A Herefordshire sludgy garage punk quartet who know how to meld the rawest of genres – once accurately described as “a wild fusion of The Jesus Lizard, The Ramones and Shellac” – Plane Crasher play Belfast’s Warzone Centre on Saturday March 8. To date, they’ve released a triple single, a live session and an eponymous 12” EP, all available independently on Bandcamp.
Stevie Lennox caught up with them ahead of their Irish tour to catch a few of their thoughts.
When did you actually form, and why?
Sometime early 2010. It started a few years before that, Edd asked Matt to join his band late 2004, Matt got in Ben from his old band a few months later then we had a long period of going through drummers until we met Rich in 2010. At that point we changed the name to Plane Crasher so Rich wouldn’t feel like just another in a long list of drummers! As for why – when we met we were pretty much the only musicians we knew who cared about the kind of music we liked and hated the kind of music that was around.
It seems like there’s a bit of a D.I.Y. ethos in Plane Crasher and your output – is this something you value in your approach to ‘the business’?
The DIY aspect is mainly out of necessity. We have songs we want to release and no label has ever offered to release them for us. It’s easy enough to find studios, mastering engineers and pressing plants yourself so why waste time waiting for someone else to pick up the phone for you? One upshot of the DIY approach is we have nobody telling us what to do or how to do it.
There are plenty of influences in your music – noise rock, post-hardcore, sludge, hardcore, early punk – but who would you regard as your primary influences? If you could give us three albums which best represent the sound of Plane Crasher, what would they be?
This is a damn hard question! After much deliberation we’ve finally agreed on the first Ramones album, At Action Park by Shellac and Overkill by Motorhead. We aspire to that mixture of unusual song structures and bludgeoning attack – with a nice tune on top here and there. We’ve all got very different and diverse tastes but we also have a large crossover too.
A lot of bands tend to ignore Ireland in their usual tour routes, so what influenced the decision to come here?
We were asked! Simple as that. We play everything we’re offered if we can possibly do it.
How far afield have you ventured on tour previously?
We did a tour of the UK with a grindcore band last year. We went as far south as London and as far north of Glasgow and many points in-between. We’ve been offered a few European shows but not enough to put together a viable tour yet.
What have you got in the pipeline following this tour?
We’ve got a bunch of UK dates when we get back, some supporting an excellent US band called The Bismarck. Then later in the year we’ll be going to Rockfield Studios to start work on our first full-length album and hopefully by then get some more European shows together. Then we’re going to buy a bungalow and start a family.
Plane Crasher play the Warzone Centre on March 8 with support from bass and drums duo Bucolic Spectre, pop-punk act No Matter and experimental/noise artist Stuart Watson.
