Fuzz Lightyear On The Importance Of Independent Venues And Their Love For Leeds’ Music Scene

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Following their signing to Nice Swan Records, we chatted with Leeds band Fuzz Lightyear about their wide range of influences and Leeds’ scene

Since mid-September, the cauldron has bubbling up for industrial-garage rock act Fuzz Lightyear. Alongside the release of electrifying single ‘My Body’ to the endorsement of Mercury Prize winner Lily Fontaine (English Teacher), the band signed to Nice Swan Records, where they are among top-tier company in the UK and Ireland’s punk and alternative rock scenes (English Teacher, Sprints, Sports Team).

The Leeds-based quartet have since embarked on a festival circuit of Northern England. The journey began at Float Along in Sheffield, which was recently followed by an appearance at Manchester’s Beyond the Music. November will see Fuzz Lightyear pull in at Live at Leeds in the City.

Fuzz Lightyear are composed of Ben Parry (vocals / guitar), Varun Govil (bass), Josh Taylor (drums) and Alex Calder (synth / guitar), the first three of whom we were lucky enough to have a chat with.

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How have you all been finding the period since your single release – how has the crowd response been at these festivals as a relative newcomer?

VARUN: It’s been really good – just to have people enjoying our tracks and saying positive things. I think we’d be doing the same thing no matter what people were saying but it’s just nice to get that reaction. Sheffield was mint, the room was packed, some of our friends couldn’t even get in …

It was kind of silly, it felt like we were playing a student gig again because everyone was just sending it because they didn’t know what else to do.

What was the creative process behind ‘My Body’ – is there anything you listened to or read which played a major role in influencing the track?

BEN: I guess that when we were first started the song, it was a really long kraut jam where we were all messing about and trying to figure out a new sound.

VARUN: I was listening to a lot of Beige Banquet at the time, who are friends of ours, and just really wanted to do something like that. What they do is really fast, just keeps going. It took a while to refine it and make it into a song with distinct parts.

BEN: The song itself has been in the works for two years. Starting out as a jam, it became more succinct and sections got refined down. Lyrically, it was interested in the ‘uncanny valley’ and body horror was a big influence on a lot of things that we were thinking about.

VARUN: Visually we always go back to body horror. It always just feels … uncomfortable?

BEN: It’s a bit cliché but stuff like The Backrooms, that whole idea of stuff being a little bit off is really interesting to me. And I suppose that is where the lyricism concerned with our environment came from, when I was thinking of the distance between yourself and everyone else. What makes you a human, how your environment affects you, and the way you change your environment in turn … all from that ‘uncanny valley’ space.

VARUN: Art wise as well, we were spending a lot of time going back and forth between a lot of ideas, not really being on the same page with each other. And then we saw someone on Instagram called @larniedoesdesign … she posted something similar to what the final artwork ended up being on our cover, and we all thought “that’s class”. There is a starkness to it that I really like. The layout and shapes of it felt really good so we reached out and she was up for working with us. Full credit to her on the visuals.

VARUN: Lyrically, I feel that it came together quite quickly. There are other songs we have had where they change a lot, but this one was fairly set from the start.

BEN: Yeah. From those jams, there was very repetitive lyricism which we returned back to in order to structure the track. It had a mantra-like feeling.

VARUN: If anything, what you [Ben] experimented with more was your delivery rather than the actual words. We demoed it in live versions a lot of times and each time your [Ben’s] voice was different, but what we settled on was definitely best.

BEN: Yeah, just sending it!

Delving deeper into your history as a band, I understand that you were previously travelling more in a nu metal direction?

JOSH: There are some bits in the set at the moment which are nu metal-y – not directly, but inspired by.

VARUN: I think if anything we would go even more nu metal-y in the future. However, I don’t think we will ever be a nu metal band – it’s one of four or five sounds we definitely pull from a lot.

BEN: Nu metal is kind of a melding. At its heart of nu metal is hip-hop with aggressive metal elements. And nowadays we are drawing from electronic influences as well.

VARUN:I think that a lot of the bands we listen to such as Show Me the Body, Deftones … you could say they’re nu metal but really it’s a bunch of different sounds coming together. And that is the same in other sounds we like: shoegaze, loud metal-y riffs, straight-head punk, as well as dance and hip-hop influences. I don’t think we’d ever say we are a hip-hop or dance band but we do listen to a lot of stuff like that.

There’s a lot of cool sounds there, and in particular the feeling of it we want to take on board. On a monthly basis, the sounds that we are individually and collectively obsessed with change quite a lot. I think really what we started off as was a garage-rock band … like Wytches meets Nirvana. And now maybe we’re a bit smarter than that. Haha. Probably not. 

BEN: Nowadays, personally, I’m not really listening to guitar bands. I’m thinking more about techno and house … Bassvictim is a big one for me at the moment.

VARUN: But then again, we’ll say this and it will change in a couple of months again. It’s just fun to listen to music, innit?

I discovered Fuzz Lightyear when Lily Fontaine shared the release of ‘My Body’ on her Instagram story. It has been a big year for her with English Teacher winning the Mercury Prize.

It is however sobering to consider that English Teacher are the first artist outside London to win the Mercury since 2014. The regional inequities surrounding the UK music industry was also an issue raised at the Northern Music Awards during April this year.

I wonder whether you have any comment to pass on this, particularly as a self-proclaimed “DIY boyband”. Is your adoption of a DIY framework a response to the barriers facing emerging artists such as yourselves?

VARUN: I think that no matter who is around us, or who is helping us, we are going to do what we want to do. We’re doing it for ourselves. I don’t think it matters who is in the room: we’re going to want to play gigs, and write the music we are writing.

BEN: I might be misunderstanding, but there is a degree to the London scene which is a bit homogenous. And maybe more fame-orientated. At the end of the day I just want to make songs.

VARUN: Yeah, I guess that’s easier to see from the outside though: none of us have lived in London.

BEN: We don’t really participate in stuff there. We have friends and bands there, and they seem to be doing really well for themselves. But the way we have it in the North just works for us and for our delivery.

VARUN: Also, Leeds has loads of amazing bands and venues. It is kind of frustrating that in order to get a certain status or backing you do need to play the game and play shows in London, which is always going to be expensive. Everyone who might recognise you or give you these platforms is going to be based almost exclusively in London. And that is frustrating. But also, at the end of the day, what we want to do is write music and play gigs with our friends. We can do that here, and I don’t think that is ever going to change. Everything else is just a cherry on top.

BEN: In the North there are more community-driven DIY scenes. We all hang out in and rehearse at this space called Mabgate Bleach which is our little epicentre of DIY, and through that I’ve met more people that are into the stuff that we are doing.

VARUN: There’s so many venues in Leeds. Newcastle also has a bunch of them, Sheffield is amazing for it. These venues are not making money, they’re just getting by day to day but that is not the point, the point is that it gives people the space to make weird music. It provides a space for people to hang out and watch a band that nobody has heard of before. It might be amazing, it might be shit, it doesn’t really matter – you’re just watching music with your friends. And I think that’s what it all goes back to: doing it because it’s fun and there’s nothing else that we’d want to do.

Which emerging acts in Leeds are you big fans of and would like more people to know about?

VARUN: Yeah, there’s loads. I think that the way Leeds is, everyone is playing in each other’s bands and everyone is friends with each other. Alex, who plays in our band and isn’t here today, plays in two amazing bands: Bug Teeth, who are ambient shoegaze / dream pop meets breakbeat, And Gladboy, who are weird, psyched-out cowboy kind of stuff.

BEN: Thank is another huge one.

VARUN: Yeah! Thank are another band that are doing really well at the moment – they’re putting out their second album soon. Every time we struggle with a song, we think “what would they do?”. They are a big touchpoint for us.

BEN: To take it back to DIY … when I first moved to Leeds, Thank was at the heart of a DIY community that made me really excited to make music. They used to run this space called Chunk, which was a punk centre in Leeds for a while. In terms of Thank, we take inspiration from not only their music but also their practices and behaviour.

VARUN: There is a lot of cool hardcore and metal stuff in Leeds as well: Pest Control are amazing. Gorgeous folk as well, such as Neve Cariad and Green Gardens. We are putting on a Christmas gig, which involves a few of the bands we really like and our favourite DJs going on all night.

What are the overriding ambitions for the band now?

VARUN: I just want to play more festivals, to be honest. Play to people who have never heard us before and see what happens.

BEN: I want to travel around and play shows. Go to cities I have never been before, hang out with new people, and generally have a good time.

VARUN: This is really dumb but ever since I have been a teenager, my big dream was to play a talk show and be the musical guest. There’s almost no way it’ll happen but that would be the sign I’ve made it – that or getting interviewed by Nardwuar.

JOSH: I think for me the goal is to work on a bigger, major release like an album. I don’t think we are near that point, but that’s something to work towards. I love all the recording side of it … me and Ben studied music production and we’re proper geeky for that side of things.

BEN: Getting closer and closer to the sounds that we have in our heads is my main ambition.

VARUN: I also want to play weirder gigs that are a bit more out of the box. We played a show in The Round [Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds] a few months ago in which the audience members surrounded us – that was really fun. I want us to play clubs… we played a 1AM slot in Manchester the other day, but I would more want to do it on a day of the week where people are out for a club-meets-gig event.

BEN:The Christmas show that we have coming up is situated in a venue which is essentially a blank slate [Sable Studios, Leeds]. It’s about making the live show a more immersive, multi-dimensional experience than just seeing a band. I have always really admired the live aspect of playing, maybe even more so than recording. Turning that into a full visual experience would be really cool to start messing about with.

VARUN: A couple of us saw a band called deathcrash at a church in Leeds a year or two ago. Already, the setting was gorgeous and they are such a special band, but they also brought this intense lighting rig – for a room that fits a hundred people. And it was the most mind-blowing thing I’ve seen in so long. This is comparable to what SCALER do as well … it’s not just the music, it’s a visual experience as well. I want to be able to get to a point where we can deliver something like that.

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Listen to ‘My Body’ here:

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