PARACHUTE FOR GORDO
Parachute For Gordo are on a mission to be unusual. The band’s unique blend of post-rock – just throw all sorts of genre names into a pot and you still might not be close – has won them tour slots around the UK with bands including The 1975 and Fight Like Apes. The band’s name is very probably inspired by one of the first monkeys in space (who sadly died after his parachute failed) and their first two album titles (2012’s Eight Minutes Of Weightlessness and 2014’s Ten Metres Per Second Per Second) seem inspired from the same incident. For their third album, the band eschewed a normal recording environment and decamped to the Austrian mountains. MusicTech caught up with Laura Lee (guitars, pedals), John Harvey (bass and vocals) and Mark Glaister (drums, production, and ‘youthful vigour’) to ask the whys and hows…
“The album’s an example of an idea run amok; it began as one of those ‘What if?’ conversations”
MusicTech: Tell us about how you all got into music making…
John Harvey: I’ve been a bassist in various bands with friends from my teens, pretty much all the way through to now, with varying degrees of non-success. My friend originally made me play bass, because he played guitar and wanted to start a band. I couldn’t play guitar, but I could play one string well enough to play Green Day songs, so I was in.
When I was 17, I decided that guitar was my thing: played for four-to-five hours a day for a year, and managed to get in to do a Music degree.
