Interview
Interview
The Molotovs: “Things have been shite for young people for a long time. We’re going to change it.”
Flying the flag for Britain’s disaffected youth, The Molotovs tell us about inspiring kids to start a band and blagging a spot on YUNGBLUD's UK tour
The Molotovs have clearly resonated with Britain’s rock music loving public of late, and the reason is pretty simple to singer/guitarist Matt Cartlidge. “It’s because we mean it.”
He and sibling bassist Issey recently gatecrashed the UK charts with their debut album Wasted On Youth, which reached No.3 after going head-to-head with Lily Allen’s West End Girl and Olivia Dean’s The Art Of Loving. They weren’t able to usurp the aforementioned from the coveted top two spots. Nevertheless, it was a stamp of approval for rock music’s impending mainstream return, as they see it.
Wearing their influences on their sleeves – and through their curated garbs, with Matt even donning Paul Weller’s unmistakable Modfather barnet – The Molotovs have already supported an enviable list of their own idols, including Iggy Pop, Blondie, The Damned and The Libertines. They’ve been touted as the newest entry into Mod rock’s rich lineage. But it’s not like The Molotovs are even snatching the mantle from their forefathers, having recently being pictured with arm-swinging guitar hero Pete Townshend who handed over Matt an almighty Rickenbacker. Some endorsement, that.
So, The Molotovs’ popularity has swelled on social media and beyond thanks to their rampant live performances. But it’s also reignited a belief in buddings acts that they can break through by busking and building a fanbase from the ground up, which nowadays, sadly, seems like the road less travelled.
“From when The Molotovs started to now, it’s been about playing live. Doing it gig by gig. Convincing club after club, pub after pub,” Issey reaffirms during our Zoom conversation amid the hubbub of a loud coffee shop. “So we’ve got this really loyal fanbase that’s grown with us. As a band we’ve done over 600 gigs. We’ve honed it on the London live music circuit. Then touring around the UK, being so young but just getting in our parent’s car and driving around the country. We’ve picked up fans from all over. I think they see us in the ‘old guard’ way of doing it. It’s authentic.”
This grassroots-up approach of grinding out as many performances as humanly possible has impressed both old heads loving the band’s appreciation of punk rock’s heyday, as well as kids their same age – Matt is only 17 and Issey is 19, remarkably. The duo announced their biggest UK tour yet for September this year titled Welcome To Urbia, including a headline date at the O2 Kentish Town Forum in North London. The gig sold out so quickly, they’ve literally just announced a second show at the venue.
Matt and Issey took time out of their hectic schedule to talk about being in-demand, rekindling fans’ passion for ‘real’ rock music, sibling rivalry, and how they blagged the support slot for YUNGBLUD’s forthcoming arena tour.
Wasted On Youth is an age-old insult thrown at the young and reckless. Why did you think it was an appropriate title for the album
Matt: “For exactly that reason. It’s always thrown at the youth as some sort of put down. But the whole point is that this isn’t wasted on youth. We want to make the most of it. It’s an attitude of the youth that you want to shake things up. Things have been shite for young people for a long time. This is an album of hope – it’s a manifesto that things are about to change. We’re going to change it. Young people are about to change it.
Issey: “It’s to inspire young people to take action, to seize the day. To reject apathy. To take control of their lives. To realise that they’re in power.
Matt: “Yeah, Carpe Diem.”
You’ve gone the traditional route in being a band by playing gigs from the get-go. What were your first gigs like, and why would you encourage new bands to get out there?
Matt: “Sh*t. They were sh*t. But you’ve got to do ’em. You’ve got to play your first live gig. Obviously we were bricking it. I’d say to every band, you’re going to be nervous and it’s going to be horrible, but you’ll get the buzz after it. Like, ‘I can’t believe I just did that.’ Then you’ll want to do it again. The nerves wane over time, but then they come back when you do bigger stuff.
Issey: We kind of did our ‘Hamburg years’ when we started off busking. You don’t have the luxury of a crowd paying to see you, monitors, anything to mask the sound, anything like that. You just get the band, the meat and potatoes. When we started playing venues, they were empty. Three men and a dog. But we picked up people from each gig. People gave us better opportunities and we established our reputation for being a great live band.
Matt: It seemed like a luxury when we started playing indoors. All the odds are against you when you’re busking. You’re playing to a load of people who go out with no intention to listen to music, and probably don’t even want to hear your music – they just probably want piece and quiet. You mic stands get blown over, you get rained on.
Issey: He’s going to keep ranting unless you stop him…
Those days are well and truly behind you now. You’re playing O2 Kentish Town Forum, twice, for instance.
Issey: It’s a full circle moment for us. We had another name before The Molotovs which we busked and gigged under. But our first gig under The Molotovs moniker was at the O2 Kentish Town Forum supporting The Libertines. That gave us our first opportunity. We were down in Margate, outside the Albion Rooms, setting up to busk on the beach. It was absolutely pissing it down, buckets. We bumped into Carl [Barat] who said ‘just come up to the studio and play’. We got chatting and he invited us on that tour. We played a 20 minute set as soon as the doors opened. Now we’re doing two nights there. I think one show has already sold out.
Matt: I know it’s sold out. This is the stuff you should know [staring at Issey].
It makes you realise how important it is for musicians to pay it forward. You’re supporting YUNGBLUD on his upcoming tour. It is true you got the gig through a chance meeting with him?
Matt: Yeah, we met him in the Hawley Arms in Camden. It’s his favourite pub, it’s where he drinks in London. I got told he was going to be there serving drinks so we went along, it might be a laugh. I was opposite him in the bar and he goes ‘I love your band’. I goes ‘what?’ and he goes ‘I love your band’. We got chatting a tiny bit, but the pub was swarmed with YUNGBLUD fans wanting Dead Man’s Fingers and coke. He said come upstairs to the afterparty to chat, and he offered us the tour. ‘I wanna get these guys on tour’ [in a Doncaster-ish accent], I wanna get these guys on the roaaad’.
Issey: Because guitar music hasn’t been in vogue for nearly 20 years, since the Arctic Monkeys or whatever, that wave being the last of it, we’ve all got to help each other out. Within the scene, on a grassroots level, we pick our support bands. We want to pick up regional scenes. When big artists like The Libertines and YUNGBLUD give us a chance, it’s paying it forward. The pendulum is swinging back. In the next couple of years we’ll see a big swing towards guitar music again.
You wear your influences on your sleeve proudly as The Molotovs. But are there any bands, perhaps newer bands, that you draw influence from?
Matt: For me, bands like The Cases and Soaked. Soaked definitely, they’re great.
Issey: I love The Lemon Twigs. I saw them at Electric Brixton last time they were here. I love their Beach Boys-y, 60s psychedelic sound. We had a band support us in Manchester called Lemonsuckr. We were really impressed with them, they were brilliant. Other bands we’ve had along on tour like Dream Machine, Sad Street. All these young bands with ambition. We’re still thrashing out who we’re taking along for the Welcome To Urbia tour in September, which is our biggest tour to date capacity-wise. But we’re looking at who we can get locally to support.
For musicians or music lovers, there’s always a song or record that makes a lasting impression the first time you hear it as a kid. What was that for you and why?
Matt: ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones. All my early music experiences stem from what was playing in the car, when my parents were driving us around. Bands like The Undertones. That album, An Anthology. Loads of The Jam, The Kinks obviously. ‘Come Dancing’, that was a massive tune. The early stuff like ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, that sort of thing. Squeeze, ‘Up The Junction’ and ‘Cool For Cats’.
Issey: Even a lot of soul. Growing up travelling around in the car a lot, when it turned on the media player would start and it’d start playing alphabetically. So, Al Wilson’s ‘The Snake’ was on repeat every day. If you dissected me here [points to her forehead], then you’d see that going around my mind. On a personal level, on my own musical journey, I was a huge fan of The Libertines. Listening to Up The Bracket at 14 or 15 years old, that jumped out at me. My nerves were on fire. That record channelled the excitement of youth.
What’s your relationship like outside the band as brother and sister? Presumably you don’t just talk about music constantly, do you?
Matt: It’s the same as inside the band, really.
Issey: We’re really good with each other, to be fair. We’re alright. We’re like fire and ice. At the moment we’re alright. If we do another interview in a week’s time, we might give a very different answer though.
You said earlier you think the pendulum’s going to swing back towards guitar music’s popularity. Do you get a sense of other bands doing it the way you’re doing it?
Matt: Not even bands, but fans as well. I went to see Crystal Palace play last night and got recognised a few times by a lot of young fans. They were like ‘we needs a young band our age like you we can relate to’. There’s a lack of ownership and lack of identity amongst people. They haven’t really got a band to cling on to their age. I’m not knocking these lot, but all the guitar bands that have been big over the past decade or so like Fontaines D.C., Wolf Alice, Wunderhorse: they’re all pushing 30. I’m three years off 20 at the moment, you know. Young fans getting into music, around my age, when people really start becoming fans and listening to music religiously, they’ve got nobody their own age. I don’t resonate with a lot of bands in the current guitar music scene, because there’s nobody my age.
Issey: Talking on a more grassroots level, we had a residency in Soho at Spice Of Life which then turned into my own club night called Incendiary, where I’d put on bands…
Matt: It was rubbish. You couldn’t pay me to go.
Issey: He did actually ask to get paid, the little sh*t.
Matt: She did. £30 a night.
Issey: Stop talking over me. Hush. But as soon as I got into music, and as soon as school didn’t give me a sense of purpose, I was on the circuit all the time watching bands. I’d end up bringing them to my venue and putting them on every week. You’d see loads of young people getting into it, loads of kids coming out of lockdown who had learned the guitar for the first time. As soon as everything opened up, like us, they hit the ground running and started gigging. There’s this new wave.
You’ve said you’re not a political band, so to speak, but do you not think just the fact that you exist, how old you are and where you are in your careers is inherently political?
Matt: I wouldn’t call us a political band, but I write about politics a lot.
Issey: We are political, we just don’t engage in party politics. We don’t want to polarise people that way. We want to promote unity and youth identity, and that in of itself is political. The fact that there’s no youth centres or social spaces other than school for kids to meet. If you don’t fit into that, or feel alienated, we want our gigs to feel like that. We did these group of gigs called ‘Youth Explosion’ which were all-ages, £3 a ticket, super accessible. They were really popular. We’d just 600 kids going feral to live music they’d never witnessed before. You’d see them get into it, the fashion would change – the first week they’d be in Nike Tech fleeces, then a few weeks later they’d come in with suits like Matt’s. You could see they were inspired.
The Molotovs embark on UK tour Welcome To Urbia in September. Find tickets here.
