Allergo Interview

INTERVIEW - w/ Allergo drummer Motion (www.allergonoise.com)

this is another old one i did back in February 2004.

gav: Greetings and salutations to he of Abernethy, who goes by the name !m!,otion
Motion: yussss

gav: What are Allergo all about?
Motion: My band is all about playing music that we enjoy to as many people as we can, who will hopefully enjoy it also, and scoring with horny 15 year olds.

gav: ROCK! When did you realize you wanted to be in a band? Why did you take up drums?
Motion: I think it was in about 4th year at school and I just used to jam with a load of mates on weekends, eventually, tom and I hooked up with matt and our old bass player Johnny, and we took things from there really. Took up drums because of Dave Lombardo (Slayer) after seeing the Seasons In The Abyss video as a lad.

gav: So the style of music you play is heavily influenced by them?
Motion: It was at first we used to play plenty Slayer covers in our first practices still do from time to time just for a laugh and you could hear it in our older songs, not sure if there’s a big an influence in our newer stuff, but they definitely got us going at first.

gav: What direction have you moved towards?
Motion: The past few years we've been getting into more Hardcore and Metalcore stuff mainly influenced by bands like Converge, Killswitch Engage, Norma Jean and Poison The Well. Especially with the newer songs we're writing at the moment

gav: Does that mean the ambitions of the band have been raised too?
Motion: Our ambition I think for just now is to try and take things as far as we can, always has been, probably always will, we're writing a lot more technical stuff so hopefully we get a lot more recognition and..well.."take things further".

gav: How have things gone so far for the band?
Motion: I'd say pretty well, we've been together properly for almost 2 years played about 50 odd gigs all over Scotland and got some good reviews and a lot of good comments from plenty of folk.

gav: Have you been offered anything outside Scotland?
Motion: Yeah we've been offered a few gigs down south with bands that have come up here we've played with, we haven't taken them though. Mainly because it's difficult for us as none of us can drive, and other difficulties like school and being underage etc is a bit of a pain as well.

gav: Is education important to the band?
Motion: Yeah, Tom's dad is a Math's teacher so it would have to be, and our bassist is a typical "swot" haha, Matt and I are at college as well.

gav: But would you ditch it all for fame and fortune?
Motion: Hehe, I think we'd all finish school/college first. Fame and Fortune, we're not really bothered about at the moment, would be nice though.

gav: How well do you guys work together as a band? Do you feel you have to compromise things to suit other members?
Motion: Right from the start we had a connection especially Tom and I, we just seem to have some weird sort of chemistry when we write songs, we've never had a really big problem when it comes to writing, we wrote a lot when we were a 3-piece for a while, then James basically started playing bass when he joined the band but picked it up well.

gav: Is Allergo's creativity spread out through all the members?
Motion: Tom writes the songs, then we both work on them together, Tom also helps out James with the bass lines and we leave Matt to do his thing with the lyrics.

gav: What's currently going on for the band?
Motion: After we write our new stuff, we're gonna record a new demo, hopefully get down to England and play a few gigs, and whore ourselves to play with some more signed bands.

gav: What local bands do you look up to?
Motion: I'm not sure, we don’t really look up to many local bands, Godplayer would probably be the first band that really excited us when we knew we were playing with them, Kaddish are also another great band we love playing with.

gav: Highlights of playing live so far?
Motion: Opening for Johnny Truant was great, traveling to different cities and going on wee walks like rock stars around the town, is always fun, usually leading in one of us (James) getting beat up and left in the middle of nowhere for a laugh hehe. Speaking to and meeting new people who enjoyed us is also great.

gav: Finally, how have you enjoyed this interview?
Motion: Yep, it's been lovely, I hope we can do it again sometime in the future, was it good for you? *lights cigarette*

gav: I've had better.....heheheh
Motion: cheeky swine