CityLife

Twisted Wheel turning into a real live force

STELLAR SUPPORT SLOTS: TW

CONFIDENCE is not a quality exclusively held by Manchester musicians, but they certainly know how to wield an unnatural amount of it.

It’s a quirk of the city’s musical lineage that Jonny Brown – frontman and motor-mouth of Oldham trio Twisted Wheel – is proud to continue.

An example, you say? Today, fresh from the shower, he’s happy to hold our interview in his dressing gown. 

“Manchester people can be quite in your face,” he says. “That can intimidate people. But there’s more soul and more truth in them – that’s the way it’s always gonna be.

“Confidence, going for it, being myself: those are my best and worst characteristics,” he says.

A similar sense of self-assurance is built into Twisted Wheel’s eponymous debut album, right from the opening bars of its first track, Lucy The Castle – a supernova rock song of Jam, Clash and Oasis influences. 
 

Dash

The song is, in many ways, the logical first 10-yard dash for a lad raised on live Led Zeppelin videos and The Beatles’ Help and Yellow Submarine movies.

“It was either that or the Wombles,” smiles Jonny. “I used to listen to them more than I’m letting on, actually.”

Whether it was George Harrison or Great Uncle Bulgaria that planted the seed is up for debate, then. But that early exposure to music and film turned Jonny onto the possibilities of being on stage when he was still in primary school.

“I was the only person that tried playing guitar until the last year of primary school, when Oasis came out,” he remembers.

“I went from the weirdo to the cool person teaching everyone Smoke On The Water.”

He met his band mates, Adam Clarke and Rick Lees, when he was about eight-years-old. “I used to follow Adam home and say, ‘Will you be in a band with me?’,” he confesses.

Ego

“And he used to say, ‘I’d t*** you if you were big enough’. I met him again at the first festival I ever went to and that’s when we became proper mates.”

A stint in a local band as the bass player eventually ended when Jonny felt his time had arrived to be the frontman: the ego had landed.

“I knew that I didn’t sing very well, but I could pull a few songs off in my bedroom. The problem was having the nerve to go out in front of people.

"I still get more nervous going back to The Railway in Greenfield (Oldham’s legendary inn known for its stellar list of star performances, and close to where Jonny grew up) than anywhere else.”

He started The Children with Rick, a band that established a huge following, supported Paul Weller and then called it a day when Jonny felt his songs didn’t fit anymore.


“I started jamming with Adam and Rick and we just wanted to rock out: just simple songs, fast and to the point.

Interpol

"At the time, there weren’t bands doing that: it was all Editors and Interpol, using lots of effects. We wanted to be the opposite of that.”

With punk music, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan soundtracking the sessions, they wrote a record in a week, attracted what Jonny now admits were ‘about 10 labels’ and signed a deal with the biggest – Columbia – within six months.


“We went from not knowing where our next gig was going to be to people taking us out for dinner in Manchester spending loads of money on us.

"They were telling us, ‘Your music’s great’, and we’d just written it in this little room.

“I was just blagging it, saying we had more material than we did at the time. You feel like the limelight will go off you if you don’t, so you just go for it.

“Signing with a major gets you out of a lot of ****. We’re at the bottom, but we’re competing with the big boys. And when you get it wrong, they’ve got the money to put it right.”

Producer

Get it wrong, though, is exactly what they did. Their first producer delivered a musical vision well wide of the mark (so far, in fact, that they opted to use an early demo of You Stole The Sun for its single release rather than the newly produced version).

Their second try with super producer Dave Sardy ‘in his studio in the hills of Hollywood’ proved more successful.

“Some people were against going to LA,” says Jonny, “but I’d been playing gigs in Manchester for six years. I wanted something different.”

It’s been ready to go since June 2008, but the timing hasn’t been right. Instead, they’ve earned their stripes on the road.

They’ve supported Kasabian, The Enemy, Oasis and The View and they play their biggest UK solo tour to date next month, including a Manchester show at the Academy 1 on May 16.

“You’re a bit like a travelling gypsy,” laughs Jonny. “But you’re respected, so you’re like a VIP gypsy.

The View

“When we were on tour with The View, all the gigs we played were absolutely terrible but we had the best time ever.

"My fantasy band would have Kyle Falconer (The View),” adds Jonny, who would also choose George Harrison, Jon Bonham and Paul Weller (‘on keys’).

“Although Kyle’s a maniac,” he laughs, “and I don’t know how he’d get on with Paul Weller. He’d probably be sick on his chinos.”

Their diligence is starting to pay off, with support slots at Oasis’ massive Heaton Park shows and Paul Weller’s forest tour this June.

Jonny says: When some little f***** says we’re s***, “That’s what’s the best thing to me, seeing my name on these bills with Oasis and Weller.” Jonny says.

“They like our music and they’re into good music, so they must know what they’re talking about. Liam’s constantly full of wisdom – tells me to have it, be myself.

“Noel said to me, ‘The longer you don’t know what you’re doing, the better’. All this is from the heart – if you start thinking about how all this works, you lose it.”

Twisted Wheel’s self-titled debut album is out now on Columbia. The band play the Academy 1 on Saturday, May 16 supported by The Answering Machine and support Oasis at Heaton Park from June 4-7 and Paul Weller at Delamere Forest on June 12.