UNQUIETNIGHTS.COM – Rock Band

Q&A With: Unquiet Nights (3rd August, 2015)

By Edwin McFee (@edwinmcfee)

This month we meet Luke Mathers from Northern Ireland born and now Italy-based rockers Unquiet Nights to hear about his band’s just released new single “Love Leave Your Mark On Me”, their impending second album, his experiences being a TV star on the continent and much more.

Hi Luke and welcome to the Big List. First up, you’ve just released your brand new single, Can you tell us a bit about the track?
Luke Mathers (vocals/guitar): Most of the tracking for “Love Leave Your Mark On Me” happened in Italy through my trusty M-Box into the laptop, which then allowed me to shape the song and figure out what else it needed before taking the project into Manor Park Studio back in Northern Ireland.

The single sees you once again working with Neal Calderwood. Why did you decide to record with him at Manor Park and what does he bring to the finished product?
Usually he mixes my stuff over the internet because I don’t live there anymore, but for this session I did go to his studio and use his Vox AC-30, mainly on the b-side “More Than These Eyes”. He knows what I lvoe and hate about mixes and at this stage we’ve done some successful ones so it’s always a pleasure to get started on a new track with him.

The song is taken from your up-coming second album. What can you tell us about the record?
We’re trying to get it out for early December. In terms of sound, it should be warmer than the first one [21st Century Redemption Songs]. We’ve had access to more analoge stuff and used less digital as a result, since the first album was recorded on the move and as minimally as possible. The album also features Tom Petty’s drummer [Steve Ferrone] on a couple of songs.

I know it’s (fairly) early days, but how does it compare and indeed differ to your debut album?
The song writing has gotten very direct. I’ve taken some dangerous topics on and deliberately looked for thoughts that haven’t been expressed in music. I didn’t write much about the experience of growing up in Northern Ireland on the first album, but more than half of this album deals with that autobiographically from my own perspective.

Have there been any “difficult second album” moments during writing and recording?
Writing the material has felt smooth, but keeping the project ticking over it terms of money is always the hard part. Difficult second albums I think are a pitfall for bands who are under expectations from labels and have a budget to procrastinate over. There have been times when big companies have booked us, then cancelled and caused us financial loss which has taken time to recover from and it slowed the album making process.

Your previous release “George Best City” featured on Sky Sports in Italy. How did it feel when you heard your song on national TV?
It was probably the most satisfying feeling I’ve had in music, because it had two extra dimensions associated to it. One is being attached to Best’s legacy and being trusted to set the emotional tone when Federico Buffa was visiting George’s grave at the end of the episode to explain his death and his impact. The other is that it had been very hard to make progress in Italy because of things like the language barrier, but this was really the ideal way to reach a lot of people on our own terms, and the result has been a huge outpouring of warmth from Italian people including some nice spikes on places like iTunes too.

It also saw you perform live on Italian TV. Can you fill us in on the experience? Any funny tales?
There have been loads of surreal experiences since February when this all started. We’ve been interviewed by some of the biggest names in Italian music and sports on TV here, which maybe I’m oblivious to because I didn’t grow up with their TV, so the magnitude of how famous these people are washes over me a bit. Then I go check their Twitter and they have half a million followers, or a picture of them interviewing Fidel Castro and Paul McCartney. There was one moment where Alessandro Bonan was making me close his show on Sky Sports 1 by singing a Roy Orbison song. I instantly flashed back to collecting Orbison cassettes out of Caroline Music in Portadown in 1993 and taking in the full absurdity of that.

Tell us about the Unquiet Nights Flash Drive Discography, which you guys sell on your site. It’s a great idea.
We came up with the idea of producing a flash drive because basically duplicating CD versions of every single isn’t cost effective and takes too much time. This way, between albums we can put all our music on one customised flash drive, which can be reused and it includes rarities and up to the minute stuff. Followers of ours have seemed to love it so far.

Finally, any gigs coming up, particularly here in Northern Ireland in the pipeline?
We last played there in March, and we do try to get booked on pretty much all the festivals so I’d love a reason to return, but there;s nothing confirmed in Ireland to report as of now. Everything will be on unquietnights.com/tourdates though!

Keep up to date online at unquietnights.con and @unquietnights.