1. Growing Up

We always had good music playing in the house and in the car. I can remember listening to The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, The Pogues, The Dubliners… all stuff that I still listen to. It gave me an appreciation of good melody and harmony at a young age, which hugely influenced my songwriting approach.

2. Inspirations

Neil Young, Tony Iommi, Steve Harris, Blackie Lawless, each member of The Beatles. There’s loads, but I’ve always liked musicians who do whatever they want regardless of trends or anything like that. People that stick to their convictions.

3. Your Band

I’m the singer and lead guitar player; we have Yotam Rubinger on vocals and rhythm guitar, Itamar Rubinger on drums and Vaughn Stokes on bass. Funny enough, we all met in a hotel lobby. Usually I like to do things DIY, so I like to keep the production, mixing, art design all in-house. A lot of bands don’t care about their artwork, but for me it’s a big deal. It all needs to tie in with the music, so I’m really fussy about who I chose to work with in that respect. We have a few really good artists that we use for merch designs that I know I can always trust. We worked with two great engineers on this album in Liam Watson and Luke Oldfield, neither of whom had worked with us before, but they both did a great job in capturing the raw sound of the band.

4. The Music You Make

Everyone calls themselves ‘psych rock’ these days and we get thrown into that as well sometimes, but I like to think of our music more as psycho rock. I suppose that just means psychos playing rock! We recorded our last album mostly at Toe Rag Studios in London, which has been used by The White Stripes, Tame Impala and hundreds of other bands. In terms of our live show, don’t expect pyro, bright lights or much talking – we creep around in the shadows and just go for it. I would say our contemporaries are bands like Blood Ceremony and Danava, who are both incredible live and on record.

5. Music, Right Here, Right Now

The music scene has plenty of great bands knocking around. The problem is getting people to hear them. The rock press would rather write another story about the making of Led Zeppelin III than to talk about upcoming bands. It all comes down to money in the end and if you’re a small band on an indie label it makes things that much more difficult. We’ve done things the more organic way, in that our fan base isn’t bought in magazine advertisements and PR bullshit, it’s come together by fans spreading the word among themselves. I saw Bohren and Der Club Of Gore recently and their low lighting and minimal stage set-up was incredible. They pretty much played in darkness, which was quite inspiring and something I’ve always wanted to do.

[Uncle Acid photo by Ester Segarra]

Performing live withGrinding Eyes atOxford Art FactoryFriday December 11, Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats haveThe Night Creeper out now through Rise Above.

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