Apollo Junction: '˜Every single person who comes to see us is appreciated'

Called Always Remember, its release coincided this week with a session on former BBC Radio 1 DJ Janice Long’s show on BBC Radio Wales.

“It wasn’t going to be a single,” says band’s frontman Jamie Williamson. “It was one of those songs that we included in the live set and people suddenly went ‘that’s a really good song’ and we decided to put it out.

“We weren’t actually intending on putting another single out this year. We’ve been so busy and built such a new collection of people that are interested in us that we thought, ‘actually we’ll put one more song out this year’ and early next year hopefully the album is going to be appearing, so all is good.”

The sentiment of the track is ‘us against the world’, Williamson agrees. We wrote it about leeds, about our city. We’re Leeds United fans and we sometimes think leeds gets a bad deal. It’s a song we’d written on and off, it had different forms and it never quite fell into shape, but eventually we finished building it in the studio and it all just came into place when we sat down together and wrote the words.

“When we played the boxing and Leeds United’s end of season awards it’s as much about us but it’s also a bit of an underdog song. It’s about standing up and going, ‘do you know what? We’ve got quite a lot to offer here’ and that sort of sums up Leeds as well, to be honest.”

Playing at Elland Road earlier in the year was like ticking an aim of the band’s bucket list, Williamson says. “When we did it, it was in May and it was such a buzzing night, with the main event being the Josh Warrington fight, and he went out and won it. It was one of those nights where we all sat down afterwards and went ‘That was incredible’. If we ever hit stadium level then we’ll definitely be booking Elland Road. You think small but you dream big, don’t you? It was amazing, a brilliant crowd.”

After performing at several festivals including the Isle of Wight, the band are steadily getting used to the limelight. “We’re getting used to bigger stages but there are still cities that we know we need to go to where we might pull in 50 people and that’s fine,” says Williamson. “Every single person who comes to see us is appreciated and that has always been our motto, whether that’s a few thousand people or a few hundred people then we do what we’ve got to do. It’s good fun.”

The band recently played at Fibbers in York – on the latter occasion supporting Tom Hingley and the Kar-pets – and at the Leopard in Doncaster; now they are looking at booking gigs next year. “We’ve been booked to play at a major festival in London,” Williamson reveals, “so that’s our first big festival of next year in the bag and we’re talking to a few others.”

With interest from record labels, the band seem finally set to release their debut album next year. “It’s finished,” Williamson says. “We keep talking about it. We’ve got another batch of songs that we’ve written since so we said’ ‘Let’s book some studio time’. If someone said ‘We want this song out of your set on the album’ then we could go and do it but in our heads we’ve got an album there.

“We’ll see what happens, but we know we’ve got an album which we’re really happy with.

“We’ve probably got enough songs for a second album and even part of a third. Because there’s five of us writing we always have songs, so fingers crossed.”