This is the first interview from Under Control's new weekly feature.
To start things off, we have interviewed The Ragamuffins when they were doing their mini North East Tour:
The Ragamuffins are sitting in the pub with a list of interview questions in front of them ready to discuss…. Jules is very excited that they serve her favourite strawberry Brothers cider, Brent & Paul are on the pints and Jaggs, the designated driver, has a nice big mug of tea and a chocolate cake, which the others are eyeing up in envy.
How long have you all known each other? How did you meet?
Jaggs and Paul met in early 2008 (Jaggs was searching for a bassist and was fortunate enough to stumble across the talented bassist that is Paul ‘smiler’ Heck), and Jules joined shortly after (she was studying music up north at the time and met Jaggs at a house party. Jaggs was looking for a female keyboard player to join the band. Jules was a female keyboard player looking for a band to join). Brent is the latest addition to the ensemble, joining in late summer 2009. Paul had known him from college so invited him to try out being a Ragamuffin when we were in need of a drummer this summer. Jaggs says “something just clicked, both musically and socially, whenever a new member of the band came in”, and we finally feel like we’ve found our definitive line-up. We all got together through a series of coincidences and mutual friends, but it seems to have worked out perfectly as not only do we all get on fantastically, we seem to really click musically and all bring our own contributions to the music.
What inspired you to make music together?
Music is an important part of all our lives; we would be doing it anyway regardless of whether it’s with each other. We’re happy to have found one another though, and love making music together.
Where have you performed? What are your favourite and least favourite venues?
Our most prestigious gigs probably include headlining the O2 Academy in Liverpool, opening the Made in Europe festival in Italy, playing main stage at Beatherder festival and performing at the Snowbombing festival in Austria. We love playing at The Cavern in Liverpool, and Jaggs counts one gig there as his favourite – a last minute crisis meant a lack of a drummer, but it seemed to work out fine being a three piece, with a packed out audience going wild to the music. Jaggs says that with the crowd participation and claps “the audience was the drummer”!
We don’t want to start slagging off too many venues in case they read this!...but Paul says the Live Rooms in Preston smelt of urine, so we probably wouldn’t rush back there. Jules liked played at Alan McGee’s Death Disco in London in the summer, so hopefully we will return there soon. We all loved playing main stage at Beatherder, but because it was MASSIVE, and made us feel pretty important! Having said that, much as it is exciting playing large festival stages and fancy venues, we all seem to agree that playing to a small crappy venue that’s packed out is preferential to one that is huge but half empty!
What advice do you have for people who want to form their own bands?
Paul says ‘don’t listen to Oasis and The Libertines’ haha. I think he’s referring to the way a lot of unsigned bands we’ve heard have a very similar ‘garage band’ sound (not a reference to the genre just that you can only ever imagine them jamming away in a garage, rather than a proper gig!). It’s important to really think about making a sound that feels comfortable to you and is unique to you, and not feel pressurised to be carbon copy of the band you love most. Try and seek influences from a range of places.
Make sure you’re in a band for the right reasons; because you love making music. It is inevitable that at some point you will be playing to an empty room, in a dingy pub, with a terrible sound system. When we’ve done gigs like this we just go crazy, we never let it faze us, we just go out there and play our hearts out because at the end of the day wherever we’re playing and whoever is watching, we are making music and it’s what we love doing more than anything else (*awww*)
What do you like to do with your time outside of music?
Paul is the manager/captain of a football team which he and Jaggs play in. Jules and Brent went to watch them play yesterday (it was freezing cold, raining a bit and the other footie team won, but still most enjoyable!). Jaggs has an unhealthy obsession with trainers, no one is quite sure how many pairs he owns (he may well not know himself), suffice to say a large percentage of his bedroom is composed of blue and white adidas boxes. Brent is a superstar DJ at the weekends (mmm that’s not really outside music though), and Jules can’t think of anything in her life that doesn’t involve music in some way so can’t really answer the question. We’re a sociable bunch though, and aren’t adverse to the odd beverage and boogie.
We all have various lines of work too. Paul is a teaching assistant at a school in Blackburn, Brent works for a company that sells steel (or something like that?!), Jules works in Music PR by day and is an A&R scout for Split Records by night, and Jaggs makes a living singing/playing guitar in various pubs and bars. Fingers crossed one day our full time jobs will be the band!
