We caught up with our good friends The Outlaw Orchestra ahead of their amazing 3rd stage headlining set at Call of the Wild Festival. Check out as we chatted about the scene, new music and their next five years!

P.S. I’d highly recommend watching the video if you get the chance, there were times where I just couldn’t type up the back and forth nicely!

How’ve the last few months been since we last chatted?

Terrible. Really bad. We went to try and get a bank account and they turned us down as a band. They said we don’t have enough information. Admittedly I [Dave] was a bit lax in putting forth my side of things. But the music, it’s been dragging along a bit but we’ve been so preoccupied with the bank that we’ve done nothing!

And what’s it like to be a part of this NWOCR scene at the minute?

It’s brilliant. I think they’re spearheading the world of rock within the UK. I think they’re going to take Download festival, Castle Donington to task, and it’ll be the ‘NWOCR festival; formerly known as Monsters of Rock/Download festival’. And because they’ve been so good to us over the years, I’m sure that when it comes to it they’re gonna go ‘Outlaw Orchestra, we’ll put them in the top three on Saturday night!’.

They’ve always been so damn good to us and they’re a bunch of super nice guys. We always have a great laugh on interview with them. Literally from day one. And they’ve got their next CD coming out and we’re on it! It’s super cool!

It definitely seems to have diversified a lot in its time too!

That’s always the case. If you start something and it grows you’ve gotta try and gather all the marbles as they fall out and it becomes bigger and becomes a bigger monster. But good on them, they’re soldiering on with it! It’s nice to be part of it!

What’s it like to be playing these sort of festivals?

Yeah, since day one we’ve made so many friends and all the people here come and watch us time and time again. We’ve got so many supporters. Even the festival bookers are so positive about the flavour we bring to the festival.

We’re hoping as we grow and we know more of the crowd, maybe some of them work for Starling Bank!

Are we working on new music?

Yeah we are! We’ve always got Outlaw ideas to record. We just went into a studio, Rogue Studios, right by Wembley Stadium. So that was super cool. They’d just worked with the guys from Megadeth and then us. It was a good studio!

If you are a musician you should work with different people, work at different studios. You get an engineer you’ve never met and they are not familiar with you. You get their take on it. You’ve just gotta hope that there’s a chemistry and if it works, bingo!

So we’ve got a few tracks down for a new album. Here’s a question though: Does a band drop an album, or does a band release singles? Now, I’m from the school that you drop an album, but the new kids on the block are telling me that you do singles and hold back say four tracks, and bring out a collective album. Maybe add a little bundle package with a T-shirt etc. I still like the idea of bringing out an album but you could then argue on what format. You say CD and all the kids out there today get confused. What’s the alternative? Vinyl? So we’ve chucked about six grand behind minidisc!

Have you guys got much planned for the rest of the year?

Busy year for festivals! It’s looking very good. We have another festival in West Sussex, and Rockin Ribs down near Summerset, and Maid in Stone Festival. That’s the site and plan that Ramblin’ Man used to be at, but is a completely separate festival. We managed to play Ramblin’ Man, back when we were supported by Foreigner and whatever…

Rockin Ribs is a great one. It’s a mega mega Americana festival. Cars, trucks, BBQs, monster trucks crushing cars and stuff. It’s the UK redneck central, it’s brilliant. They even have a wrestling ring! It’s super cool. Some serious beer drinking at that one!

Other than that we’re on later today, in the tent by the exit.

What can we expect from your set?

A few covers. Some Motorhead covers. Some Beatles. We’ll do ‘Come Together’ as I thought Tina Turner did the best version of that. We were going to do Private Dancer but Pete’s moves weren’t up to scratch! Always gotta chuck in some covers. We did a tour with Warner Hodges who played for Jason and the Scorchers, and he said to us ‘do three of your own and chuck in a cover’. Keeps the crowd happy and it works a charm. ‘Finally, I know this one!’ and all that. ‘I didn’t realise it was these guys who wrote Rocky Mountain Way!’.

But yeah, that’s what you can expect from us! We’ll go warm our fingers up and then go do some rock ‘n roll!

Do you have any plans for the next say five years?

I don’t think we’ve got a five day plan, have we?

I really wanna play Shepherds Bush Empire. We love that venue. Super cool. Brixton Academy too. The Oprey would be something special. The Roundhouse. You can get a support slot here and there and play some really cool venues. Then you know you can pull a good crowd!

Five year plan… you never look beyond where you are. You never know how it’s gonna go.

In five years I want to have gone into rehab about three times. I wanna get hugely fat and then rehab, rehab, then reform after all the court cases, lose all the weight… Different rehabs each time too, drugs, booze, then sex, which was how all the weight was lost. They lead from one to the other. Then come back looking terrible but reformed. Arrested a couple of times for trying to score dope in Times Square or something like that. Then the cover of Rolling Stone!

So that’s the plan for five years… desperation. The desperation tour. Tagline ‘The Car Crash that Nobody Wants to Look At’. And we’re gonna start tonight!