Apollo Junction: ‘People are wanting good music’

Leeds band Apollo Junction return this week with another taster for their second album, due out in late summer or early autumn.
Apollo JunctionApollo Junction
Apollo Junction

The anthemic On The Ropes is the fourth single that the group have released in the past 12 months.

“We’ve been lucky because, with everything that’s been going on, we’ve been able to continue recording and getting songs out,” says singer Jamie Williamson.

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“Obviously the difficulties of the last year have been incredibly hard for all the bands and the whole music scene, but as a band, putting music out has been our sort of pathway through the middle of it, trying to stay relevant in a way.

“It would be very easy to just disappear, you can’t play any gigs and you might as well go quiet, that’s what a lot of the big bands have done, but the newer, smaller bands have been there. I know with us, we’ve seen ourselves growing in size because of how much engagement we’ve had. People are wanting good music. The news is full of so much miserable stuff at the moment – you’ve got America falling part and our government making a mess of things – what good can happen? There are not many outlets of positivity and music’s been – I think – a positive force in keeping people going.”

On The Ropes is, says Williamson, a song that was “very much written about what’s going on”. “We couldn’t hide away from the fact that the world is in such a weird, dire place, it is on the ropes at the moment, but there’s still that positivity to keep us going on that path to get us through this.”

The new song is one of several tracks that the five-piece recorded with a choir. “We came up with this choral part, just the five of us sitting around a table in the studio and worked out a melody and we were lucky enough to have a choir that we could get in touch with,” explains Williamson. “The members that could come in were sticking to (social distancing) guidelines. We also got a couple of parts down on other songs as well, which sound incredible.”

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Having signed to Leeds label Shed Load Records last year, Apollo Junction were able to release their first album, Mystery, on vinyl – a year after it came out on CD. Now they are “really close” to completing a follow-up, says Williamson. “If we had our way, we’d do it The Beatles’ way and put an album out every nine months, but we know that things don’t quite work like that any more,” he adds. “There’s got to be a campaign behind it. Our management are very good at saying ‘slow down’. We wanted to release this single, for example, in the first week of December; they said, ‘Don’t put this out in December, it’s not a Christmas song’. They’re good at making us sit back and realise that things need to take a bit of time. Album two is ready and we’ve already started building a collection of songs for the next one. The first album took a bit of time but with the second one everything’s been very inspired. It’s a really special album.

Apollo JunctionApollo Junction
Apollo Junction

“There’s a song called Forever which is about Leeds and getting together as a city – we wrote that at the beginning of lockdown when we had no idea that in a year we still wouldn’t be together. Also we had the song Sometimes out which was our first success in terms of streaming, it was picked up by Spotify and Amazon Music and Apple Music, that’s the first one of our tunes that they’ve noticed and put on a playlist. Then Borderlines came out and there were even more social media engagements, people thought it was our first single, they were getting in touch saying ‘I love that song on Spotify, I can’t wait to hear what else you do’, and we were going, ‘You don’t need to wait, we’ve got a debut album sitting there’. In our humble opinion, it’s a really good debut album, but the second album is actually going to knock down doors. I think it’s the best batch of songs we’ve put together in years.”

Much to the band’s delight, they recently had an endorsement on Twitter from Leeds United skipper Liam Cooper as well as a letter of praise from manager Marcelo Bielsa. “The band are big Leeds fans and we’ve had connections with them for a while,” says Williamson. “We’ve played at Elland Road as part of the Josh Warrington fight when it came about on the pitch and we played the a centenary occasion at Elland Road.

“Ben (Hope), our bassist, decided one day to send them the vinyl. This team and the city have inspired so many songs that we wanted them to know that. It somehow made its way to Bielsa and we got a letter saying thank you and he really liked it. Liam Cooper has also been in touch saying that he loved the album as well, so for a Leeds band (to have the support of) the captain of Leeds and Bielsa, who’s the king of Leeds, you can’t really complain.”

On The Ropes is out on Friday January 22. The band’s gig at The Warehouse, Leeds has been postponed to November 27. www.apollojunction.com

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