Mouses Cover Story

Teesside’s irregularly named ‘Mouses’ have been crawling around the local scenes of the North East for very little time, but as a band that only began with the year 2014, their D.I.Y., Lo-Fi sound has managed to gather up a lot of active experience in the young year of their birth. Regularly slotted gigs, radio airtime and a 5 track E.P. (not to mention their soon-to-be-released music video) are all things that new bands expect to only begin having a year or so down the line, but somehow these two and their stripped back, grungy sound have found ways to get noticed in less than half the time.

I got to sit down with the bands two members Ste Bardgett and Nathan Duff on a Sunday morning after perhaps their biggest slot yet at Teesside’s own Stockton calling, to talk about the success of their unique sound.

“It’s kind of like a cross between distorted lo-fi and early 90’s punk rock,” Ste explained with certainty - almost as though the band’s irregular distortions had been asked of an explanation a lot in its young life. “A cross between Weezer and distorted noise.”

With the bands newly found experience, their approach towards all aspects of work are what he believes may have led to its success. So much so that it managed to get them a slot over in one of Newcastle’s biggest Indie festivals.

“We’ve got a slot at Evolution Emerging this year and I was talking to someone in one of the bands that played yesterday that have been playing for a couple of years and they were saying ‘how did you manage to get that? We’ve been trying to get it for the past two years.’ We sent a track in and there was like 600 tracks that they had to listen through and they picked 40 to play out of that and we got in.”

Still seeming baffled by the thought of getting on to such a festival, Ste attempts to explain what the thought may have been for the those who were to decide Mouses should make it more than hundreds of others:

“I think if you were the person who had to listen to those 600 tracks I feel like our sound would stand out just because it sounds so different to how a recording should sound. It would probably stand out because it’s the only one that’s so distorted and badly recorded. When they’d get to our track; whether it’s for a good reason or a bad reason, it would stand out.”

It seems obvious that Mouses members have formed the band on the premise that the sound would be approached in this way. Both Ste and Nathan have a lot of experience not only with the playing of their instruments, but have also been able to use production experience and apply that to the recording of their sound. Taking a very D.I.Y. approach to the making of their E.P.; recording each instrument in a rehearsal room with one microphone wouldn’t be expected to find its way into sounding like it would truly capture a bands performance, with Mouses though, it undeniably works.

And as you could imagine, the benefits of knowing and being able to tackle every task you would need go through to get noticed has great benefits for a new band.

“It’s good being able to record really easily. We don’t think about having to pay to go into a studio. We can just record what we have straight away. “ Ste explains, being able to look at how quickly they brought out their E.P. ”A year from now, if we have about 50 songs then we just let the good ones progress to be released.”

            Nathan follows that by clueing me in to another, more simplistic reason that they’ve been able to do so much in so little time: “It’s easy rehearsing too, because there’s only two of us, so it doesn’t seem to take long to write the songs.”

            With this, Ste explains to us how the work they put in eventually leads to much more work in the long term. “Yeah, I just need to stop writing so many songs. It seems like we’re behind the actual releases. We’re already starting to play and write new things but we haven’t even released the first [songs] properly. So that’s going to be another month and then the new songs we wrote a month ago will be a few months after that but we’ve already played them a lot.”

            This approach to D.I.Y. doesn’t only apply to their making of the music. The amount of gigs they’ve been receiving recently is a lot to do with them also. They’re being proactive when it comes to booking themselves and advertising their name around and that is a thing that has led to many opportunies as much as their sound has.

“We want other people to listen to it, because we get a buzz of that. If people are going to your gigs and liking it then obviously you’d be happy to see that they’re enjoying your music but we’re not making it to get noticed, it’s just nice when we do.”

It seems that at the moment, starting out the band are going through the regular cycle. Write, Rehearse, Perform, Repeat. And with so much focus already applied by both of the band members, it’s not a surprise that they’ve gotten so many opportunities as their reward. With new material not far away and new gigs less so, the bands efforts seem to work as a testament of what you can achieve in a short amount of time. When you are focused on what you want and you know how to get it, the opportunities are there for you to take.