Faded Shades Chat Recent Single, London Life, And more

---

---

London rock outfit discusses their recent single ‘What I’m On About’, London life, and much more

The London rock outfit Faded Shades recently came out swinging with their thumping new single ‘What I’m On About’, a three minute barrage of riffs, hard hitting percussion, and angst driven vocals. It’s a dizzying listen in the best way and had us hooked on the band.

So much so, we wanted to chat to them to get to know more about this growing rock n roll outfit. We chat all things new music, the cost of pints in London, and more.

---

Kieran: Hey fellas, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us! How have you all been?

FS: Yeah really good thanks, keeping busy. Joe’s actually just been out in the New Mexico desert building houses, of all things!

Kieran: How’s life in London been treating you? 

FS: We’re spoiled really, so many gigs about, both for us to play and go to and see other artists. Just in the last month we’ve seen or played with relatively unknown singer-songwriters with dedicated followings all the way up to Liam Gallagher, so yeah, anything you want music-wise, it’s in London  It’s not easy on the wallet though, when pints are £7 now haha.

Kieran: So, how did you all meet and when did you start making music together? 

FS: Well Joe and Charlie met at birth, through virtue of being brothers. Myself and Joe met online over 10 years ago now, both of us just wanted to join bands and be writing and playing music. The three of us have been playing together for about 7-8 years now.

Kieran: What’s a common misconception of being a musician based in London?

FS: Maybe that it’s easier, or that there’s more opportunities? Which I guess is true, but there’s so much awesome music from great artists, it just means there’s that much more competition, so being heard is that much more difficult, kinda small fish, big pond. You’ve got to work a lot harder to stand out, and have your own style, and your own niche.

Kieran: Do you all share a collective influence or does it vary?

FS: We’ve all got plenty of common ground with bands like Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Rolling Stones, But I think we’ve all got our own tastes and styles as well, which just makes the band stronger; Joe’s very big on his Americana, like The Eagles or Owen Campbell, Char loves mod bands like The Small Faces and The Kinks and I bring a heavier taste in stuff like Soundgarden and Royal Blood.

Kieran: How did your influences affect your sound? 

FS: Well we’ve all got different preferences in playing and song writing, as a result of our music tastes, like Joe has a very melodic approach to everything, he loves cool sounding chord progressions, while I can sometimes be in opposition, just wanting big fat riffs and distortion haha. Char really brings it all together, he can find a beat and a rhythm to whatever madness me and Joe are cooking up.

Kieran: You just dropped your anthem driven new single ‘What I’m On About’, can you please talk us through this release and what it means to you? 

FS: The track is a bit of an oldie to us now, we first wrote and recorded it about 6 years ago for our first album, but we weren’t entirely happy with how it came out, especially compared to how we had been jamming the song and playing it live for our fans. We were fortunate enough to record this version with a cracking producer in Wembley, about 90% of the song was recorded live with all 3 of us in 1 or 2 takes, he really helped us got much more energy and power out of the song, it’s lot more authentic to the Shades sound now, I think. 

Listen to ‘What I’m On About’ here:

Kieran: Can you talk us through the writing and recording process of this track? 

FS: Joe wrote the lyrics after a particularly heavy holiday in Amsterdam, and he had this really cool guitar riff he brought to me and Char. After we had been jamming around it, I was sort taking the piss and just playing big fat notes with all my pedals on, but it actually worked and brought the whole thing together.

Kieran: Lastly, what else can we expect from you in 2024? 

FS: We’re taking a break from gigging over the Summer, looking to record and release song banger tunes that have been rattling around our noggins for a while now and we’re dying to get out into the world, so you can all look forward to hearing those later in the year, and no doubt catch us playing in and around London this Autumn too.

---