This Sunday on MTV Music, Relentless Ultra presents Soundchain, an exclusive interview with Zane Lowe and Biffy Clyro that goes into the band's history, festivals, dropping out of school when they first got signed, Nirvana and Guns & Roses as inspirations and writing power ballads...
Here are a couple of the quotes. Firstly Biffy Clyro on how they got their name, and how it was the worst decision they ever made:
BEN
Okay, this is so far-fetched because the name is based upon something that never existed in the first place, so it was actually Simon, so Simon
SIMON
It was based on a Cliffy Biro. When I was at school with my friend Martin who used to drum in Areogram (great band, check them out, Soundchainers) and we were thinking up merch for weird bands and we thought, ah, Cliff Richard should have biro pens – Cliffy biros and then the spurious bit of my brain was like what about then Biffy Clyro – yeah! Then spent about a year going, “yeah, that’s so cool” and we changed our band name to it from Skrewfish, which was even worse. And literally it’s the biggest mistake we made was not changing that name before we released our first record – and this is from when we were 15 years old, so we had like a good 5 years to change the name of this band and we were so obstinate and sure of ourselves that we thought, no, if people are going to judge us on our name, they don’t deserve to listen to us.
On Inspirations:
SIMON
I think the first thing that made us want to play music when we were 12 or 13 was Nirvana and I think most people our ages that’s true and it kind of stems off the back of the 80s rock stuff like Guns’n’Roses, which I love, but you can’t play music like that, you know, unless you’re born for it on another planet, from a sex alien.
For us coming from a small town, and Nirvana were from a small town, and the songs were simple. And we just started making a racket basically at the boys’ house. The boys had a garage – we were your classic garage band. We did practise in a garage for years and it was Nirvana that made us kinda want to write music and then bands like Soundgarden that kind of showed us the sophistication you could have, I guess, cos before then it was very much a metal upbringing – certainly for me. I mean I was into Pantera and Slayer and Anthrax and if it wasn’t brittle I wasn’t interested…
And talking Power Ballads
ZANE
And you certainly learned how to write a power ballad?
SIMON
Well as it turns out I don’t know how. I don’t know how! Turns out I listened to too much Bon Jovi when I was 8, you know. Yeah, that’s awful, I’m a power balladeer, that’s terrible
JAMES
that’s not the expression we use
SIMON
Now I’m in a huff.
ZANE
There’s nothing wrong with a good power rock ballad.
SIMON
I think sometimes the slow songs come kind of easier – I know that sounds silly but when you’re listening, where it’s more about the lyrics and the song is about the emotional build, it’s easier to judge it sometimes and I guess probably I’d grown up on Guns’’n’Roses and even Weezer, Nirvana with ‘Polly’ (ZANE: yea not afraid, not afraid) and I think we always appreciated that – the brutality of some things but then with the delicacy of another song…
