Review Fix Exclusive: Nick J Townsend’s WEAK13 Talks Future

Review Fix chats with WEAK13’s Nick J. Townsend, who discusses the band’s creative process, goals for the future and standout song.

Review Fix: How did the band get together?

Nick J.Townsend: I founded the band in my hometown. Kidderminster had a great underground music scene after the millennium and I did my fair share to help forge it but but after having so many musicians coming and going in my own band I decided it was time for change so I kinda moved away to the Black Country in 2010 and had a huge reshuffle; met Wesley Smith and I thought “Wow, what a bassist”. He’s incredible to work with; so creative and we just clicked; we had a lot of the same views on the world; he used to be in a band called Raging Angel and I remembered supporting him once at some small club in the middle of nowhere and the pair of us had this incredible conversation about David Icke. When we first agreed to work together I told him we need to find not just a drummer but an incredible one; so after a month of scouting I heard a rumour that one of the drummers who’d previously caught my eye over the years, Neel Parmar, had just parted ways with his band. There was something special about Neel; a real rock star quality, dangerous, unpredictable, an animal and basically everything I was dreaming of. Members of his last band suggested I should never work with him but I figured that he was in the wrong band. The three of us arranged a band practice in Stourbridge and we tried jamming a fresh tune I’d written called “You Don’t Love Me”; we currently still play that song live in exactly the same way as we did after that first rehearsal because the three of us just nailed it. We all looked at each other and realised we could keep making music like this so let’s go for it.

Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?

Townsend: I do write a lot of the material but its a totally shared process; that may sound weird but let me explain; once Wesley had this bass riff he liked and he recorded a demo of it and showed me; he’d had it for about 8 years and it hadn’t matured into anything, it was mainly the same riff for about 4 minutes; I took it home and thought hard “Great riff but it’s too long and it needs to be a bridge section”. So I wrote music around that one riff, keeping in mind that it needed to be situated in the middle of the song, and two days later “My Last Summer With You” was completely written. Basically I wrote around that riff and created the bulk of the song but it was the initial bass riff that Wesley wrote which inspired me to create the rest of the framework; I didn’t have a starting point till he’d written that riff. That’s just one example; every song is a new challenge. There’s a lot behind every song; some are written in very long and unorthodox ways and others are written fast. I’ve never told Neel how drums should go or sound on a track; me and Wesley often demo ideas and we get a feel for the material but we give Neel total freedom to do anything he wants on a drumkit for a WEAK13 song; he’s a wild drummer; why would I want to tame him?

Review Fix: What’s your standout song? How was it written?

Townsend: The song “Joke” has been more successful than I could have ever imagined at the time of writing it. I was in a real foul mood because an ex-band member had been calling me a joke behind my back; he didn’t take me at all serious as a musician so I locked myself in an empty room for an hour with the plan of writing a song by pacing around without an instrument using only air guitar and my worst Beavis & Butthead voice and vowed to write something superior than anything my former band mate ever could. Honestly, try singing that song like Beavis & Butthead and you can feel how it was actually written. The music video for “Joke” is set in Washington DC at the White House and lots of people write to me explaining that the song is such an anthem lyrically about everything that’s wrong in the world of politics, that politicians are a total joke and that the song is an anthem for people who have no faith in authority figures. However in reality the lyrics to “Joke” were about me being constantly ridiculed by people with less talent than me. The comedy of our rulers. 
Review Fix: What are your goals for 2016?

Townsend: We’ve had consistent great reviews for our debut studio album ‘They Live’ and even though it’s not long been released we have to get working on the follow up album; which will take as long as it takes. We’ve set our own high standard with ‘They Live’ so the fun now is to make another album which blows it away.

Review Fix: How do you want your music to affect people?

Townsend: I’m trying to reprogram the damage caused by the blind monkeys currently trying to dictate the music industry; we have fans tell us that our debut album is the first proper album they’ve related to in years; mainly because so much garbage has been shoved down their throats by the mainstream music press in recent years. I hope, if anything, that our music gives more people the confidence to be themselves and to inspire them to be creative and improve their own lives, the hope that we create for others by having tunes which makes people think afterwards “At last, I’m not on my own” or “Thank god I’m not the only one that has that opinion”. There’s a lot of satire to WEAK13 but there are so many truths we present which many are afraid to face. We’re not afraid.

Review Fix: What’s next?

Townsend: We get a lot of bands copy our ideas so I’ll never be that revealing in an interview and if I do state some future plan then there’s a strategy behind it; there’s always a lot going on behind the scenes and we plan ahead all the time. I create the occasional red herring or smokescreen nowadays because we know that some bands frequently steal a lot of our concepts and will imitate that red herring like clockwork. Once, on Facebook of all things, I asked publicly “Has anyone got a tank I can borrow?” and left it at that. I was inundated with oodles of messages suggesting where I could obtain one then about a week later I start noticing other bands I suspected of foul play publishing photo shoots of them stood by tanks or boasting because they will soon have an amazing tank music video or that they are going to do a small intimate gig in a tank or that all the band members are saving up for their own personal tanks and crap like that and I just think “Ha, yeah…you do that, you all go and waste your time and energy on that; meanwhile I’m making something completely different”.