Introducing: The Grammatics

The Grammatics may not be a band known well round these parts, but Lincoln is soon to meet them, as they are supporting Bloc Party on their Bloctober Tour, coming to the Engine Shed October 12th.

The Leeds-based band came to be when another band came to a close, and due to being friends in school and college, the band began to form. They also managed to find themselves a cellist, which would make them more like one of their influences, Cursive, an American indie-rock band.

Their name came from a number of factors, as bassist Rory O’Hara explains: “It was partly a result of a club night that Dom, our original drummer, and Owen used to run, and Owen and I used to go to a school called Tadcaster Grammar School. The band came about as the club night drew to a close, so we took the spirit of the club night, put ‘tics’ on the end, and so the Grammatics were born.”

Other than Cursive, the band had many inspirations to keep them going. These included singer-song writer Elliot Smith.

“We love this grandiose type of music, such as The Arcade Fire, and we just wanted to bring back that type of grandiosity.” This is why the four piece added cellist Emilia Ergin, to add an orchestral feel to their music.

The Grammatics are already making quite a name for themselves, having played Leeds and Reading Festival three times in a row, to name just one.

O’Hara adds: “We played Latitude last year, and a few smaller ones too. It’s fun. It’s got to the stage now where the bigger the audience is, the easier I find it, because we’ve been playing smaller shows where you can see the whites of the audience’s eyes, and that’s infinitely more terrifying. [At big festivals] you know people are there but you can’t see individual expressions, but it’s cool, I love it.”

This is the first time the band have toured with Bloc Party, though it could have been the second, as they were originally lined up to tour with Bloc Party at the beginning of the year, and the band are excited at the opportunity.

“We were told that the band actually liked us and requested they could take us on tour. You’d usually expect a bigger band to support them but they insisted on taking us. It’s amazing and very flattering”

O’Hara finished with good advice for new, unsigned bands out there trying to get big: concentrate on the music before heavily promoting themselves.

“Young bands get caught up in having to have a profile and being on top of your Twitter and self-promotion, but we worked on our music for six months before we even played a gig or put it on MySpace. Bands kind of miss the point now that you should be in a band because you love creating music you enjoy, rather than to get signed. I think it’s important to work on your ‘vision’ and work on the music before you start trying to push yourself out there. I think that’s the best thing that we could ever have done.”

Check out The Grammatics video ‘The Vague Archive’ here: