We sat down with our good friends Sons of Liberty while at Winters End the other weekend, catching up about their latest album and plans for the year. Check it out below!
How was the set?
Oh, it was great! We haven’t done anything since October last year. So we’d had a bit of downtime, we’d had a couple of rehearsals, but a big gig like Winters End is always a bit of a challenge! But, it was really cool! Kira Mac were super early with their soundcheck so we got loads of extra time to get more comfortable with what we were doing. We were at least an hour earlier than we should have been so we got to have a bit more time. And a shoutout to Rich Brinley of NWOCR who did our front of house sound tonight! Everybody’s reporting how great it sounded.
It’s been a couple of years since we last daw you and since you’ve had a lineup change, how’s that been?
Oh wow, that is a little while! So yeah, Russ has come onboard after the songs were already written, we’d demoed them up and we’d been in the studio a couple of times, the backing tracks were down. It was like “what the hell do we do now?”. So we sent a couple of mp3s to Russ on email and like an hour later two songs came back with some worked up backing vocal ideas. So the click was right there! We put him under a bit of pressure as we’d spent way more money recording than we really should have done. Originally Rob left, then Rob #2 was fronting the band for a little while but when he came to the studio that didn’t quite work out. So we thought okay, we’ve spent a lot of time… but Russ stepped up to the plate. Three or four days in the studio, after about 10 days doing demo versions. So we worked him really hard, but the reaction has been fantastic!
Yeah, the album seemed to go down really well!
Thank you! And live too, there’s a lift in the energy of the band. Yeah, he’s a bit younger than we are, not beating around the bush here! But he’s brought a challenge to the rest of us to lift our game a bit.
It did look like you were having fun up there!
Oh Christ yeah! And that’s absolutely what it’s about. We’re not gonna make one million pounds out of Sons of Liberty, but we are going to have a damn good time doing it! So as long as that comes across on the stage too, that’s wonderful!
And you played an unreleased track for an EP, right?
So when we recorded the album we had 13 songs recorded that were all treated exactly the same way. When it came to… vinyl is really challenging, like 44-minutes maximum. Once we worked out which songs would fit the vinyl we thought we should just go with the 11 songs on the CD and keep the other two back for future use. So for the October gigs that we played the two unreleased tracks we put out on a little EP and it’s gone really well! Six songs from the album, one from the EP, and it seemed to work pretty well!
I imagine there’s some writing going on still too, right?
Yeah, I mean Fred is prolific. He sends me stuff… after the week you can log in and there’s another message or track or riff idea that he’s come up with. That’s where most of the songs start. A couple have gone a little further with Russ doing some lyrics and vocal ideas, but we’ve not rehearsed or got together as a band. We’ve just been focused on making the most of what we’ve got in the can, so to speak!
Have you got quite a busy 2025 planned?
Yes! So kicking off late February until early May pretty much every other weekend we’re doing three or four gigs. It looks really cool as a tour poster! Couple of festivals in the summer. We’re playing A New Day which is a new one for us. It’s associated with Alford rock and blues. It’s quite eclectic, it’s more of a mini Glastonbury-type festival with lots of different types of music. But they’ve slotted us onto the bill! We played Alford last year and off the back of that we got the booking for this.
Then in the Autumn another run of gigs around the UK. So yeah, the diary for 2025 looks pretty damn good! I think we get to o to Scotland twice. We seem to have gathered quite the crowd up there having played the Winter Storm festival a couple of times. And that seems to ripple over onto your own gigs in Edinburgh or Glasgow! It’s nice that we’ve latched onto a few people there!
Do you have song you wish you could have written?
Most of us have pretty big classic rock histories. Freddie would probably say ‘Rock Bottom’, UFO. Me and Mark are more Blackfoot, so something like ‘The Highway Song’. Steve’s a bit strange because he likes his extreme metal stuff, or the operatic stuff, so he latched onto Nightwish and stuff like that. Russ, being a bit younger, he comes up with something a bit crazy. He loves his Bon Jovi, but loves to throw in a bit more of a pop thing.
Yeah, it seems like bands like to throw in a bit of a pop cover every so often!
Yeah well me and Freddie go back a long time playing in bands and we did the whole cover band thing. My approach was to take things like ‘Footloose’ and rock up the guitar riff a little bit and turn it into a rock song. It always went down well! The craziest thing we ever did was ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe but with kazoos doing the keyboard run!