With Y Not Festival on the way, we catch up with Leeds newcomers Silverfish.
Words: Sam Taylor.
It's no secret to anyone that Leeds is a hotbed of new music. After meeting at a fresher's week flat party in the city, Silverfish quickly bonded, spending months working on a cache of songs. You'll struggle to find much of that online yet - it's very early days - but now, they're heading to Y Not Festival. Time for a catch-up with vocalist and guitarist Tom, eh?
Hi Tom! How's it going? What are you up to today?
Hey Dork! Yeah, it's going really well at the minute. We've all just been rehearsing for the last couple of weeks up in Leeds, ready for Y Not. Today we were trying out a sax for our live set and making some vlogs.
Introduce your band - who are you all, and what are your roles within the group?
The band's made up of Tom Gannon (guitar, vocals and synth), Ben Norton (bass, vocals and synth), Oscar H-J (guitar and sax) and last but not least, George Bolger (drums).
When did you first realise you wanted to make music, was there a moment you can pinpoint?
It was when I visited the Beatles museum in Liverpool when I was about 14. That really inspired me, seeing four normal guys take the world by storm, and I picked up a guitar pretty quick after that.
It actually turns out all of us decided to go to Leeds to study just because of the great music scene it's got going on at the minute, so we were all set on making a band straight away!
How did you approach finding your sound, did you go through a lot of experimentation?
Luckily for us, we all took gap years before uni, and so by the time we met each other, we'd all basically been doing our own writing for a whole year.
This kinda laid the foundations for us early on, and then it was just lots of rehearsals to blend each other's styles and to let each other add their own personalities to each other's songs.
