Words: Lexi Goodland | Header Image: Yo SNAPS

There’s nothing more disappointing than an artist failing to live up to your expectations. Although Cardiff’s Rainbow Maniac have a catchy, upbeat blues-rock sound and put on a great show, I’m sad to say I was a little surprised by the lack of professionalism from the band members.

Bassist Laura was genuinely sweet and I was lucky enough to catch her for a little one-on-one chat after their show in Plymouth, but frontman Conor seemed uninterested and dismissive of my questions whilst the final two band members didn’t even participate in the interview. Not a great first impression if I’m being honest and kind of took away from how much I enjoyed their music.

CLUNK: How did Rainbow Maniac come to be?

C: That’s the least interesting question that we ever get asked, but the answer is we all met in college about six years ago.

CLUNK: Well I only have five questions to ask so I’m going to be asking things that I think people might want to know.

C: I doubt they’d want to know that but that’s fair enough, carry on.

CLUNK: How did you come up with the name Rainbow Maniac?

C: We just love rainbows pretty much. It’s kind of a metaphor for happiness and sadness, so after the rain comes the rainbow and we are just a silver lining in the life of the British public.

CLUNK: What did you think of the talent from Falmouth?

Laura: Oh it was fucking amazing.

C: Me, Laura and Gavin missed the first half of the first band.

Laura: We were really gutted.

C: We didn’t realise how infrequent the taxis were and there are no ubers in Plymouth.

Laura: (Laughing) Yeah, put that in your interview that the taxis in Plymouth are piss poor!

C: So, yeah, we were trapped inside a pub with Guinness, unfortunately, opposite our hotel until the last 10 minutes of the first band but Louis said they were really good. The second band were also quite good but not our style whatsoever.

Laura: Obviously they were very talented but just not our kind of thing. Those bands will definitely be helping put Falmouth on the map though.

CLUNK: If you could describe your sound in three words how would you describe it?

Laura: Oh there’s so many words to choose from! It’s a good question though, it’s making us think.

C: It’s not a good question. As all bands, we’d love to think that we’re completely new and can’t be pigeon-holed into a genre, and, like all bands, we probably could very easily be pigeon-holed into a genre, just like British indie rock and roll. But there’s a few strong themes: romantic, like 50’s Motown and stuff, not afraid to sing about love and all that gay shit, singing about heartbreak and stuff, it’s a lot more interesting than most modern music, so I’d say romantic, very melodic, and fucking bouncing. That’s two words but I think we’re allowed on this one.

CLUNK: What can we expect from you this year?

Laura: We’ve got big plans.

C: Yes, we’ve got big plans, big tunes, some very nice suits. There’s a bank of unreleased songs that we can do what the fuck we want with. We’ve got an album recorded so we’re going to use that as leverage to hopefully get labels involved, but until then we’ve got a whole bunch of songs that are not on the album to release so we can release new tunes until the cows come home.

Laura: And upcoming festival dates, we’ll definitely be playing some festivals this summer too.

Listen to ‘Snowball’ here: