Wilt

After a successful tour in March with Sum 41, Wilt are about to head out on tour to promote their second album "My Medicine". Providing a snapshot of indie-rock in 2002 they're joined on the bill by headliners My Vitriol and providing more than able back-up in the support slot are Bristol rockers Halo. We caught up with Wilt's lead singer Cormac Battle to find out what they've been up to for the past 12 months.

Q: Until the recent tour with Sum 41 and your own headlining tour it seemed like you'd dissappeared off the face fo the planet. What have you been up to all this time?
A: We just went away and because the record company had faith in us they gave us the time to just go away and make a decent record. Once we had 11 songs ready we were like fuck it, thats cool lets go away and do an album, but the record company kept making us go away and write more songs and by the end of it we had about 30 songs. I think that worked out in the end because we have made an album which is substantially better than we would have, had our impatience ran out.
 

Q: And then, as we mentioned before, in March you made your assault on the public as the support slot for the Sum 41 tour. At the Manchester show it went really really well. Was the whole tour a major success?
A: It was amazing. We thought because were not as immediate as Sum 41 and were a lot older it might be hard to win fans over....but everynight we felt like we were headlining!!! A lot of the crowd were virgins and the tour wiped away a lot of cynicism.

The word emo was touted around recently and I don't find it insulting - but we do have an across the atlantic sort of sound. And if you're a journalist you have to give the public and idea of how something sounds and the easiest way to do that is place it in reference to something else.

The Nu-Metal think is just flavour of last month and people keep saying rock is back. A lot of the Nu-Metal stuff to me is boy bands with guitars and you still have to dig really deep to find decent music.
 

Q: "Take Me Home", the last single you released seemed so out of place in comparison to the rest of "My Medicine". Was it down to the band or the record company that you made this somewhat strange choice?
A: I didn't want to have that single, but we have a democratic process and I was out-voted. Its sounds To me it sounds the most un-singley song on the record, but I think the idea was to take a hardcore stance and bring out the most uncommercial song on the whole record.

The weird thing was we made a really cheap video and it got A-Listed on MTV2 and was played more than any of other videos. I was like shit, this isn't really what we sound like!!! I think with "Distortion" coming out next week it comes across that the album isn't just the same track 12 times over and hopefully represent the eclectic nature of "My Medicine".
 

Q: Didn't you record the last album for about £3000. It must have been a huge leap in a sense to go into a proper studio with Dave Enriga who'd produced albums by the likes of the Manics and Idlewild in the past?
A: The last one was like an extended demo, but were still keeping it real this time. We didn't just go out in plush studios...it certainly wasn't a holiday. Sometimes I think of producers as very fine studio engineers who make very very good demo's for you, they don't bring anything to the record for you.

But with Dave it just wasn't the case. He almost became like a fourth member for the record...a lot of time was spent talking about the songs rather than just saying lets do it and he played a lot of keyboards and added these old analogue sounds which gave us this extra dimension and a totally different view of ourselves. When it came to the end of the recording we realised that we needed an extra player to recreate the textures live and truly represent the albums and that's when we got Derren in with us.

Were a bit older than the bands around now and were bringing different influences into our music than a band who were just starting now would. I mean were all 80s indie kids and because we were about 18 or 19 when "Nevermind" came out, it was the bands previous to that that were are real influence.

I think were an indie band with bigger aspirations at the end of the day!!!

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For more info on the "My Medicine" album and the tour dates
www.wilt.ie
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