Animal Kingdom tonight 8pm

Tonight at 8 pm Animal Kingdom will play an Acoustic Set in the Lobby for us before heading on tour to America on Friday. We had a coffee with Geoff Lea, their Drummer.

 

What do all drummers have in common?

I guess most drummers are pretty chilled out and enjoy hitting things. They like being in the back making lots of noise.

What made you want to become a drummer?

I don’t know, I think I just started hitting things when I was about five, my parents made me get some drum lessons so I could kind of do it properly. We lived in an old pub which had a beer cellar, so my parents let me take my drum kit down there so as not to make any noise that could be heard from the living room. I just shut myself down in the cellar and bashed away at things. My parents always encouraged me, they never said ‘turn that record off ’ or whatever, they were even taking me to gigs when I was a teenager. Hamish and I were in a band before we started to drive .

So You and Hamish have known each other for a long time?

Yes, we’ve known each other since we were twelve and around the age of thirteen we were in a band together, my parents would cart us around in their cars to rehearsals and and our own gigs.

Do you write your songs together?

It mostly works like this: Rich kind of comes in with an idea and lyrics in it and the rest of it is sort of pieced together with the three of us kind of working on all the other parts really. It seems to work like that, it’s a nice way of working, we all get to bring our own input aswell as our own influences.

You are going on tour on Friday to America for five weeks. Do you guys like being on tour? I’d imagine you’d come to know each other very well ?

We spend so much time together as a band, even when we are not on tour we are in the rehearsal studio or the recording studio, just the three of us spending every day together doing music related things. So when we are on tour it feels like a bit of a roadtrip holiday. I guess we just fall into these sort of roles. I do allot of the driving, Hamish is pretty good at organizing and then Rich does the formal side of stuff and then it will suddenly change when we have a night out and I can’t drive and Hamish has to drive and everyone is swapping.