With two critically acclaimed albums under their belt, a fourteen month support slot with AC/DC just wrapped up and their first British sell out crowd waiting just metre's away, you might expect Northern Irish blues rockers, The Answer, to be living with their heads up in the clouds. On the contrary. "Can I get you guys a beer?", utters Cormac Neeson, a frontman barely returned from warming up 90,000 strong crowds halfway through my chat with bassist Micky Waters, before laying down on a sofa in the corner. Despite a promising future ahead of them, they're keeping themselves grounded.
"We've just played some amazing shows. You wouldn't believe how good playing New Orleans was. But we still remember playing some of Europe's shady toilets. And Leicester [laughs], Jesus, we were getting dripped on all through the show and so was our equipment. We kept getting these shocks through the gig. That was worse than some of the bars back home."
How has playing with AC/DC affected your performances and how were the crowds, I ask? "It’s definitely helped us be better performers in front of big audiences. We’ve played big tours before, but that one was everyday for fourteen months. It wasn’t just like a festival in the summer or a couple of shows here and there. Full on, there you go. Get out in front of 90,000 people and play every night.
I have to admit, we’d heard all the horror stories that the support bands get bottles thrown at them and all the rest ‘cause their audience are very hardcore and just can’t wait to see them. They hadn’t toured for seven years at this point. But we actually got a pretty good response every night. It’s definitely been really good for us."
Not bad for an band with two albums then you'd think, but Waters soon makes clear how hard they've worked to get it. "We’ve been around for a long time as well. We’ve been round for about ten years, but properly touring for five/six years." Still, when asked who else they'd like to support, you can sense a tongue planted firmly in cheek when Cormac chips in from across the room, "Fuck that, headliners all the way!"
It's undeniable that The Answer first burst onto the scene with the acclaim of their debut album Rise.
"It was, quite a surprise for us, its success. All the material we’d written in the first three/four years. Yeah it did really well [in Japan.] Our first show out there was a sold out 2500, at a time when we were only doing 200 or 300 here so it was quite a shock.
With Everyday Demons, we were under a little bit of pressure to write a really good album and I think we wrote a better one. The songs are better and our performances are much better on Everyday Demons. But yeah, we put that pressure on ourselves anyway. I think we’ve got the raw power and energy of the band on Everyday Demons, which we just weren’t able to do on Rise."
For a band who are so deep seated in classic rock sound, it's surprising to hear some of their influences. "These boys like Helmet and Tool. All the grunge stuff as well. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden. Going back, we love The Rolling Stones, The Who, Free, bands like that. Basically all that, but mainly grunge" But there's no hiding they still enjoy the past more than the present musically. When asked the question of the moment, 'album of the decade', between them they rustled up a few names between them and the odd shrug of the shoulders. When decade was changed to 'ever', Neeson started an endless list. From the aforementioned grunge, to 50's blues, it's all there.
So, what does the future hold for a band who doesn't rest?
"We’ll do this tour and then take some time off over January and February and start gathering all the ideas we’ve had over the past 6 months. Put them together and start writing the album across January, February, March. Then do some tours in Europe and across America. Hopefully do the album sometime between May and September. It’d be great to get another album out by this time next year. We suspect we'll play the festivals too as we missed the season last year. I heard [Sonisphere’s] really good. We play a lot on the continent too."
For a band that's swelled so much in the past 3 years, it's encouraging to see they aren't showing signs of slowing down. It's going to be interesting to see what the future holds for a band who are bringing back the past.
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