Centauri Interview
Posted by Hunter on Tue, 05 Aug 2008.
Tomas Iliffe - Vocals
Charlie Lee - Guitar
Toby Pritchard - Drums
Tyler Raine - Guitar, vocals, programming
Rob Sharman - Bass
Formed March 2007
The weather is looking decidedly grey and miserable outside, and I’m sat in the “Orange Tree” waiting for Centauri to show. They’ve been a little hard to get hold of, but that’s not surprising since these guys hold down full time jobs as well as being part of a highly regarded up and coming band in Leicester. Waiting for people to poll up to meet at is not exactly a favourite past time, but thankfully they show up pretty much on time. They’re certainly friendly enough, but there’s a bit more about their attitude that suggests a seriousness to their music, professionalism. They sit down and make themselves comfortable and we start.
I’ve had a look over their Myspace, but there isn’t much of a biography there as such so I ask them to tell me about the band members, their musical background and their influences. Charlie and Toby met at the Access to music course at Leicester College a couple of years back, and the rest of the band fell into place after recommendations from friends. The line up was finalised in March 2007, where they played a fantastic set not long after at the Supersonicboom event in Willow Park, a gig that boasted around 800 in the audience. The band name itself comes from an 80’s movie, the title of which, “Flight of the Navigator”. I’m a little surprised and just want to check we’re thinking of the same movie, with the irritating kid and the equally annoying spaceship. There’s some embarrassed laughter (because owning up to watching that would be a thoroughly bad thing!) “AH, maybe not that one, but it did have Alpha Centauri in it!”. When they’re talking one thing that strikes you is how one of them will start a sentence, and another will finish it, and it comes as no surprise that 3 of them live together (apparently with a Polish neighbour who’s not fond of their living room being converted into a music practice room!).
One review of their music described it as:
'Every so often there are flashes of absolute genius in their material and the maturity of their writing is evident in the unashamedly poppy melodies and electronics - definitely no bad thing.' JH, Rockfood
But I wanted to know how they would describe it themselves, “Everyone asks that !! How do we describe it! Melodic heavy music”. It’s always tough to describe your own music, and worse being compared to other bands, but the one that prang to mind for Centauri was the recently successful “Enter Shikari”. It’s not a comparison that is literal, but it’s the closest they can come up with, “We use synths in a slightly different way, we try to layer them a bit more if that makes sense, and we don’t really do solos!”.
I wondered who wrote their songs, whether it’s an individual or team effort. “Tyler often does guitar parts first, we get them down and recorded, sound out a few people to get different opinions (always good to be objective!), and then the song will grow from there. We’re pretty democratic about it too, but listen to what each other thinks about it as we go on. We’ve also got a legend of a guy we’re working with who’s in a band called ‘Kyte’ (he’s out in Japan with them at the moment on tour!)”.
Some bands stagnate, but not Centauri, who have continued to grow and flourish. In their own words their music has become more mature, more technical, not just because their own musical abilities have improved, but their attitudes too. They’ve become more confident, and it shows in their live performances. At the moment there also putting together an ambitious CD with 8 songs on it at RPM on Mill Street, although there has been a slight delay with the sound engineer being away…..with “Kyte”. Apparently when they first started the recording somebody had proclaimed optimistically that it would only take 2 weeks at the most, they all start laughing “with the benefit of hindsight, 2 weeks was a bit inaccurate, especially as we’ve been doing it on and off for two months now!”.
When asked to highlight the best moment for the band so far, there’s a sharp intake of breath…”We’ve enjoyed every gig immensely and it’s hard to perhaps pin it down to just one moment. After every gig we play we get ‘tighter’ and grow in confidence”.
So what’s next for Centauri? “Well, we want to get the CD out there, that’s the priority, and then once that’s done, we’d like to gear up for a tour (buy a van for that) either as a headline or support”. For the time being that’s enough to be thinking about so beyond that it’s a question of them just seeing how things go in the meantime. However they did promise that if things took off they would develop their own web site as opposed to using Myspace, poking fun at my dislike for the social networking site!
Centauri are very modest, and are thankful to the people who support them, friends, family and fans alike, “Can we also say a big thank you to our Polish neighbour too, even though he keeps trying to kick our front door down?”