[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]South-East Londoners Eastern Barbers - formed by multi-instrumentalist brothers Ross Fernandez and James - have just dropped their new single, ‘Blue Flakes’. The follow-up to ‘Milk’, it’s a rich, seductive take on the gentrification of the area they grew up in, and the complexities that come with growing up. Ross explains how their jazz-influenced pop came to be.
Hey Ross, what made you decide to start a band, then?
Well, we've been playing music together since we were pretty young. Our house has always been full of instruments, music teachers coming in and out and like books flying all over the living room haha. We mainly played classical ‘til we were about 10/11 and then we started a little jazz trio of me on piano, James on drums and our older bro on saxophone. We used to play functions, and little blues bars across the UK and in Europe and then I guess we just got to the age when we thought it wasn't really cool to be doing that anymore – especially cos all of our friends would just be out playing football instead. And we wanted to be playing more of the stuff that we were listening to, always trying to sneak in ‘jazzed' up versions of pop songs into our sets… We then both studied and moved abroad, spending a lot of time listening to a proper wide range of music and working out how best we could express our ideas. During this time, EB only really existed as like a WhatsApp message where we sent and stored ideas and recorded little tracks with whatever ‘equipment' we had lying around and then when we came back to London we started translating that into playing live!
Tell us about your new single, ‘Blue Flakes'?
I think sometimes it's a bit difficult to kind of pinpoint what songs are written about or what influenced them cos they are kind of written over a small period of time and give a snapshot into what was just going on then. I mean, we consciously tried to write a ‘happier' sounding song… if that helps? I was listening to The Shadows and a bit of bass-driven Outkast stuff and also Barış Manço, Turkish rock star from the 70s, so that influenced the sound a bit. But yeah, we wrote it off the back of ‘MILK' which is like this constant disillusionment and disengagement with things around us and we wanted to explore something more like dreamy and simple…like the feeling when you first get to somewhere on a night out, but your head is still kind of hungover from the day, it's a bit blurry at first, but then you feel it sort of escape you…
