My Inspiration: The Ilfords – Quavers

Newcastle indie-rockers, The Ilfords, drop their latest single Quavers. The track is a ferocious offering that violently lurches from the speakers and fills the room with pounding rhythms, grit ‘n’ grind guitars, and a punch-packing shouty chorus.

Here, David and Finlay tell us what inspired this latest release…

David: You know that fella? The type where you only need 30 seconds to realise they’re not for you. The type of person you immediately wish you could forget you’d ever had the displeasure of meeting.

Now imagine you met someone like that. Fast forward 5 years and you’ve bumped into them in a bar. You’ve somehow got a mutual friend. You try, but you can’t hide your disgust at realising they still exist. One of their opening lines even kicks off with ‘I’m not a racist, but…’.

Well, a few years ago I found myself in this dire situation. I’m not a confrontational man, but this little social worm boils my piss. So like any semi-creative, I took to the route of music to express my anger at the interaction. In a way, I’m almost grateful because I’d had writer’s block for a while. My music influences had changed drastically over that period as well, with more of a focus on heavy lead guitar bands such as Queens of the Stone Age and Pulled Apart by Horses and heavy rap such as Griselda. It was a perfect storm.

Finlay: On the music itself, Quavers was a song we wrote with live shows in mind. It was a song written to close a set, for people to scream along to. Once Negz (David) brought the idea to us in the studio and the rest of the band got involved the song evolved quite a lot. We’d been listening to a lot of bands with reputations for their live shows like Idles, Foals and Rage Against the Machine and we tried to emulate the energy they create. As a band, that’s where we want to be, creating energy at our shows, and the studio tracks are almost secondary to that. To do this in Quavers we added space, for example, that makes the song hit even harder. Think Two Steps Twice by Foals – when they play that live, the swirling buildup before the last chorus kicks in really makes the song.

We love Negz’s performance in this track as well – he almost spits the verses; you can tell he was listening to a lot of rap. His delivery adds so much power to the lyrics and to the aggression of the track. It really does call to bands like Idles and Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, which we love.

And of course, it changed again when we took it to our good friends Ady and Lee of Sugar House Productions over in St Helens to lay it down in their studio. As always, they were full of no-nonsense ideas and the energy really went up a notch over there. We’re buzzing with how it came out.

David: Quavers won’t stop me from ever having to meet this person again, but hopefully I’ve made my feelings known about my opinion of this person, even if they will be clueless to the fact. If they won’t hear it at least you guys will.