Eastbourne quartet City Of Ashes wrote their debut full length All We Left Behind about, as vocalist Orion Powell calls it “18 months in my life, which could almost have been funny if they weren’t so tragic”. An assured assembly of mini anthems, All We Left Behind was produced by Matt O’Grady (You Me At Six, Deaf Havana, Your Demise) and boasts the band’s recent single drops: swaggering pop rocker ‘Waves’, and slow-burning dark ballad ‘Masks’. You can watch the video for Waves now at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_KpC_0oAXA and you can pick up album All We Left Behind is now. Here they take the A-Z Interview…
A Song Which Made You Want To Make Music: Loads of stuff! Haha. We’re actually in the tour van right now and have just been listening to The Beach Boys ‘I Get Around’ so I guess we’ll go with that.
Best Album Ever Written: Obviously ‘All We Left Behind’ by City of Ashes, available from all digital stores! Haha
Craziest Moment You’ve Experienced In The Band: We were on tour last year in heavy snow and got trapped in the mountains between Sheffield and Manchester. We had no phone signal and had to dig our way out with a pair of hi-hat cymbals as we had no shovel.
Deepest Lyrics One Of Your Songs Features: It’s a pretty deep and personal album to be honest. ‘The Highest Point of Living’ has got to be one of the most raw.
Easiest Song You Wrote: ‘Falling Star’ was certainly the quickest. The song just knew what it wanted to be and fell out really quickly. It was actually the starting point of writing this album so it was pretty poignant for us and took us in a very new direction.
Favourite Show You’ve Ever Played: We’ve played some amazing support slots for bands we’re fans of like InMe, Fei Comodo, Polar, etc, which have been great but I think a real highlight for us was a hometown show we did earlier this year. It was our first sell out to a 250 capacity theatre which was a special moment.
Guest You’d Most Like To Feature On A Your Record: Tom Jones! We’d actually all love that!
Happiest Moment In You’ve Experienced In The Band: Right now! We’re all in a really good place and finally feel like we’re the band we wanted to be. We have an amazing fan base and are beginning to write new music for the future!
Interesting Fact About One Of Your Members: Ori’s short movie ‘Peach’ was part of the Official Selection at the London Short Film Festival 2014. It was such a blast to be a part of!
Jokes You Have In The Band: The amount of times we have to pull over for James to throw up when he’s had a couple of beers.
Kicking Off Your Set Is Best With Which Song: We’ve really been enjoying opening our sets with the first song on our record ‘Ode to Innocence’. It’s a fun rock song and thematically is the introduction to the story of then album.
Longest Distance You’ve Travelled To Play A Show: We left Swansea after a show and had to play the next day in Aberdeen it was a hell of a slog for everyone and was definitely a challenge.
Most Inspiring Musician You’ve Ever Experienced: It’s too hard to say! We all have been inspired by so many artists. All of us have different musicians that fired us up creatively or lifted us out of a dark place. All of them have been massively inspirational to us.
New Band You’d Recommend: Our friends ‘The Effect’. Great band.
Opening For This Band Would Be Ideal: We’d love to open a show with both 30 Seconds to Mars and the Foo Fighters on it. That’d be awesome!
Place You’d Most Like To Tour: The whole world! It’s too hard to narrow down a single place and we have a lot of touring left to do.
Quote That You’d Like To Pass On To Readers: To chase every dream you have! It’s exactly what we do and the experience is unrivalled!
Reason For The Title Of Your Recent/Forthcoming Release: Our album was a very difficult personal journey for Orion. The title ‘All We Left Behind’ was really reflective of all the work that we put in to make this album happen against the odds and finally achieving it and being able to let go of some of the demons that had dogged the process for us.
See Us Live At: During our current UK tour! It’s been a busy two years of tours for us so we’re taking a little quiet time after this one to do a little more writing.
The Old Days Of Music Were Better Than Those Current, do you agree: Every age of music has wonderful and terrible examples of work and this is no exception. The only thing we’d change is to outlaw the awful reality TV shows like X-Factor which is really damaging to the industry creatively and insulting to audiences.
Unusual Merchandise: Not really. Maybe we should start an underwear line?
Variations You’d Like To Do On Any Of Your Songs: We’ve recently been performing a rocked up version of our song ‘Sententia’ at our shows which has been very well received and is proving to be a lot of fun to play!
What Bands Have You Seen Live and Regretted: We’ve seen loads and loads of bands over about 140 or so shows in the last 18 months. Some we enjoyed more than others but there’s always something to learn, even if it’s just what didn’t work.
X-rays or any other treatments needed for band related injuries: Dan has been in and out of hospital so much! Highlights include his broken spine from falling off a roof and having to race him into the emergency room when he had an allergic seizure en route to a show.
You could have written any song in history, which would you pick: The cantina music from Star Wars.
Zoo animal that best describes the personality of your band: The Golden Tamarin. Just like a band on tour they use different sleeping nests each night.
