Dolly and The Dinosaur Interview: We've Always Been A Live Band

We caught up with Tom, the bassist of Dolly and The Dinosaur, and asked him a few questions about the band. Read on to discover the ins and outs of the band.

First off i'm very intrigued by the band name, where did this originate from?

We’d like to say that it was creative genius but it wasn’t. For a bit we were pink dinosaur, but that didn’t roll off the tongue nicely. But nah we always wanted dinosaur in there, and Ro’s sister was watching peppa pig and he heard the name there, and here we are.

You've got quite a few demos out already, describe the writing process, who does what?

Ha, the demo is so crappy. We released them in a hurry, just to get music out. We’ve always been more of a live band, so based on feedback to watch us and then hear the demo is pretty naff.

We all play guitar to a reasonable standard, someone usually writes a riff or chord sequence and it’ll be developed collectively, getting extensive parts in to have a complete song. As it stand initial writing and lyricism is probably 50:50 between Adam and myself, but I tend to write more alone, introducing drums and the full band at a later stage.

Out of the demos you've released which is your favourite?

Without - it’s a hard smash, but we’ve some unrecorded bangers.

Do you feel your age hinders your ability to grow or enhances it?

It’s tough cause the bands breaking the scene these days are 19 and upwards, so being 16/17 it can be easy for us to be overlooked, especially when our demos are such shite quality. But we reckon we’ve got current tunes that don’t blindly follow the generic ‘indie’ formula so many bands swear by. It’s just a matter of recording them and releasing them, then the age gap could head start us.

Who would be your dream band to tour with?

It would be mad to support a mega band like the Foos, but we’d be chuffed supporting anyone who just loves it as much as we do, and has a crowd that love it too. We love all forms of music man, I guess that’s what makes us unique.

An O2 academies tour has always been the dream, but shows where people come to see us cause they love the tunes and want to. Not us flexing we’re playing the o2, supporting some shite band in the toilets in front of their family and friends. We’ve played some empty gigs, but when we’re at academy level, support or headline, we’ll pack it out and throw a fucking party.

If you could swap roles with anyone else in the band, who would it be?

We’re all pretty settled, I mean I would love to play guitar live on a couple tracks just to see these hooks I’ve written make people groove with me playing. But that said bass is easier to play in our songs and I’m crap at guitar, so playing bass means I can properly get into it when we’re performing.

Who wears the trousers in the band, or is it an equal weighting?

We all bring our own thing I guess, so in some areas we’ll assert ourselves more, but all decisions are made by all four of us.

We caught you at hadfest, how did you find that show?

Ah it was rad, would’ve been nice to play a later slot cause we don’t usually get to, but yeah we enjoyed ourselves a lot. We had two big gigs the next week so toyed with the setlist a bit, and it seemed to go down well. Our mates Misfires were headlining, so we spoke about biscuits, football and chinese food with them for an hour before we went on. Top lads.

What's been your best show to date?

In March we played Bucks Battle of the Bands, which was a pretty special one. We got through to the final 3 and had to play one more song, and we’d written a newbie for it, knowing that if we nailed it we ought to be in good stead. However the other bands were tight as and hadn’t written their songs 5 days previous. But we played it and won.

We’ve played two support gigs at Facebar in Reading with Misfires and Kevin and the Vandals respectively, both of which were class, the first cause we proved ourselves to a bigger band and the second cause it was super rowdy, we met some cool people and it was the first gig we’d played as a full band in a few weeks.

Is your schedule busy in terms of gigs for the rest of the year?`

Nah not really, we’re focusing on writing and recording at the moment, but stay tuned for a big announcement in the coming week…..