Joe's Big Toe

“They’re here!” I’m already half way down the stairs when the shout comes, but as it does I find myself paus­ing, run­ning through a last few checks in my head. Yep, everything is ready.

In the main recep­tion I greet Tom, Jake and Jack of Basic Terms, a Walmley-Based Indie-rock trio. They’ve been mak­ing their rounds on the Birm­ing­ham music cir­cuit since March last year and their most recent record­ing, uploaded to their Myspace page, shows a lot of prom­ise. As a single unit they’re rel­at­ively new to this, but make no mis­take; this is a young band with some pretty grown-up ideas.

You’ve been together for just over a year now, how did Basic Terms get star­ted?
Jake: Well me and Tom had been play­ing for a while in a band called The Flood, it was just some­thing to do; and then we met Jack in school.
Jack: We star­ted a more Indie pro­ject on the side of their band, and The Flood even­tu­ally split up, so we decided to go for it from there.

So the obvi­ous ques­tion really, who were the major influ­ences on the band, which artists really got you into the genre?
Tom: It’s a mix­ture of lots of dif­fer­ent music really, with me it’s Eric Clapton and a lot of the old stuff
Jack: There’s a Blues side to it too, as well as clas­sic rock like The Rolling Stones, Led Zepel­lin, The Who. There’s a lot of Indie stuff in there and some ska as well, so there’s a def­in­itely a mixture.

So have you developed a sys­tem of writ­ing music?
Jack: Well with the music we all write our own parts.
Jake: But one of us will have an idea for a riff or some sort of idea to start.
Tom: And Jack writes most of the lyr­ics as well, but every­one just puts in their own idea.
Jack: We all have a say in it really, and if there’s some­thing that one of us doesn’t like then we’ll change it.

Tom, you’re the vocal­ist for Basic Terms; did you join the band to be a singer or did you get the short straw?
Tom: I’ve always been the singer; that’s the way it was in the band before, so with us it just kind of…happened.

What do you think of the music scene in Birm­ing­ham at the moment? Has it been dif­fi­cult to find gigs?
Tom: It’s get­ting bet­ter I think
Jake: It’s still dif­fi­cult to get week­end gigs at the moment though.
Jack: But music-wise I think the Birm­ing­ham scene is one of the best in the UK to be hon­est. There are lots of ven­ues to play, and some of the bands around Birm­ing­ham at the moment are bril­liant. The audi­ences depend on where we play though; we’ve had some bad and some really good audi­ences. Home gigs are usu­ally the best, places like the Sound bar
Tom: We’re play­ing at the Flap­per [and Fir­kin] on Wed­nes­day actu­ally.
Jake: We’ve played the old Bar Academy a couple of times, and should be play­ing the new one around March hope­fully.
Tom: The Rain­bow as well, sup­port­ing Iron Wiz­ards.
Jack: We’ve played with them before as well, that was a good gig.

So you’ve got a few shows under your belt now, do you still get pre-show nerves at all?
Tom: Not really any more.
Jake: It’s more like an anxious­ness to get on stage and get star­ted, more than nerves.

You some­times find that bands get too wrapped up in their sound dur­ing live per­form­ances; do you think you put on a good show?
Tom: Well you’d really need someone else to say that
Jack: It depends how the audi­ence is as well. If the audi­ence don’t enjoy a show then we don’t enjoy it either.
Tom: But we do always try to show 100% to whatever audi­ence we play to.
Jake: You do have to get the sound right first, and the rest comes after.

So are the gigs mostly to friends and fam­ily at the moment or are you pick­ing up fans as you go?
Jack: We’re get­ting a lot of new crowds; we’re play­ing with a lot of new bands at the moment so we pick up some of their fan-base as well. We’re play­ing to new people and get­ting some really good responses. We advert­ise our gigs pretty well though, mainly through word of mouth.

Any die-hard fans yet?
Tom: Yeah we have three who come to nearly every show and stand at the front.
Jake: We’ve got a few reg­u­lars that turn up every now and then as well.
Jack: It’s a good feel­ing that someone actu­ally enjoys the music though.

What’s next for Basic Terms?
Tom: Def­in­itely more record­ings.
Jake: We’ve got a few new songs that we’re hop­ing to record, but we’re in a writ­ing stage at the moment.
Jack: We’re hop­ing to take it fur­ther and aim high.
Tom: It’s more mature music that we’re writ­ing as well now instead of our old stuff which is more “new band”. It’s still good but the stuff we’re writ­ing now is more straightened out.
Jack: We got together last Janu­ary and we had a gig in March, so we had to write a half-hour set in three months. It was tough, but now we’ve got more time to relax.
Jake: It would be nice to expand out of Birm­ing­ham and play fur­ther out.

Is there a spe­cific sound that you’re going for now?
Tom: All the influ­ences we had have merged together to cre­ate what we are to be hon­est, we didn’t aim to get any spe­cific sort of sound.
Jack: With the new stuff we’re going to try out a bit of synth, like elec­tro sounds, pianos etc.

For a band that’s only been together for a year, your pre­vi­ous record­ings sound pretty tight…
Tom: Well that comes from me and Jake play­ing together for a long time, nearly every day for five or six years now.
Jake: We are def­in­itely ded­ic­ated; at the start we were doing 10-hour prac­tices.
Tom: We’ve also got a new song that we’ve gigged twice. We’re sort of test­ing it out at the moment but we don’t have a name for it yet.
Jake: So any ideas are welcome!

Basic Terms will be at the Flap­per & Fir­kin (16+) on Wed­nes­day 27/01/2010

Show start: 7:30pm
Tick­ets: £5 on the door
Basic Terms on MySpace