Issue 53 / March 2015

lot of the Liverpool scene.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever be singing about the Liver
Birds,” says bassist Patrick Hughes on their place as a
‘Liverpool band’, “but I think you do get a lot [from the
city] subconsciously; as opposed to just singing about
the city, you pick up a lot just from being here. There’s
always music, there’s always gigs in Liverpool, always
things to see; you can have Africa Oyé, then you can go
out and see metal gigs. You pick it up.”
The result on record is in a sense indefinable; on
their debut EP proper – November’s self-titled fourtrack
effort – the group careen from synth to accordion
to frenetic, vaudevillian stretches and off-kilter hits to
the heartstrings, and they themselves struggle for the
catch-all adjective. “It’s quite poppy, but it’s not pop…”
offers Patrick. “The influences are quite mixed,” his
brother and drummer Liam adds. Ultimately it’s singer,
keyboardist and chief-songwriter Sean Keogh, brother
to Chris, who makes the best stab at it. “I think we just
want to be weird. Different. There’s no point in not
doing that musically… When we started I just wanted to
be doing something I thought was interesting.”
Interesting is certainly the word, and the group are
unafraid when it comes to flexing their offbeat muscles.
In their younger days Patrick, Sean and Chris were
members of a live ska group, and cut their teeth across
a series of inconsequential toilet-circuit gigs. “We were
all fairly young at that point; we were all under 20. We’d
have to sell X amount of tickets and pay to play. Thinking
of it now it was crazy; they were just taking advantage
of us as we were so young.” The long-term results have
still impacted on their sound, however, particularly in a
ska-influenced offbeat tone to a lot of the tunes. “With
Autumn Leaves Us Blue [lead single from the recent EP],
the time signature is just… weird. Sean’s played it on his
own a few times and people have got up to dance, and
they’ve just not been able to. I like that, though; there’s
gotta be some sort of confusion,” remembers Patrick.
The sense of idiosyncrasy surrounding the group
doesn’t dent their passion for their peers either. As if
their sound wasn’t indefinable enough, there’s the
potential of the group hooking up with a local hip
hop artist; though at the moment it’s a collaboration
that’s in its formative stages. “We’ve been talking about
getting involved with him,” says Patrick of the potential
plans, “maybe jam with him. Just jamming, then we’ll
see what happens. I think it’ll be quite interesting with
our poppy kind of sound and his vocals. That’d be kinda
nice.”
It’s fair to say the group have come a fairly long
way since those early days of ska. Now with a couple
of gigs as a full band under their belts, the group are
fast ascending to the top of the local radar. “It’s good to
have recorded the music, got the buzz and then started
playing it live as opposed to what we used to do in
Liverpool,” points out Patrick of their approach. “We
spent a lot of time doing these crappy gigs – they were
good fun but just in front of our mates. We’d play them
every week and nothing would really happen.”
Until university scattered the group, the two pairs
of brothers had spent almost their entire lives in each
other’s company. “All of us were into music; we all
played in different bands. We all played different gigs
together but people went to uni and stuff and the
bands just stopped,” recalls Patrick. Time passed, shortlived
student bands came and went, until, as Patrick
continues, “There was this time when we were all in the
same place and we started A Lovely War. We did some
gigs together, just me and Sean. It was really good fun
but we needed a band – it felt like there was a lot more
we could do – so it was really good to get Chris playing
guitar and singing, and Liam on drums.”
The fortunes of A Lovely War are undeniably on the
rise, yet the group still retain an animosity for the state
of Britain’s cultural opportunities for unestablished
artists. “Music and art isn’t treated as a commodity like
any other job is, and that’s a problem,” says Sean on
the subject. “We put so much work into this band, and
people can assume that that somehow doesn’t count,”
agrees Patrick. “We’re making money for other people,
and somewhere along the way it’s become acceptable
that that’s just the way it is.” “It’s sold to the bands as if
they’re being given all these opportunities, rather than
‘you’re making us money’,” his brother adds.
“It’s so much easier now to record yourself and get
yourself out there; that’s changed things a lot,” Liam
continues, and it’s a state of affairs that’s helped
immeasurably with his own outfit. It was the video for
Autumn Leaves Us Blue that saw ears initially pricked,
even though they barely had a finalised line-up; since
then, their EP has become a fast favourite for all of
an alternative sensibility, representing the quartet’s
steady rise. As a live backbone begins to assert itself,
we can only hope that ascent is a long and continued
one for these understated instigators of the kind of
individualism this city sorely needs.
soundcloud.com/alovelywar
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