Music
Interview: A Day To Remember are ready to take the UK on
We catch up with Florida genre-mashers A Day To Remember as they prepare for their UK dates.
With last year’s Bad Vibrations album marking the end of a turbulent time for A Day To Remember, their imminent UK and mainland European tour dates are set to be triumphant. Their blend of alternative genres has secured them a dedicated fanbase, and encouraged a suitably varied support line-up including British rising stars Moose Blood, pop-punk international breakthrough band Neck Deep and veterans New Found Glory.
“I’m already here,” A Day To Remember guitarist Neil Westfall reveals of their trip to the UK as he takes a break from preparations. “We’re doing some rehearsals at a space over in Redditch. We flew in this morning, had a nap and now we’re getting ready.”
With that, we asked Neil about things to come as the four bright lights in the alternative world hit large venues and arenas across the country.
How are preparations going?
It’s all been good. We’ve been writing the setlist, getting all our production in order and making sure the show is up to par with what we want to bring to the fans.
What do you think will set it apart from your other trips to the UK?
This is the first time we’ve been able to bring over a full touring rig that we’ve brought to other countries. We had this touring rig when we were on the blink-182 tour in Australia, so we’ve had some time to perfect it. We’ve lived with it for some time now, so when we bring it to the UK and Europe venues it’ll be as good as it can possibly be.
It’s kind of unfortunate for every other country. We kind of used them as guinea pigs, and now it’s perfect we can bring it over here.
It’s also the first time you’ll have a chance to play the new material over here.
Yeah, we’re going to do six songs off of Bad Vibrations.
How have you found the reception to those so far?
It’s been amazing. We got to do pretty much the same setlist in Australia in December, and the reaction was incredible. People were singing along and moving around. It’s as good as you can hope for a new album.
The record marks the end of a difficult time for the band. What does it mean to play this material live?
This is the first album we got in a room to write, and got our emotions out together since Homesick. It’s a really important album to get out and play live, because that’s how it was written. It was written to be played live. To actually get out to show people what these songs are supposed to sound like… It sounds great on album, but live it just has this emotion that’s completely different. To be able to play that and have people react positively to it, it’s such a relief.
You’ve got some big and varied names as support; is this variety important to you as a band?
Yes, for every tour. It’s so important to put together a line-up that represents everything we stand for as a band. We play punk, we play pop, we play hardcore, we play metalcore, and everything in-between. To have a band that represents every one of those genres makes sure that everyone who comes to the show no matter what genre of music they are a fan of, they have something they can get into as well.
It also doesn’t hurt that all of these bands are our friends too. We get to hang out with our friends and play shows; it doesn’t get any better than that.
How would you describe what’s to come?
It’s going to be insanity from the first band until the end of our set. Every band that’s playing is just incredible at what they do. The fact that you can go and the opening band is going to be as intense as the closing band is going to be amazing. It’s going to be really raw and intense show from the beginning to the end.
A Day To Remember, Neck Deep, Moose Blood and New Found Glory will be appearing on the following dates:
22 January – International Arena, Cardiff
23 January – The SSE Hydro, Glasgow
25 January – Barclaycard Arena, Birmingham
27 January – The SSE Arena Wembley, London
28 January – Arena, Leeds
Grab any remaining tickets for the A Day To Remember tour now through Ticketmaster.co.uk.