Friday 22 November 2013

Treetop Flyers play Manchester's Night/Day Cafe

TREETOP FLYERS - Night/Day Cafe, Manchester - 15th November 2013

 Country/folk/rock band Treetop Flyers have been playing together in various formats for a couple of years, and won the Glastonbury Festival Award for Emerging Talent in 2011, releasing their debut album “The Mountain Moves” earlier this year. 

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I meet lead-singer Reid, guitarist Sam and drummer Tomer drinking beer on the saggy sofas of Manchester’s Night/Day Café’s dressing room, where tonight they’re playing one of the last shows of their headliner UK tour, having wrapped up Bristol and London gigs earlier this week.


After having to part with their old bass-player over the last month, they say that their performances feel different, yet in ways better than ever before. “I think we’re a lot more relaxed now,” says Reid, “We had a gig in London the other day and someone said “That was the best you’ve ever sounded”, and we feel like a different unit and a lot better.”

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Sam describes a growth in audiences, and a warmer reception compared to previous tours. “We’ve seen at this tour a slight lift; we’ve had more people at our gigs. When you do sound check and it’s an empty room, it’s like oh God, what’s going to happen. We’ve done enough empty rooms in our time. It was a scramble to get everybody ready for this tour, but the music feels brilliant, and so we are actually really grateful just to play, it’s all just been a tremendous experience.”

They tell me how they met: an amalgamation of various London bands. “Mine and Tomer’s band fell apart, so as we’d known Sam for years we started to get everyone in a room with [bassist] Laurie as well, purely just to have a laugh,” Reid explains, “and I think deep down we knew that it would work.”


Sam interrupts, “Reid always had an idea that him and myself would play together. I didn’t really realise that, I thought we’d just get drunk together,” he jokes. “But when we got into rehearsals and messed around, we quite quickly realised that we could all bring something to the table and the music could be born. It was like a reinvention for all of us, coming together.”

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Over the last few years, a lot of writing together, a lot of intense touring, has led to an intensity comparable to an actual relationship. The writing process for their first album, “The Mountain Moves”, has consisted of a lot of fighting, and a lot of painful honestly.

“It’s like when you have a girlfriend and you have an argument, and you have to take a few days to make it up to her,” Reid tells me. “It’s like having four girlfriends.”

I ask about something I’m always intrigued with regarding bands – as much as it’s a relationship, do they see their project as a business too? And does this business have ethics?

Tomer says that this is something they consider more and more now. “Sometimes you don’t really have a choice, you know, which is unfortunate. I think you have to compromise in order to get anywhere in life in general, but there are definitely things we wouldn’t do.”


“The argument sinks with doing adverts and stuff like that," says Sam, "That is quite a different landscape than it was when you dream of being in a band. Five or ten years ago it wasn’t very cool to do an advert. But if you’re on the inside and you look at how business works, there’s very limited options to make money but also have that kind of exposure. A good example is The Lumineers. Do the ad, take the money off the devil, and then all of a sudden you’ll be playing two thousand capacity gigs around the world – you’ve got to do what you can to get past a certain level. “

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Tomer explains that an old band of his, in the States, went through that same ethical dilemma. “Our singer wanted to turn down a chance to be on an ad campaign for Coors Light,” he says. “They were going to put a free download on a billion bottle caps. A billion. And some of the bands that were involved were big bands, and they asked us to be involved with it. He didn’t want to do it – he said, ethically speaking, that he didn’t want to be involved with Coors because they had something to do with the Nazis in World War Two. I think it depends on your personal ethics.”

I ask what these ethics are – to them, personally, and where they would draw the line. “I wouldn’t want to endorse politicians,” says Tomer. “I feel like it’s a bad place to get involved – I see when bands get upset when politicians use their music in their campaign, Reagan did it in the 80s with [Springsteen’s] “Born in the USA”. That song is actually a massive criticism of power in the United States and politics. I know that Springsteen wasn’t very happy about it.”

“We could re-write “Things Will Change”, and it could be “Things Won’t Change,” says Sam.

They throw about names of musicians they think have successfully walked the line between channelling a political message without it becoming cheap – Woodie Guthrie, and the Beatles’ “Blackbird”. “It’s clearly a civil rights song, but you can listen to it and it just sounds like a song about a caged bird,” says Tomer. “Many great songs reflect on the troubles that people come into in life, I think that’s the best way you can delve into people. Music is about reflecting on life.”

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And it always come back to heartbreak, Reid says, that is the most powerful force behind their music, and, decidedly, the majority of pop songs. “It’s really intense. You can’t lie about it. When you feel it, the world just disappears around you. It can hit you really hard. It’s the purest emotion you can ever feel.”

“All of us combined have lost so much in the last couple of years,” adds Sam. “I think the band is a big part of the longevity. We’ve lost girlfriends and family members and lots of things but we’re all still here, looking at the same ugly people.”

The loss of Reid’s father played a large part in the creation of “The Mountain Moves” – his ashes were actually used as an instrument on one track. “I remember telling the producer and he was like, that’s so fucking cool, good idea, he said to me, you’ve got to do that. We never forgot it, we put it really high in the mix.”


It's an emotional experience watching them play that night, with all these things still fresh on the mind: their live set is so tight that it's hard to believe they've recently replaced their bass player. With the Mumford hiatus going on, I'm sure it won't be long until critics are putting hype around risingly successful folk bands like this, but I'm keen to forget that and see them for what they are - clearly very close friends, smart guys, making music that is full of heart.

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You can check out more of Treetop Flyers here 
Photos from Rachael Farrington.

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