YOUNG GUNS

Put into simple terms, it's been a pretty hellish couple of days for Young Guns. Currently on the road as part of this year's Kerrang! Relentless Energy Drink Tour, the band has had everything from illness to gearbox failure thrown their way over the past couple of days. Having sent their van away for costly yet essential repairs they made it to Glasgow with help from their tour mates, My Passion and The Blackout, and tour sponsors, Relentless. To top things off Glasgow has welcomed the tour in with a good old fashioned shower of rain and vocalist Gustav Wood has no idea where his jacket is. Despite all of this both he and drummer Ben Jolliffe seem more than happy to sit down to answer a few quick questions...

VLS: With eight shows down and five to go, how has the Kerrang! Tour been treating you?

Ben: It's been incredible. It's always been a great crowd, wherever we've been.

Gustav: Yeah! I think we're kind of warming up more and more as well. We've been in the studio writing our album for the past couple of months, so it's really nice to have such a long tour because you really get into the swing of things. The crowds have been amazing! Even when we go on first, because obviously it's rotating, when we go on first sometimes it's just fifteen minutes after doors and the crowds are still awesome, everyone's just jumping about and going mental. It's great.

VLS: What have been some particular highlights?

B: Birmingham was probably the highlight for me. All the shows so far have been incredible, but Birmingham was just...I think it's the biggest venue on the whole tour and we were excited to play it anyway, but just being on stage and seeing  a massive room of people was incredible.

G: Yeah, there was just something about the show in Birmingham. They've all been pretty great but that that one really stands out. Last night in Leeds was pretty great as well, actually. There have been loads of great moments. Getting to hang out and party with the All Time Low boys has been really good fun and we are all good friends with the guys from The Blackout anyway, so that's good too. After meeting My Passion we've become really close with them so overall there's a really good atmosphere on tour.

VLS: You've played in Scotland a fair few times now - what are some of your favourite things about coming up here?

G:  No matter the size of the show, Scotland in general has always been one of the better places for us to play, even when we played our first show here last July. We played with Taking Back Sunday and then a couple of weeks later came back on our own headline tour and played at Ivory Blacks and that was amazing. Every time we've played here we've had a great show; it's been really good fun; the crowds have been wicked and then we've always gone out and had a really good time in Glasgow city centre.

B: Except for that time you lost the van keys...

G: Yeah, but we only lost those van keys through having a really good evening!

B: I think for the whole band, Glasgow is the place we most look forward to playing.

G: Every time we're on tour Glasgow and Edinburgh are always good to us.

VLS: A week ago today you're new single, 'Winter Kiss', was release as a free internet download. What was the reason behind this?

G: It was twofold really. We were never going to make a shitload of money off of releasing a single, let alone a single that we felt was maybe not what people were expecting from us. We think it's really important to show how appreciative we are of everyone that's supported us so far. We haven't been a band for a terribly long time and we've been really lucky with the reaction to our music so far and so we kind of wanted to - without sounding too clichéd - give something back to everybody who's been good to us and who's listened to our band, come to shows and bought merch and just been involved in this whole thing. That's incredibly important for us. We wanted to release a single to give everyone a bit of a taste of what's to come on the album and we thought we'd give it away for free as a way of saying thank you. It's a digital present!

VLS: Awesome! And has this digital present been well received?

B: Much more so than we thought it would. From the release of our EP to the release of our album, which we're in the process of writing, it's quite a gap so we just thought we'd put out a song. We didn't think it was going to be a massive deal but the fact that it's got daytime radio play and it's got such a good reception from such a wide audience has been a bit surreal.

G:  Yeah, it's been really great getting radio play off of it and the video's been getting a heavy rotation on the music channels as well. It's even been on MTV2 , which was great! Winter Kiss has treated us well so far.

VLS: You're in the middle of writing your debut album. What's the song writing process like for Young Guns?

 G: The song writing process is really convoluted really - we all write together and our songs tend to change numerous times. The songs on the EP changed about 10 or 15 times, I mean 'The Weight Of The World' changed countless times. It was the same with 'Winter Kiss'; we went through loads of different versions. We tend to just jam stuff out for a long time together and then I'll go away and write the melody and the lyrics and whatever. With 'Winter Kiss' it was kind a case of the song itself had a vibe to it, like a dark theatrical vibe and so I just tried to mirror that in the lyrics.

VLS: Finally - it's February 1^st and we're officially one month into 2010. Did you make any New Year's resolutions and if you did what were they and have you stuck to them?

G: Any New Year's resolutions that I made personally flew out the window on January 2^nd so...I think one of them was to drink less and that didn't really work out too well! 

B: I just wanted to appreciate everything a bit more. I mean last year we had such a good year that it's sometimes hard to take in; it just sort of flies past and every now and then you sit back and go "Wow, we've done this, we've done that", y'know? It's good to sit down and take stock of what's happened.

G:  We had such an incredible 2009, and so far an incredible 2010, and when you look back on the year, we've done some amazing things - winning best new band in 'Kerrang!' and best new band in 'Rock Sound':  those are amazing things to happen, but you can get caught up in it a whirlwind because there's so much going on around.  I mean we're still quite wet behind the ears and we're doing things, for example the Kerrang! tour, which are fantastic, but we're surrounded by people who find it all normal. You kind of slip into a routine where you start accepting all these things going on around you and I think in that respect Ben's right; we need to try and sit back and take stock of what's going on around us.

B: ...and drink more!

G: That shouldn't be a problem!

Young Guns are currently wrapping up a killer run on this year's Kerrang! tour.  Keep checking back for details of their upcoming headline tour, which will be announced shortly! In the meantime you can grab your free copy of current single, 'Winter Kiss' HERE.