Voodoo Vegas

Voodoo Vegas are one of the hottest bands around at the moment. Gigging continually, it seems, and just having released their debut album ‘The Rise of Jimmy Silver’ (reviewed here http://www.music-news.com/showreview.asp?H=Voodoo-Vegas&nReviewID=8891).
Vocalist Lawrence Case took a few minutes to answer some Q’s from Music-News.com 

M-N Can you introduce the band to us all? 
VV We’ve Nick and the lovely Meryl on guitar, Ash on bass and Matt on drums. I do the singing and I also dabble in a little bit of gob iron when the time is right!!

M-N As a band, you hail from Bournemouth. How did you get together in the first place? 
VV Many moons ago I answered an advert Nick put in the local paper for singer wanted, we played together for a few years under a different band name, then in 2006 Ash joined and we became Voodoo Vegas. We spent a good few years playing around the UK. Then in 2008 we decided we wanted a bigger sound and Meryl joined the band as our 2nd guitarist. We’ve played with quite a few drummers over the years but now we’ve got Matt Jolly on the drums, Jolly by name but not Jolly by nature! ;-)

M-N How would you describe your sound to anyone unlucky enough not to have heard it yet? 
VV Our sound is based around Classic Rock with elements of blues, heartfelt lyrics and musical hooks that get stuck in your head.

M-N You have touches of classic rock from all ages in your sound, what were your influences growing up and starting out? How did your distinctive sound come together? 
VV My biggest influence is Aerosmith, I love them and I think their sound influences me a lot in my song writing. We all like the classic bands like Ac/Dc and Guns ‘n’ Roses. I also think we’ve got some modern influences like The Answer and Black Stone Cherry. Plus the idea of writing a song that I can get the crowd singing along or nodding their head to really fuels me.
I’ve got no musical theory knowledge at all, all I know is what sounds good in my head, and luckily most of the time the people who see and hear Voodoo Vegas agree with the noises I hear in my head. I think the things I hear in my head work well with Nick, Ash and Meryl’s more musically trained ears when we write songs together.

M-N My colleague Claudia A caught you at the Camden Barfly and I am planning to come down to the show at the Zenith Bar in April. Are you happy playing these size of venues or do you think that your sound will translate to a larger hall? Are there any plans as yet? 
VV We’re happy playing anywhere, although saying that playing a packed out hall is always fun. I think our music translates anywhere, I honestly cant say a gig that we’ve played that the audience have not been into the band. We’ve played so many different places from a local village hall, to a sold out La Maroquinerie in Paris when we supported Fozzy. I think a big part of it is that we have a good time on stage, if the audience can see your enjoying yourself their gonna enjoy themselves.

M-N How do you feel that the world sees classic rockers such as yourselves? Is there a resurgence in the rock scene at the moment or are you in the vanguard for the new hard-rockers? 
VV I think the world see classic rockers like they always have, people who play loud music, I’m not sure if there is a huge interest for the non rock fans discovering new bands, they’re more interested in what rock tribute is playing at their local venue.
I would like to think die hard rock fans are always looking for new music, Ac/Dc, Aerosmith, Slash, all the awesome legendary bands wont be playing and writing forever and hopefully rock fans know that, that’s why new rock will always thrive in the rock scene, rock fans have a passion that I don’t think fans of other music genre’s have.

 M-N What is your fan base? Who do you appeal to? 
VV Our fan base comes from people of all ages, the really good thing about Voodoo Vegas’ music is that it connects to lots of different people, we can go and play anywhere and most of the people will like it..

 M-N You appealed to your fans for financing via Pledge Music?  I understand that the original request was oversubscribed enormously. How did that all come about? 
VV When we first started our campaign I remember talking to Meryl saying I didn’t know if we would hit our target, but amazingly we hit 100% of our target in 24 hours, by the end of the campaign we had hit an awesome 344% of our original target. It’s awesome to know the Voodoo Vegas fans have that much faith in us. Sometimes its hard to believe that just from us playing shows over the last few years we were able to raise the money we did to record the album.

M-N Was this to avoid the record label ‘stuff’? How do you feel about the state of the business at present? 
VV  We decided to run our pledge campaign after we had a bad experience with a management company, we wanted to take things into our own hands. Get a producer we wanted and fund the album ourselves.
This isn’t the case all the time but one thing I’ve learnt over the last few years about the music business is much like most of life, you gotta know the right people. If you don’t know the right people you gotta know someone who knows someone. And if that’s not the case you gotta go kicking some doors down with your music and get known by getting you name out there. We’ve built a stong fan base off the back off our live shows we played around the UK and Europe we didn’t have any help from anyone when we started. We would play for free just to play a support slot in front of a big audience.
One thing is for sure if you don’t have the talent and the ability to back you up when you get there from people who you know putting you there, you will come crashing down and people will see through you.

M-N The whole package for ‘Rise Of Jimmy Silver’ is brilliantly over the top. Was the whole thing down to the band? Did you have ideas for it as a package or are these songs that have evolved into the concept? 
VV  Jimmy Silver is the name of the first song we ever wrote. Jimmy is a character I made up in my head about a guy who just love’s to rock in his heart and in his soul. This album is The Rise Of Jimmy Silver, from the first song we wrote, to all the gigs we’ve played, to the amazing pledgemusic campaign we ran.
I think one of the reasons the album has had such positive reviews is because we’ve played these songs for years on the road, in many ways the songs were chosen by the audiences we played to. If a song got a good reception we kept playing it and working on it, if a song didn’t get much of a reaction we would end up dropping it.
That also goes with the whole Rise Of Jimmy Silver, all the gigs we played helped us get to the point of where we could record our album.
Also with the cover of the album I’m a huge comic book fan, and I get fed up of seeing album covers with the name of the band/album in a clever font or the band standing in shadow. I wanted something different and something that was Voodoo Vegas, and I think the Artists Jim Boswell really caught the whole Voodoo Vegas vibe.

M-N Thank you and good luck with the album. Hope to see you live in April