Review Fix Exclusive: Riveryard’s Simon Holdsworth Talks Goals And More

Review Fix chats with Riveryard’s Simon Holdsworth, who discusses the band’s origin, goals, standout work and more.

Review Fix: How did the project start? 

Simon Holdsworth: The band with it’s current lineup started in January 2018. Dom and Lennon were already playing together before I joined. Their previous singer ran out on them the day before a new year’s eve gig and of course they wouldn’t cancel a big event like that so they asked me to step in. Knowing only a few songs from the set I reluctantly agreed and stayed up all night revising lyrics and hearing a couple of songs for the very first time. The gig went pretty well all things considering. Lennon and I jammed sometimes in high school music class and I met Dom through a friends band at a house party, so we knew we all wanted to take up music professionally and a week later they asked me to join the band. 

Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?

Holdsworth: Dom writes the lyrics, chords and the basic structure of the song which is then brought into our rehersal where Lennon and I work on percussion and bass around the idea. Lyrics are mainly inspired through observations which intertwine with Dom’s everyday life.

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

Holdsworth: Our most successful song so far has been our first release, seaside. It was the first song we ever wrote so we were still testing out the best way to go about writing, but with it being our most listened to single, we must have done something right. Personally, however, I believe our soon to be released song ‘I only wish goodbye’ will be more of a standout song. We went about writing it the same way we do any other, Dom brings in an idea for chords and lyrics and we fit everything else around it, but it is definitely one of our more technical songs to play and one of my favourites to play live. 

Review Fix: What are your goals for 2020?

Holdsworth: With the covid-19 situation we’ve been trying our best to boost our fanbase without being able to gig by focusing more on our social media and releasing our reportoire of songs. Hopefully, by the time we are allowed to gig again, we will have an even stronger fanbase to release our music to. 

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

Holdsworth: We would like our audience to be able to connect with the songs on a personal level. Many of our songs can be interpreted differently by people, we just want our listeners to feel the same passion and feeling that we put into each of our songs. 

Review Fix: What’s next?

Holdsworth: We have 3 more releases planned, the next one being the 28th August with ‘I’ll find you’. As soon we can gig again safely we will get right to it. In the meantime follow our various social media’s to keep updated.  @weareriveryard