Music
22 May 03

Overdue sensation

Why In Me‘s debut album was well worth the six-year wait.

Six years – in some walks of life it’s a blink of an eye. In music though, it’s a life time. Especially when it takes you six years to get around to releasing your debut album, as British trio InMe have done with their record Overdue Eden – a period all the more amazing when you consider that all three are only just in their early twenties. Mind you, singer Dave McPherson and bassist Joe Morgan have known each other since they were four, with drummer Simon Taylor meeting up with them at school.

“I think it’s cool,” says Dave when we point out that they’ve not been exactly hasty in getting to this position. “There’s a connection between the band members rather than us just doing this for a living”. Joe agrees. “I’d say it was more organic. A lot of people are in bands because they want to make music and they gather like-minded people around them. That’s a cool way of doing it but with our band it’s more about friendship first. We got together very naturally, rather than auditioning people”.

If their experiences have taught them one thing, it’s that, unlike some swaggering would-be rock stars, the position that they now occupy is one to be appreciated.

“For the first six years of the band we were also at school and doing jobs”, Dave explains. “We loved what we did but it was hard. Now that we’ve got this opportunity to make a living from it, we’ve really pushed ourselves and pushed the music to the front”.

Their timing, it has to be said, is immaculate. A few years ago their brand of bruising, occasionally brutal hard rock would have seen them languishing in some sort of metal ghetto with the likes of Fear Factory and Machine Head. Nowadays however, they’re on tour with Feeder and all over the media. Not that they set out to make a crossover album, as Joe points out.

“We really didn’t think about any of the things that a normal band would. We didn’t think about radio, we didn’t think about selling records, we didn’t think about anything like that. We were all about 18 or 19 and we just wanted to put whatever songs we had down and get it sounding really good. It’s very much our record rather than a showbiz record”.