There's Hope For Us All

Sometimes it’s hard to be a visionary. Just ask Sam Herlihy of Hope Of The States. He fronts a band who are brimming over with the stuff, who look to combine a unique musical outlook with an eye for the unusual when it comes to live performance. Trouble is, they currently find themselves playing the, shall we say, smaller end of the venue spectrum – which can pose a few problems.

“It was a bit of an eye opener when you start playing places like the Barfly in London”, he admits, “and it has been a struggle to get everything across how we wanted to. We’ve always managed but maybe it hasn’t been as impressive as we would have liked, just a sheet taped to a back wall, sort of A4 size. We’re always happy to muddle through and hope people realise we’re making an effort, even if it’s not quite coming off.
“People seem to notice some bizarre Dunkirk spirit as we’ve got Matt and Ed who do the projections clambering around in the roof, trying to hang the projectors. I think people do appreciate the effort and thought it was quite funny to watch”.
While we’ve all got used to – and probably a little sick of – the continuing waves of next big thing hyperbole, Hope Of The States’ two releases so far (the singles ‘Black Dollar Bills’ and ‘Enemies/Friends’) suggest that this could well be the real deal. In a world increasingly dominated by the same old humdrum garage rock, it comes as a breath of fresh air to find a band who aren’t afraid to set their sights a little higher.
“The basic ideas for the songs are not so much from specifics like books and films but try to create a similar atmosphere as much from listening to cool records,” says Sam. “It’s a mixture of all three, not just music. Films and books have an equal influence on them.”
While this has been a potentially tricky area for some in the past, the Chichester six piece are determined not to head down some pretentious blind alley.
“If you’re going to quote anybody then to me it’s more impressive to quote some random bloke on the street as it is to quote some sixth form student politics figure. It just becomes sloganeering and loses all meaning. We’ve never had any urge to wear big badges that say hey we read poncy books, we’re more interested in the atmosphere than covering things in soundbites”.
Nor do they underestimate the importance of staying musically accessible either.
“That’s how we started, playing one note for two hours or something. It just becomes a sort of cul-de-sac. There are plenty of people who can do that stuff a hell of a lot better than we could, just as there a hell of a lot of people who can do three chord punk rock a hell of a lot better. Our thing was always to take the emotional impact and some of the sonic things from the more complex records and condense them into little pop songs”.

Enemies/Friends is out now on Sony