Last Stop China Town

'We’ve played at venues where the sound guy’s said, 'I didn’t know people still wrote music like that’!' declares Last Stop China Town’s guitarist and resident 'airhead' Robin who, fresh from the shower, is happily sat on the dirty floor of Camden’s Underworld.
Hailing from 'Indie Band Central' Northampton, the quintet, united by their obvious love for Metallica, also cite influences ranging from death metal to jazz fusion via Stevie Wonder, and claim to be 'the rock band' in town.
Named after one of their own songs the band signed to Woodhill Records last year and have since cut their teeth on the live circuit playing with Bullet For My Valentine and Breed 77 but, as Music News found out, they’re not planning to hang around in the support slot for long.

MN: So out of all the rock sub-genres where exactly do you sit?

Alon (vocalist): Well we have difficulty with that. Somebody very early on said that we were 'beautiful metal’ which we don’t know whether that necessarily says what we are.

Ollie (guitarist): I think we want to be taken seriously as a rock band but at the same time when we come on stage you can hear the vocals - you’ve got some harmonies but then you’ve got some good guitar riffs and catchy choruses.

Robin: We grew up listening to Metallica, Bon Jovi, Guns N’Roses, all stuff like that. We like a good chorus you can sing along to. We like our heavy riffs.

MN: Do you think you can be taken seriously as a rock band?

Alon: Absolutely, considering the response we’ve been getting. Our debut album came out in late July and people have liked it. We’ve had a tremendous response from people telling us there’s nothing else like us around at the moment, which to be honest, I don’t know whether there is.

Lewis (drummer): There are other metal bands obviously but not doing the same sort of thing we’re doing. There’s a lot of screaming bands and we don’t have that. He does a bit of growling occasionally. (To Alon) You’re a singer aren’t you?

Alon: I can’t scream! We make music we like first of all to please ourselves. Maybe it is a little bit self-indulgent. We love the duel stuff that Trivium and Bullet (For My Valentine) are doing. We do that as well but not because we’ve heard what they did to begin with, just because it suited us when we were writing stuff before 'Ascendancy’ and 'Poison’ came out. We take everything that we like and we make it our own and luckily people like it so far.

Ollie: People come up to us and say, 'oh we expected you to be a load of rubbish actually as most support bands are’. We’re like, 'yeah we know, we’re just going on trying to do our best’.

Ben (bassist): The comments we’re getting as well are they’ve never seen a support band who are so confident.

Robin: We’re not afraid to try and steal the show a little bit.

Alon: We don’t consider ourselves a support band.

MN: How did the dynamic change when you replaced your original female bassist to become an all male line-up?

Alon: When she was in the band it was really good, the fact that she got a lot of attention and it gave the band a lot of attention as well. It wasn’t ever meant to be a gimmick. It turned out we weren’t the right band for her. But when Ben joined the band everything just became so solid. We’re such good friends off the stage.

Robin: Living together on the bus for 14 nights, It would’ve been harder with a girl in the band, one girl on the bus with all those guys.

MN: How has the album been received?

Alon: Well there were two singles before the album. The first single was received really well. The second single ('Soldiers Of Fortune’) wasn’t received as warmly. It was a song based around 'The A-Team’. It was a bit of a dedication to them because we loved 'The A-Team’ when growing up. We had our tongues firmly placed in our cheeks but all these muso types didn’t get it. But then the album’s come out and had nothing but good stuff said about it. We’re really proud of it. If you want to see what the heart and soul’s really about on Last Stop China Town’s then you have to see us live.

MN: You must have had a lot of fun shooting 'The A-Team’ promo video,

Alon: It was awesome! Wet, hard, sweaty, mucky work. And cold, but fun.

Robin: I did look like a complete twat running round dressed up like as a soldier, though.

Lewis: He made the most camp-looking soldier in the world! He couldn’t help it.

Alon: He’s not got the most amount of meat on him, bless him. We were in these one-piece suit things and me and Ollie filled them out. His kneepads kept slipping down!

Robin: They’re just jealous really because all the young girl fans like me!

MN: As the favourite, can you deal with that attention?

Robin: Yeah, fine, but someone came up to me and said, 'I really want to have sex with your bum’!

Alon: Didn’t he say it to you in a Borat voice?

MN: You promote a family-friendly show but is there a dark side to Last Stop China Town?

Alon: It’s funny because this band is mostly based around our friendship. I’m an odd one as far as what you might expect out of a lead singer. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do any drugs, I’m vegetarian but I don’t preach.

Robin: I mean it’s good how we get on. Me and Lewis do drink and do drugs!

Alon: As far as the dark side goes, we’ve all known hardship. I feel like I’ve had a tormented past, I made a few bad decisions a few years ago which is why I’ve gone into the way that I live my life now. I’ve been in previous bands where we couldn’t get the line-up right and it was so frustrating. In my personal life I’ve had a few different ups and downs. At the moment I’m the happiest I’ve ever been but it’s still nice to dip into those emotions so I can put pen to paper. You’ll read some of the lyrics and go, 'oh dear, there’s been some pain there’ and it’s not contrived.

MN: Are you a songwriting unit?

Alon: I do about 90% of the lyrics. If I have writer’s block, then these guys will do it and vice versa.

Robin: You often get one named songwriter because of his ego more than anything else. It’s often the singer; singer’s tend to have massive egos and want to control everything. So we try and avoid that and all of us can bring whatever the hell we want to the table. Soppy love songs one day, death metal dirty riffs the next and we’ll try our best to make anything work.

MN: So is a headline tour coming soon?

Alon: Yeah. Every single promoter that we’ve played in front of has phoned up the agent within a day or two and said, 'those guys are awesome, we’d like to have them back’. We’ll probably end up doing between five and ten dates up and down all of the cities that really, really embraced us. We’re being submitted for all of the festivals in October, so fingers crossed for Download because that would just be awesome!


Debut album 'Vital Signs’ is out now.
Visit www.laststopchinatown.co.uk