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23 October 2023

Every Monday I will be bringing you an interview with an unsigned music artist. This week, I caught up with Newcastle band Dead Romance Club to find out more…

Who is in the band, how did you meet, where are you from and how did you come up with the name?
We’re a four-piece band with Jax on vocals and rhythm guitar, Adam on drums, Marcos on bass, and Sam on lead guitar. Jax and Adam are local to the toon, but Sam is a scouser, and Marcos is either from Greece or Hull (he’s very vague about where he’s from in Greece, and spends a lot of time in Hull, so we think he’s really from Hull).

The band has been through enough members to fill the roster of 10 different bands, but this is the most longrunning and stable roster the band has seen. Jax and Marcos are the two members from the original lineup, and they started in 2019. Any progress from the band was hindered pretty severely by the pandemic so lots of time was spent writing songs and preparing for gigs once venues opened up again. Adam joined the band a few years afterwards, and brought his spark of creativity to the songs, reigned in the bits that didn’t quite work, and polished what did. After another year or so the band found themselves looking for a new lead guitarist, so they posted an ad on JoinMyBand, and after a nervewracking audition in November of 2021 Sam was made a member.

The band was originally called something along the lines of Dead Romance, and the drummer prior to Adam (named Adrian) was discussing if they could improve the name with Jax. Adrian suggested that adding a Club would improve the name, thinking along the lines of Mötley Crüe. And so they changed the name! Sam and Adam can’t really take much credit here, as they joined when the band was already named.

Who were your musical influences when you were growing up and who are your influences now?
Some of the commonly shared influences among the band include Alter Bridge, Guns N’ Roses, Slash, Mötley Crüe, Metallica, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC. Effectively we’ll collectively listen to anything with a distorted guitar and hard hitting drums.

Sam was a big fan of Dimebag Darrell’s guitar work growing up, so used to listen to a lot of Pantera, but also liked Avenged Sevenfold, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Sour, Slipknot and System of a Down. I’m sure there were many more. He finds his musical influences have varied quite a lot. When he got his first car at 19, his only CDs in the car were Taylor Swift and Michael Bublé (and it wasn’t even the Christmas album!). He does appreciate any catchy music, not just raw talent. But later on he went into a big Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan phase, which inevitably led to inspiring him to play more guitar. These are still the influences that impact him most to this day.

How would you describe your sound?
We’ll let you know when we figure it out 😉

But seriously, we’re hard rock bordering on metal. We’re not as heavy as Metallica, but we’re not as hard rock as AC/DC. Some of our earlier songs (such as Conflicted in Faith) were pretty heavy, and we have one more in our set called Lies that’s equally as heavy, but for the most part we’re light hearted hard rock.

What is your latest release called and what was the influence behind it?
Our latest release is our self titled EP. The lead track on there is named Breathe which is a ballad-esque song which combines clean verses with hard hitting distorted choruses. The lyrics follow the story of a person experiencing a breakup, and feeling the tsunami of emotion crash over them. After we finished recording, the producer suggested adding a solo behind the last chorus. So Sam rocked up with no idea what he was going to play, improvised some stuff around a minor pentatonic scale, and it came out absolutely phenomenal. There’s something about a solo that just punches so much harder when it’s behind a chorus with lyrics over the top.

What’s your local music scene like?
Newcastle has an amazing music scene! We’ve played our fair share of venues over the last year. A huge shoutout to Trillians Rock Bar, which always seems to have time and a platform for local artists. But also Little Buildings is absolutely instrumental in giving new bands a platform and helping them get their feet off the ground. A little further afield we’ve always played the NE Volume Music Bar in Stockton-on-Tees, those guys are also absolute heroes of the scene, they’ve reviewed our releases and put us on a lineup knowing full well that we’re unlikely to pull huge crowds that far away from Newcastle. We love playing all of these venues, and can’t offer enough of our gratitude to everyone that has a platform for music in the North East.

What do you have planned for the next 12 months?
We’re playing Trillians in Newcastle on 5th and 16th December 2023. We’re also playing Heaven & Hell Fest on 27th January 2024 in Rotherham at The Bridge Inn/The Hive (our set time is at 3:30pm for that one so if you’re coming down try not to be late!).

Our plan is to get out and about around the country more next year, we spent lots of time playing in Newcastle this year which is awesome, but now we want to make sure people everywhere are hearing the music we’re putting out.

Is there anyone you’d love to collaborate with?
We just played with Bastyon, Fires of Freya, and Gwailo at our EP launch. All of those bands are quite close friends of Dead Romance Club, and we love the music that they all put out.

Outside of the bands we’ve already played with, we’d love to tour with Building Giants who come from Preston, and we’d also like to split the bill with Crowley at some point. We’ve not actually spoken to either of these bands about this yet… so hey if you’re reading and want to make this happen, hit us up!

Any funny stories surrounding your live performances?
Our second gig was at Anarchy Brewery, and we were supporting an AC/DC tribute band called UK/DC. It’s pretty unheard of to have a support band do originals before a tribute band, so we struck absolute gold with this. It’s way easier to sell tickets to an AC/DC tribute band than it is a full originals gig.

So we go on, we play our set, Sam has a nightmare with the clean and distorted channels being set at different volumes as we’d only done a line check and hadn’t had time for a full sound check. We can see the sound guy in the background of a brewery with at least 200 people in there just going absolutely nuts. Anyway, smooth operator Marcos the bassman has been killing it all set, and clearly his bass solo interlude worked some magic because it turned out one of the other band member’s mothers seemed to like what she saw. None of us really knew how to react, we were just so awkward. We were probably all petrified they were going to make the crowd turn on us. But the dudes from UK/DC were really chilled, and no one said anything to make him feel too awkward… maybe they just never heard?
(If you’re reading this UK/DC, sorry I’m not actually sure whose mum it was!)

What is the one thing that you want readers to know about you?
We genuinely are thankful to everyone that’s supported us in any way. We’re under no illusions about the size of us as a band, we’re growing but we’re still local to our scene. So thank you to every last one of you that has shared a post, bought merch, recommended us to a friend, or just offered any words of encouragement. Without people like you, there is no new music.

You can find out more about Dead Romance Club via Apple Music, Facebook, Instagram, Linktree, SoundCloud, Spotify, TikTok, X (Twitter) or YouTube.