Introducing: Over The Wall

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We get sent a lot of music here at TLOBF Towers, as you might expect. Most of it, if we’re honest, is a bit rubbish… However, there are rare occassions when something truly great stops you in your tracks. And Over The Wall have done just that. A superb mix of clashing styles, there’s hints of TLOBF faves Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit (and yes, it might be because they’ve got Scottish accents), but there’s also an urgency and honesty to their music that’s rare in a band so new. Anyway, enough of my rabblings, here’s a bit about them…

For people out there that have never heard of you. Give us three reasons why they should…
1. We are really not cool.
2. The only contrived thing about Over the Wall is the euphoria, and the statements we make in stuff like this.
3. We are quite honest about everything, there are no fake accents or anything.

Can you recall the moment when you first decided you wanted to become a musician?
Gav: Listening to “Why Can’t This Be Love?” by Van Halen on my dad’s headphones when I was four. I couldn’t comprehend that loads of the sounds on the record were overdubs and synths and I could only see one guy making it all with a guitar like a magician. I had a little toy guitar that I used to make do the sounds of laser guns and explosions along to it.
Ben: It’s difficult because I started playing music before I wanted to be a musician. When I was a kid my mum forced me to have piano lessons at the house next door. I guess the moment when I decided I wanted to become a musician was probably whilst writing my first song and the feeling that I would like to write a few more an all. I had become a reasonable pianist by then but it was just something I had been doing for a long time and never really struck me as musicianship.

Where do your songs come from? What’s your inspiration?
Gav: Lyrically I think there’s a bit of a theme around being uncomfortable about getting older, that early twenties crisis that everyone has, and there’s a fear of death behind that. That’s what ‘Thurso’ is about, among others. We also hate the fact that we’re Thatcher’s children, where you get told from childhood that you should look out for number one, this hyper-individualism. We’ve sang about the Attlee government after the war, which was Thatcher’s antithesis, and whenever I sing about my home town that’s the idea in the background. It’s the obvious thing to be against when you’re consciously trying to make ‘euphoric’ music; a communal experience.
Ben: Musically it varies quite a lot. We generally just rip off everything we like then carefully camouflage it in the Over the Wall wrapping to avoid copyright infringement. That sounds terrible but there is some truth in it. There are only two of us and that can be seen as a limitation to the depth and possibility of our music. What usually transpires however is that we can swap about more. We don’t need a fixed instrumentation for what we do, so we don’t use one.

Name your Top 5 records.
Gav:
1. ‘Born To Run’ – Bruce Springsteen
2. ‘Nebraska’ – Bruce Springsteen
3. ‘The White Album’ – The Beatles
4. ’5150′ – Van Halen
5. ‘Screamadelica’ – Primal Scream.
I’m sure that’ll be a different 5 tomorrow.
Ben:
1. ‘Heartbreaker’ – Ryan Adams
2. ‘So’ – Peter Gabriel
3. ‘Lifted…..’ – Bright Eyes
4. ‘Bone Machine’ – Tom Waits
5. ‘Lycanthropy’ – Patrick Wolf

What was the first gig you ever played and was it a success?
Ben: Old Stereo in Glasgow. There were around thirty people there and we were performing under our own names as part of the Over the Wall collective before we rebranded ourselves. I’m not quite sure how good we were but we played for well over an hour with a repertoire of tunes that have since become largely redundant. In a way the songs we played then were much more diverse than what we do now. I would say it’s because we are better at writing songs now and have a better idea of what we are doing. There were some songs that were just pure noise, others were little ditties, but fundamentally the ideas behind most of that stuff is largely unchanged.

What one piece of criticism has stuck in your mind and was it justified?
Ben: I don’t think either of us are particularly overjoyed when someone tells us to get a drummer. I’m not very good at taking criticism so I could warble on about them not understanding what we’re all about but to honest it’s irrelevant. Quite a lot of people throw that at us and I wouldn’t say they are wrong – except my dad. I enjoy playing music with Gav and to introduce another person would have a far greater impact than merely on the sound of the music. It’s the whole dynamic of our little band that’s at stake.
Gav: I’m quite happy to tell anyone who criticises us that they’re wrong except Ben’s dad.

What one thing has caused you to waste your free time in the past 6 months?
Ben: It’s probably BBC iplayer. I’m totally hooked on the thing. Pretty much every evening I’ll watch something new. I particularly enjoy searching by category as oppose to channel. This has the added advantage of suiting a particular mood you may be in but without necessarily knowing the program in question. I began watching New Tricks starring Dennis Waterman and Amanda Redman in this very manner.
Gav: My efforts to witness any team in Scottish football better Rangers or Celtic are a vain waste.

If you weren’t making music, what do you think you’d be doing?
Gav: Spending a lot more time with my girlfriend. Getting physically fit. Apart from that life would be pretty much the same, we both still need day jobs unfortunately.
Ben: Maybe I’d learn how to make shoes. I had a 1/4 life crisis about a year ago and decided to become a shoe maker. I ordered this beautiful shoemaking book off the internet and went down to Timpsons to ask about any vacancies. I soon realised that making leather shoes would actually be extremely difficult and for many was a lifelong pursuit of perfection, so decided against it.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Gav. I worked as a labourer in a steel foundry for two summers in a row and although it was physically really hard nothing compares to the grind of a call centre.
Ben: My call centre adventure is probably up there with the best of the worst of them. I have never felt so hated in my life. Except for on 22 June 1986 in Mexico City when I inadvertantly turned the ball into Peter Shilton’s goal with my hand.

We’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice?
Over the Wall’s ‘Songs from particularly emotional parts of Cameron Crowe films’ mixtape
1. In Your Eyes – Peter Gabriel (from Say Anything)
2. Freefallin’ – Tom Petty (from Jerry Maguire)
3. Secret Garden – Bruce Springsteen (from Jerry Maguire)
4. Tiny Dancer – Elton John (from Almost Famous)
5. Come Pick Me Up – Ryan Adams (from Elizabethtown)

mp3:> Over The Wall: ‘A Grand Defeat’

Over The Wall on MySpace