Music Q&A:
Peace

Birmingham band Peace have heralded a new scene in the city and last year’s EP Delicious won them plenty of interest. Their debut album is out in March and they play the NME Awards tour: 8 Feb, Academy, Manchester; 9 Feb, O2 Academy, Leeds; 13 Feb, O2 Academy, Liverpool.

You’re about to open the NME awards tour. Has that translated into a different work ethic or tension? 

We always tend to be worryingly laid back. I guess we’re putting a bit more pressure on ourselves because we want to play some new songs from the album on the NME tour so we have to work a little harder, but at the moment I can’t see any signs of stress.

The video for Bloodshake had a really retro mid-1990s feel to it. How much creative energy do you invest in things like visuals?

We used to do all the artwork, visuals and merchandise ourselves. I dyed hundreds of T-shirts in my mum’s bathtub last year and used to do all our posters and website. Now we work with an artist or directors but still make sure that it’s all our ideas. The idea for the Bloodshake video was just everything we wanted to see in a video at the time so we insisted on doing it.

You covered Justin Bieber’s Beauty And A Beat. Did you enjoy doing it?

It was the bassline that made me want to do it. I had to beg the band to do it. No one Beliebed in me and after days of negative email chains I managed to convince them to at least try it in rehearsal, and then they were like. “this is sick”. It was fun once everyone stopped whinging.

You played a lot of house parties. Will you hang on to that informal approach in order to counter the treadmill of touring?

I wish we could but playing house parties is so stressful and so much stuff gets broken. With the amount of shows we want to do, it makes it much easier with a team of people and a tight schedule. We have to play the game a bit too so that more people can see us.

What’s your favourite rap lyric? 

In that song by Biggie Smalls when he’s all like: “I used to eat sardines for dinner.” I basically eat sardines for dinner all the time so I’m like: “Legend.”