After reviewing their fantastic latest album Volume 4 back in our twelfth issue, we talked to Shield Your Eyes frontman Stef Ketteringham to get a more involved look into the band and the way they operate in what can be quite a claustrophobic UK underground rock circuit of familiar faces. For a start, the band spent November transcending the UK altogether and touring Europe to as far flung places as Slovenia, proving that the scene that gave birth to their fuzzy and schizophrenic experimental blues is not the only one that will welcome them. Stef was simultaneously relaxed about the booking of the tour and humble about being given the opportunity to play overseas, saying ‘By the time we go away we'll have a nice tour arranged. Some of it is arranged a long way in advance, some just before going, it’s cool.’ Simultaneously hinting at future plans by mentioning that, ‘it's a real privilege touring in other countries. We're hopefully going to play in Scandanavia for the first time in the spring which is totally good.’ Unfortunately November’s tour has not yet been as thoroughly documented as the recording process for Volume 4, which involved a ferry crossing to Jersey and such choice moments as ‘I took to the deck for the rest of the journey, and kind of crouched down for most of it, holding on to a tap in a kind of foetal state. I was sick a few times and spent a long time thinking how amazing the sick bags they give you can hold puke in (them) without seeping or going soggy, but they just feel like paper.’ For now anyway we can only hope for their European antics to be committed to the annals of the internet and in the meantime have faith that the band are not going to move to Brighton and start singing twee indie-folk ballads lamenting their long lost days at sea.
What with a UK tour in support of Volume 4 lined up for January and another channel hop planned for February to spread their music like a rash the French and Spanish will want to catch, the band have a clear and unrelenting commitment to getting their music heard and a love of playing live. Stef rapidly dismisses any notion of ever having wanted to pack up and go home whilst touring, saying optimistically ‘No that's kinda silly, touring around playing rock music takes you to situations and places you wouldn't fall into any other way, you've got to be able to see the good in that, you can't want every experience to be totally black and white if you know what I mean.’ Playing live is also touched heavily upon by Stef when discussing the frequent change of bass players that the band has experienced in its relatively short life time. Improvisation around, and experimentation with, their recorded material seems to be the main pleasure that the band now take from gigging their music, a pursuit which Stef feels catalysed the departure of their first bassist Toby; ‘He chose to leave at a good time as maybe it was becoming obvious we needed someone who was also able to use improvisation and I suppose a better affinity with proper rock musicianship, which Bav totally has loads of.’ Stef also now attributes the defining sounds of Shield Your Eyes and the way the band wrote songs for their latest album to how they play with their current bass player(s), saying ‘With Bav we started doing a lot more live improvisation, and extending numbers, that kind of thing, loosening up the structures and getting by on signals and stuff like that for changes, and that really passed into the new record too.’ The ability for guitar and drums to adapt to new bass players so quickly is a real testament to the bands musicianship and seems to serve as a way for the two consistent members to keep up a lightning pace of relentless touring when other commitments pull people away. The idea that the Shield Your Eyes chameleon will keep marching onwards whatever form it may take is expanded upon by Stef, when he recalls, ‘We had Sanna in for a tour last Spring and she was grand with not a lot of rehearsals beforehand, and since then Andy and Dan have toured with us and we'd like to write songs with those guys too. So between Dan, Bav and Andy we can operate as a nearly full-time band and just divide the touring up between them as what suits their own lives and their other bands and schedules and work, things like that. I think we're all really into that arrangement, and I really enjoy how we naturally play in slightly different ways with each bassist, it further adds to the interpretive way we want to play our material live.’
As far as their recorded material goes, the band have now released four albums in three years as well as finding time for other musical distractions, like Stef’s solo project Guns Or Knives for instance. When asked whether writing and recording this much music is a strain, Stef disagrees, saying ‘I find the songs quite often write themselves and I totally enjoy the process, as you would hope’ further explaining that being so prolific is less of a conscious decision and more of a modus operandi for Shield Your Eyes; ‘There's no reason why we'd need to take a long time writing even our best music. The ideas usually stem from simple guitar motifs I land on whilst playing unplugged for my own enjoyment, and once I start turning them into songs and take them to the lads we nearly always have them smashed into shape within a couple of hours. We also like to see the numbers as something that can keep changing as we play them live more and more. In our case it suits the context of the band; an album a year and seeing touring to be not just a means but an end in itself. Also, our musical style makes most sense when kind of felt out, and knocked out and not overly thought over or considered, just what flows for us and feels right.’ But that is not to say that the band are careless or thoughtless about what they write, and this shows through clearly in the brilliance of Volume 4 and Stef’s attitude towards artists who look to be tagged as ‘prolific’ for whatever reason; ‘I'm not keen on productivity for productivity's sake when the actual music is mediocre, or of course, just totally pointless shit. I think the world really doesn't need further saturation of mediocre guitar music.’
Finally, we ask Stef what his favourite song from Volume 4 is, on which he is torn between bluesy guitar ballad ‘Glad’ and raucously jerky ‘Tryna Lean A Ladder Up Against The Wind’ because ‘in both cases because I was hoping to capture a certain feel which you can't just practice or engineer towards, and with those numbers I was pleased we managed it.’ Improvisation and change really seems to constitute the entire philosophy of Shield Your Eyes and unsurprisingly these ideals are dragged into the studio too; ‘The songs weren't too over-rehearsed cos (sic) that can definitely be a bad thing when making an album if you want to capture the feel of playing and not just the precision of getting things right.’
If you want surprises, twists and turns and a band influenced by the experimental live excitement created by 1970s giants such as ‘Taste, T2, the original line-up of Thin Lizzy’, we suggest you get Volume 4 down your ear canals repeatedly over Christmas and get as excited as a shaking dog about watching Shield Your Eyes warp it into an even weirder blues gremlin on their January tour.