A Chat With Nothing Rhymes With Orange; Goodbye Devizes, or Chow For Now?!

Devizes-own indie-pop-punk youth sensation Nothing Rhymes With Orange smashed the Exchange on Friday as a farewell to their local fanbase. They pursue a music course together at Bristol Uni; but is this goodbye forever, or just Chow for Now? (there’s a pun there, but only for ardent fans!) I met them at their rehearsal the day before to ask this, chat about their past, prospects, breakfast cereal intake, and Jennifer Aniston….

If you noted new songs on Saturday, why one was named Jennifer, if you observed the song Manipulation, once used as an encore, was pushed to the middle of the set, or if you’re generally wondering how they’ll cope living and studying together in one house, all will be answered!

Background first. A couple of years is all it’s taken Nothing Rhymes With Orange to build a phenomenon locally, the likes I once compared to The Hoax thirty years ago. I quoted myself to nightclub owner Ian James, who agreed, reminiscing about the Hoax playing Jools Holland’s show. They may not have reached that level yet, but this present conjunction is the make-or-break period. Many school bands fold here, as life takes them in different directions. Ergo, key to gauging their thoughts is to cast their minds to the beginning and discover how close knit they are.

So once we established the original lineup of frontman Elijah Easton, guitarist Fin Anderson-Farquhar, drummer Lui Venables, and bassist Ivor Ritson formed NRWO at Devizes school, Ritson being replaced by Sam Briggs soon after, I wondered if they were friends beforehand. “We all knew ‘of’ each other,” Sam and Lui confirmed, “kind of knew each other separately from Lavington,” Fin added. “But then we didn’t talk to each other!” Sam completed. Elijah agreed, stating he’d known Lui since about twelve years old, “but we didn’t speak until I was about sixteen,” when they both joined another band.

Sam brought it to present day, “if you’d have asked us at the start, like five years ago, if you’d all be living in the same flat together….” Which bought a round of laughs, I believe Lui bantered about Sam. “I would have been like, what are you talking about?!” Sam completed.  Youngest in the band, Fin, reminisced, “me and Sam used to play in a band together, when I was in year 7 and he was in year 9,” then added “narcolepsy!” I’m uncertain if that’s the name of the band, or if he suffers sleep disorder!

They’re venturing to Bristol to study the same music course, residing at the same residence. Sam pointed out last year ago that’s the furthest they’d gigged. “This year we’ve done everywhere compared to last year.” Story checks out, alongside many festival bookings, they also made first steps in London, “yeah, Camden in two weeks,” Sam replied. But when they get there, and people don’t know them, how does it compare to being in Devizes with fans singing back to them? And which do they prefer?

As harmonious as they perform, they agreed they love playing both, Elijah complementing, “when you go to these places and then you see people enjoying your music as well, that’s a whole other experience.”

Sam exampled a gig at Bath’s Komedia, balancing the two, “that was half and half. Some people at the front who knew us. But then there was about 500 other people, which was mental!”

On the potential pressures of communal living I used an example; an occasion when I woke up one morning to discover the pasty I’d planned to take to work had a bite taken out of it, and was placed inconspicuously back into the fridge!

Fingers for such inconsiderate tomfoolery was immediately pointed to Elijah, with milk! He confessed he’s on about seven bowls of cereal a day! “But I buy them,” he reasoned. “I think that’s the difference. When we were at the start of Sixth Form, I didn’t really know what I was going to do,” he furthered, “and I didn’t know I was going to Bristol. I had no idea what I was going to do with it.”

Sam added, pointing to Fin, “I think I was the only one of us three, and maybe you, who knew you were going to do music at college, maybe…”

“Yeah, because I have no other option,” Fin complemented!

Sam continued, “I was already going to do that before I even got in the band together, I injected that into you a little bit when I turned up.”

“I think now we’re just throwing ourselves all in,” Elijah said, “about two years ago, we were doing it and not sure what we were going to do.” There was a mutual agreement it was because, “we love it.”

Maybe they can deal with subtle musical differences, but when it comes down to breakfast cereal, that could be the limit which pushes it over the edge! Yet when citing their musical influences, they all wanted to say the Fontaines, even when I first opened the door to see Elijah bouncing around the hall with his guitar, Sam sitting picking his like it was made from diamond, Fin with the expression of motivated concentration, and Lui holding it together on the drums, it was like a gig without the audience, and all these elements indicates mutual appreciation for their common goal, drives an instinctive pledge, a motivation to bond and therefore to work harmoniously, and hard.  As Elijah expressed, “well, it’s like we’re brothers now.”

While the guys were taking the interview seriously, there I was back on pastry products, implementing an unwarranted light-hearted angle, joking on the Greggs steak bake falling apart lyric from their song Monday, was his own fault for going to Greggs. Yet in this I was pondering those amusing themes of pitiful everyday scenarios like Lidl Shoes too, as all good punk should, against the balance of romantic themes, and this brought about how they tackle cliches in pop when creating a song, and methods they use to compose them.

“I’ll probably come up with some lyrics,” Elijah revealed, “if there’s a lyric that is unbearably cliche or, obviously, there’s something in it that you could make fun of or compare to another song… If we make a song that sounds like a YouTube montage, one of us will bring it up, and bluntly say this sounds cringe. We just get rid of that. Looking back on our old songs, we sort of did. If you think Manipulation, when I listen back to that now, I think it’s a bit cliche, but part of cliche people still have a love for.”

Manipulation was their crowd-pleaser and often used as the encore, I had previously noted it had been pushed to the middle of the setlist for tomorrow’s gig.

Sam theorised, “there’s a familiarity in cliche. In some sense you can find beauty in it ‘coz you can try hard to avoid a cliché, and write with an ambiguous sense about something, but people still need to understand it, and I think it’s easy to go away from what people know. You know what you’re thinking, other people don’t. The hardest part is the balance of trying to write something people can understand and connect with as well as not thinking it’s cliche. That’s the difficult art to master.”

Do they have a template when creating songs, or do they sporadically come together naturally? “They’re all different, really,” Elijah answered, “we all do instrumentally. I’ll think of some lyrics, but it can change from song to song. The recent ones, we’ve been coming up with loads of new ones, and the new format is, we’ll think of some lyrics, we’ll cook it quietly, maybe get the first product ready, and then get the whole band in and finish it into this final product.”

Eiljah praised Sam’s input. “Another thing that’s changed is having Sam in the band, because we’ve written differently compared to when we wrote Manipulation and songs like that and didn’t have Sam in the band. Sam’s changed the dynamic again with how the template is, and now we’ve got him playing guitar, we’ve got like three songs great….”

Fin added, “when we started, we were sitting down and going, ‘we need to write a song,’ now it’s like, ooh, a new song come up, let’s do that, it’s less sitting down and going, ‘we are writing a song right now.’”

I could sense professionalism establishing through experience and understanding the natural passage of creativity is to recognise and develop when inspiration strikes. The new songs are patently more skilled than previous three-minute punker blasts, to concentrated and prolonged instrumental sections akin to prog rock, yet retaining edge, NRWO are crafting a unique style and are united in perfecting it. The gig at the Exchange confirmed this.

Sam said, “that’s the most important thing to stay with when you’re writing a song. It’s to not write a song because you need a song, but it’s to write a song because you want to write a song. We’ve done it before. You sit down and you’re like, oh shit, we’ve run out of ideas. We’ve played all these songs a thousand times. Let’s write something new, but 99% of the time nothing comes out of that. It’s more likely to come out of just sitting down and you’re jamming or you’re sitting in your room.”

Elijah added, “For me, you know, the song starts as an emotional output, experience. We’ll have a week of not trying to write anything, and you have like, a shit day or, you go to a party or something and then, suddenly, you wake up about 3:00 in the morning, write this song and then go back to sleep! And then I’ll wake up in the morning. I’ll send Sam a voice-note on my phone singing.” Like the song Monday, I reasoned, that happened, didn’t it? ‘I’m having a typical Monday, write a song about it!’

“It’s interesting the links you can find,” Sam responded, “Eli might have written some lyrics, and then a month later I’ve wrote some guitar parts, and I’ll send it to him. What I was feeling at the time I wrote that guitar part was the same as what he was feeling when he wrote some lyrics another time. And those two things end up being a song.”

“I think we’re sometimes technologically on a wavelength as well,” Elijah followed with, “we’ll literally write a song on WhatsApp, we’ve done that on voicemail!”

Thinking this has all gone rather serious, I asked the guys, “who’s in it for the music? Who’s in it for the chicks? And who’s a bit of both?!” And you should realise I cannot divulge full details, but some decided on other’s behalf, few suggested they were spoken for, few opted for both, but when it returned to seriousness, the music was the overall winner.  “I’m definitely in it for the music,” Elijah claimed, then professed to writing a song about his fixation for Jennifer Aniston, who’s erm, four years older than me, “when she was in Friends,” he clarified! Fin hoped Jennifer might marry him off, but they performed the song at the Exchange, none of the female fans seemed to fuss!

We moved swifty onto the course at Uni. “We’re almost all doing the same thing,” Fin explained, but stressed there was differences. “There’s production,” Elijah added, “turning it from live music into songs, how to record and how to get all the right equipment and recording settings.”

“It sounds like all you’re going to be doing is playing guitar or drums or whatever,” Fin informed, “but it’s getting bookings, arranging gigs. There’s also business and event management in it as well. Yeah. So it’s kind of it’s the performance and ‘around it’ as well as like just standing and playing shows.”

“Which is pretty good because I mean, we’re kind of been doing it for a year!” conveniently led me onto my next question, if they could put forward what they’ve already achieved as a project? Elijah scrubbed the ‘homework’ idea but welcomed the thought they would “help us achieve more and bigger opportunities, links into festivals and meeting new people and into new studios.” Just being in Bristol alone is beneficial to this, surely?

“We started to struggle recently with the fact that there’s only so much you can gain from being in a little town,” Sam expressed, “though it’s been nice.” This took us on the angle of finding venues wanting original music over cover bands. “That’s the thing,” he continued, “you often get, ‘ooh, can you play covers? Which is fine. What’s been good, is to get such a strong fan-base. It’s been easy because there’s not much else around.” Using a gig from May, at the Three Crowns in Devizes, where the usual requirement is cover bands, such is the reputation the boys have attained, fans will sing their songs back to them in much the same way classic covers will evoke.  

“Yeah, it’s just brilliant,” Elijah smiled. “We met loads of people, had amazing gigs in Devizes. I’d like to think this is the start; we’ve got this band now, and we know what we want to sound like, we know what we want to play like, and we know how we want to perform. So we’re just taking the same thing, and the main goal is trying to get it as big as possible, which is a bit crazy! Crazy, but I think the whole thing is a bit crazy, because if you’d have told me and Lui like what, five years ago, we’d even be….”

“Yeah,” Luiinterrupted, “it’s mental where we’ve come….”

And it is. I asked of their influences, but rather they concentrated on upcoming guitar bands like Wunderhorse, found solace in the smaller stages at Reading Festival, and stuck to their guns of analogue guitar music rather than experiment with tech. I pushed them on synths and backing tracks. “I don’t think we necessarily want it for ourselves,” Elijah said, “but I think it’s inspiring to see a band going into mainstream with just their guitars and nothing else because I think it’s rare now.”

Fin expanded, “a lot of the people in the top ten are just one person,” and we spoke of the depletion of mainstream bands. “A randomly inspiring one, because I could list 1000 bands which inspire me,” Sam added, “that’s the obvious thing to say, but besides that, like Reading the other day, we saw Georgia Smith, and it’s cool to see, not that’s inspiring our music, but to see there’s a band playing behind her. If you listen to her on Spotify, there’s garage beats and it’s all produced and processed stuff; that’s coming round a bit more as well. You see these people who traditionally would have a backing track and a microphone, coming out with band behind them. Which is really cool as well, on the basis, one; it gives you different points of view on what you could go to as a band later down the line, and also the fact that there’s more room for it….”

“It’s good to see music live,” Elijah prompted a chat about smaller gigs versus the mainstream. “I will always love loads of fans, always,” he suggested, “when you see like all those faces out in front of you, and it’s like geez!”

We spoke of naturally maturing a sound but being uniformed against selling out or diversifying your style, ending with me supposing there’s a formula you stick to for however long that roller coaster rides.

“If you change in the right way, you can never be wrong,” Elijah replied, “we’ve probably got an album of songs now that we’d all be happy recording and releasing. But if we did another one, we stick to the same formula, but say, a third album, normally people get bored of it.”

Sam added, “there’s changing in style, which can degrade a band potentially,” but turned the focus onto “a loss of energy,” for the flailing attention of the public on a band. Sam figured it wasn’t the change in style of a band, “but if you don’t retain that energy….one thing you shouldn’t do is not change your style and try and stick to the same thing, if none of you want to do it, because then it’s just going to sound like you don’t want to do it. And I think, personally for me, and other’s might feel differently but I find it more important if you needed to do a little change in style to promote the fact that you like what you’re doing now, I feel like that’s better and I think to an audience that’s better conveyed if someone’s enjoying themselves on stage playing what they like. That’s better to see than someone playing what you want but not enjoying it.”

But I’m going to twist the narrative to influences, because I believe the lads have been a contributor to encouraging younger locals to practise and form bands too, and wanted to ask them if they had any advice for them. I’m unsure how true this is, they suggested they wasn’t aware of it, but were happy to hear of it. But the advice was definite and unified; “don’t give up.” “Yeah, just do it.” “If you wanna do it, do it. It’s cliché, but….”

“Even if you got no idea what you want to do,” Eljah added, “if you like something and you’re enjoying it, just do it! Because otherwise you can’t just be miserable if you’re not doing it. If you listen to people who say, oh, that’s terrible, don’t do that, stop, stop playing, what are you guys doing? Yeah, there’s no one to be doing anything, if everyone just listened to them, you’ve just gotta enjoy yourself!”

It seemed to me we’ve a lovable, carefree frontman, lavishing in the moment, rightfully, against Sam, the articulate analysist, pinning their thoughts, and the whole band are tight, hardworking and motivated; that’s a winning combo. Sam added, “don’t compromise your originality for the sake of other people, I think is the biggest thing. Because at that point you’re enjoying yourself. And that takes me back to what I said earlier on, yeah? A band enjoying yourself is a band in its best place.” And this made a perfect summary of NRWO, our town should be proud of what these guys have attained, but the killer question is after such a great gig at the Exchange, is this us parting ways, or just Chow for Now?!

“The main thing is we’ll be back,” Elijah promised, and went off rambling slightly! If I know anything about student life, they’ll be back when they run out clear underwear! But when they do, Confucius say, Nothing Rhymes With Orange will have attained vast advances beyond the sphere of knowledge here in Devizes, and if the Exchange gig was more refined than ever before, their return will be something else! Until then, we at Devizine wish them all the best with their studies and lives in Bristol; if you can call making rock music a study, I call it shirking!!  That Ain’t workin’!!

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