moments. It’s an annoying form of magic. Collaboration is the sauce that binds the sandwich of music, it’s best to have a vague idea of what you want to achieve then watch your friends make it better while you cry about the original idea being blasphemed on. Often we’ll jam in a krautrock fashion then allow the melodic ideas to show themselves among the horrors, then you just put them in the tightest song structure possible to give the illusion that it’s actually a pop song you could show to your mum.
“What messages do you seek to convey through your art?, is there a particular artist(s) you look up to?, what are your influences outside of music?”
We would like everyone to witness this neverending kamikaze run that seems to never end or stop getting better, it’s extremely obvious we have wasted our youth, a lot of money we never had and all of our dignity – but the songs never stop getting better and our personal lives keep getting worse so we cannot stop out of morbid curiosity. More widely, imagine all the people, living life in peace but unironically – the communal experience of music should teach people to be nicer and less insular and more left wing and therefore based and good. It’s the oldest human art form for a reason. It has also been very cool over the past eight years having fresh faced youths telling us we had a part to play in them starting a band, sorry about that poisoned chalice youthes. Outside our music we enjoy the pub A LOT, cats and dogs, telly films, books and smoking inside rental properties.
“Do you feel comfortable being labelled as “post-space” / “noise rock” / “avant garde”, what do you consider yourself, should the industry move past prescribing genres?”
Joel Page quite likes being called Joel Page. Genres can be useful, apart from the fact absolutely nobody has given us a genre that makes any sense. It’s now time to turn off the irony glasses and turn on the serious glasses for paragraph time, Post Space is just a nonsense term we made up because everyone kept saying post-whatever all the time and we liked how it sounded, Noise rock kinda makes sense but that sounds more like Big Black or something nastier wheras we go all Robbie Williams stadium chorus at times. Avant Garde would probably be something like The Residents or something and makes us think of berets in a not cool way.
We honestly don’t care what anyone calls us as long as they call us. Post-Punk now refers to all music made in the past 47 years with a guitar, and almost all of it is bad. We barely listen to guitar music with the exceptions of Gillla Band, Tropical F#ck Storm, The Drones, Godspeed, Oh Sees and various hundreds of bands we have played with and like. I went to see Nick Cave last month and he was ridiculously good but old and completely incapable of defending a judo kick from Lewis “lankyland” Calvert. It is very boring when a lot of the UK’s scene is genre obsessive and being defined by a cabal of Steve-Lamacq-listening old men with no knowledge of anything that happened in music after The Fall. We cannot be genuinely expected to like Yard Act without consequence. However we would appreciate those same Steve Lamacq listening old men to continue buying our merchandise or our car will run out of petrol on the motorway.
P.S Steve Lamacq, you are a lovely chap, it’s your fans that are the problem with society.
P.P.S please play us on your show Steve Lamacq
“As artists do you feel burdened by a drive for perfectionism?, has this affected your work?”
We are burdened in a Christlike way by a need to make it not perfect. Perfection is lame. If we could have the loud cries of farmyard animals in every second of every song, we would do it – we just don’t have the livestock. We hate the way that live music audiences are accustomed to a “polished” live experience – the best gigs we have ever seen would give stadium rock bands trauma for life. Why on earth are people trying to replicate records live? That’s why you make records. So you can listen to them. You should be bouncing your guitar off people’s noggins and doing backflips during your 19 minute tuning break live regardless of genre, we want our jazz acts to yeet a bassoon through someone, mid-ballad. Stop caring. We want to vomit every time a band has a “slick” live show and soullessly run through the numbers night after night like a depressed amazon worker pissing in a bottle as he stacks crate after crate of other people’s toys. Play good songs wrong and differenter. Exist in a space with the people who came to see you and make it a fun and engaging experience with an element of risk and reward. Watching a show come toppling down and seeing if it rises from the ashes like a pigeon in a BBQ is the most exciting thing about live music.
“Have you ever disagreed over the creative direction of a project?, if so how have you reconciled this?”
We could violently disagree over the creative direction of left and right. The quest for “best song UK” often involves ruthlessly arguing with your best friends to a needlessly personal level over a minor guitar part in a generally inconsequential band in a completely inconsequential and indifferent universe that is indifferent to that guitar part, because it doesn’t exist yet (there’s too much treble though, seriously – sort it out) We find getting older and dealing with deep-rooted personal issues with therapy, mindfulness and taking a breath (that treble is f###### ridiculous mate, are you serious, are we serious?) and realising you’re in a room with your oldest friends threatening each other about treble helps, if that fails you can always kneecap each other – you run out of knees FAST though. We all have a little kiss every now and again and that helps bigly.
“You’ve been active for around eight years, in this time, do you think Leicester’s local music scene has improved? What more can be done to help bring attention to our city?”
Sure thing, and we haven’t got a chip on our shoulder about remaining at roughly the same popularity in that whole time, and I don’t know why you’d suggest that? They never knew about Van Goph in his lifetime either, he had to straight up die, boss. Nah, there’s loads of good bands and way less buttrock blues dad supremacy now. We were essentially trolling for the first three years and have now committed our lives to the bit when we realised it was excellent.
Leicester – we got the sauce. Aaron Brooks is the best new songwriter in the UK and we’ll die on that hill. They got the sauce. We got the MWM, Sauce. We got the Mouse Teeth, pure sauce. The Societys don’t really count because it’s the same guy who is already par-excellence. but sauce. We got loads of stuff that I can’t remember this very second and will regret when it comes out and people semi-jokingly ask why we didn’t shout them out. but we are forever pouring one out for our dead comrades Earls. Up the bloody Foxes me ode. Jamie Vardy, is upon the party. We have lots of opinions on how things could be improved but all work in local venues already so we will allow the children to forge the future of the Leicester People’s Republic Of Music (LPRC)
“Do you feel optimistic about the future? Whether that be regarding music, the band’s future projects/shows and the world we live in”.
In terms of music. Yes. We continue to be better every day. I have attached a graph to illustrate this point.
As for the state of music, it is impossible to not talk about the fact that it is completely financially unviable to tour or exist, especially as a six piece band. Soon everything you hear will be from Etonians who can gap yah their way through the music industry to sing about the summertime in their songs and take losses indefinitely or from an AI bot with the voice of Tom Macdonald (who already sounds AI generated, but in a more disturbing way as he is a human) talking about the summertime. This is good news for People Assembly fans as we have never been adverse to financial self harm, the issue this presents is that we could very possibly be destroyed at any moment, which is very familiar to anyone who has seen us live. This is because Britain made arts the reserve of people who don’t need it then separated itself from the main touring circuit of Europe because we are a largely stupid island of idiots who watch too much dad’s army and think Churchill was well cool. Doughnuts. This has nothing to do with us wasting all our money on booze and silly times. Alexa, play Bleak by Fruit band. We’re still gonna do it though, because we love it more than anything anyone has ever done in human history.
On a broader international front – we welcome the cleansing light of nuclear fire at this point. It would be a welcome relief from the inevitable rise of fascism brought on by the melts that make up the British public’s cap-toffing-racist-facebook-community-group-brain hivemind, the ongoing genocide we pay for with our tax and the exciting new development that the richest guy in the world must be the smartest guy so he is allowed to decide who da prime minister now even if that person is just oswald mosley with a new hairdo.
The plate of sexy feudalism ft. computers has been dished onto the table of life – and it tastes like dog. We quite like our cats though, so we keep chill for them. we’re really optimistic about the country and I am not forever googling “house price Catalonia” followed by the crushing memory that I spent all my money on pedals and petrol for the last eight years. Protest and do mutual aid kids, work a foodbank, find out what your neighbours need and get it and when the thing they need is for you to shout expletives at fascists, do it -it’s well cool.
In terms of People Assembly stuff though, we will harmonize a sick pinch harmonic with the Jericho Trumpet sounding through your street. We will continue to release music and tour every single venue that hasn’t put us on the naughty list and hope to pull off drinking 12x your fee then running away like the bit in The Blues Brothers (1980). We will probably do this until our hearts give out or we die in a shootout with TV licencing.
We have a 4 track E.P due very very soon and another three tracks we just done-did yesterday ready to shoot into the abyss. It is ludicrously good and we are in love with the songs and we simply hope more than one Swedish man will fall in love with them also.
I have attached a Graph of the People Assembly’s live show attendee demographics achieved through machine learning to better understand our upward trajectory and inevitable stardom.
“How do you feel your latest gig at The Big Difference went? Is there anything you would change with hindsight?”
We would have made the 27 people who didn’t show up therefore not granting us the privilege of a sellout rounded up and forced to attend for their own cultural good. We would have given little kisses to everyone who did show up and we would also have not allowed entry to our friend Lewis “LankyLand” Calvert because he Judo kicked People Assembly frontman Joel Page square in the stomach in the middle of a song during a “nearly” sold out gig because he watches too much wrestling and can only view life through the lens of wrestlemania.
“Your gigs are notorious for their loudness and propensity to descend into mosh pits, what are some of your best/worst memories from your live sets?”
We are extremely concerned that people believe our gigs are “ridiculously loud” and “my son’s crying” – they often threaten us with terrible things because we have destroyed the venue’s grouting and/or people’s hearing. Either all bands are too quiet or something has gone very wrong in our brains and lobes. We believe the kids are wrong. I have attached a formula from maths to simplify this equation:
Loud = Good
Quiet = What are you hiding in your weasel-like tones?
Recently our friend from Earls from the past, Anthony Lamb attempted to question this equation in a philosophical manner and was defeated in the mind dojo because maths is always right.
Worst memories include forgetting to go to Sheffield that one time, uh, getting smashed in the face with a headstock so hard it made a decent Picasso out of my blood, loads of our terrible broken kit just not working until we start crying in front of the audience (usually sold out). Breaking Lou’s ankles playing on stage dodgeball with a plugged in guitar body filled with nails that we made for comedy purposes. We played the next room over from a wake recently, I doubt we cheered them up and we probably vibrated their sadness cake off the table. All of these would be bad memories if they were not extremely funny.
The best gig memories are every gig we have ever played but most of all the gig the reader of this didn’t attend. We wouldn’t change it for the world, refer to the earlier excellence chart. Give us every gig and we’ll line em up and drop em. Ramming up our stage at Dot To Dot this year was a triumph.
“What do you think of when you’re in front of an audience?”
“arrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
“What do you think it is about your band in particular that draws such a passionate, loyal audience?”
We have been pointlessly contrarian for no reason for the better part of ten years, we basically formed because we were pretentious teenagers who absolutely hated landfill indie because we thought guitars should be wronger for some reason. That hasn’t even been a thing for ages so the whole thing is moot. The floral shirts are gone and bought houses and all we are left with is bitterness, eight years in the wheelie bin and pretentious adulthood (which is even sadder) we did however somehow end up with some admittedly great songs we made by mistake, again – if we quit, it’s so joever.
The people who are extremely dedicated to anything we do remind us of ourselves about the bands we loved when we were mere youths with no chips at all on our shoulder and we adore them very much. I think the appeal of us and loads of other bands is that it is so much more exciting being a fan of tiny bands and watching them grow like those little aliens in tubes you could buy from bossman in the 2000s rather than paying £290 to watch a fully grown alien outside a tube in a stadium through a telescope. We love our fans and they rock bigly. Smooch.
“What is your advice to smaller bands or artists coming up in Leicester?”
Just be excellent. JBE. Don’t make bad Oasis music. Get freaky with it, put a ringmod on the vocal beyond the range of human hearing and flip the bird at the nearest dog. If you wouldn’t listen to your own song on a gitmo style loop for 24hrs at a time – put it in a bin and leave it there forever and ever. Love your own music and make it for yourselves and yourselves only. Literally nothing else matters. Probably learn to hit the griddy so you can dance on a Chinese app if you want money from music. Have obscenely rich parents with monocles and a timeshare in the Maldives.
On a realsie though – Just love it and experiment as much as possible as often as possible and if you’re not dancing around the studio basement in joy or crying in the corner abandon it and keep writing until you do. Keep moving and always have something on the horizon or the loss of momentum will kill you, like a shark. we are clearly not experts but the key rule is always:
Do what you love and everything else falls into place.
“Looking ahead: what are your plans for 2025?”
We continue to ride the highway of rock to its logical conclusion, but harder than ever before.
We adore playing music and would crucify ourselves for the chance to play in Bognor Regis Butlins or any community hall currently available. We do this because we feel music is an absolute necessity in our lives and emotional wellbeing, without it we may go to the Bradgate unit with serious problems.
We will continue to play at every place with a 3 pin electrical outlet until the sun gives out and we’ve got adapters if someone wants us to play somewhere else on earth. We believe you need to adore the songs you play and try to pole vault every hurdle the ol’ end stage capitalism throws up with absolutely no grace or decorum.
If there is one person in the crowd – play until you bleed out or wee yourself and hope they enjoy it and start a band to keep the ecosystem alive.
As our significantly more talented, influential and brilliant late friend Ruth Miller said:
“Don’t Bother About What People Think,
Start Later And Have Fun
Challenge The Prissy Global Music Business
Make Your Own Songs
Play Local To Save Energy
We Did It, So Can You”
And as Ian Redhead of Stayfree Music said about us many years ago
“That shit should be Illegal”
Linktree:
https://linktr.ee/ThePeopleAssembly
Upcoming Shows. Follow @the_people_assembly on instagram for lots more
1st March – Bodega, Nottingham
8th March – Next Door, Islington
5th April – Adelphi, Hull
21st June – Queens, Bridlington