By Vanessa B
Helping to bring back guitar-led alt/punk music to the mainstream, Bristol Alt-Rock Quintet Fonzy & Company share their new release ‘The Kids Stay Home’ today and answer a few of our QuickFire Questions.
The heartfelt, spunky and spirited anthem lends itself to influences like The Front Bottoms, Green Day, Teenage Fanclub, The Muffs and Feeder. Giving some background on the song’s message the group shared:
“It describes an outlook of disdain from your fellow man. Because they’re the experienced ones, your take on anything is patronised. This is anybody from parents, bosses, authority figures, anybody who tells you they have the best intentions but uses that power to belittle another view. ‘So blind, we stare’.”
Check out the visualiser for “The Kids Stay Home” and our interview below.
What drives your music?
What really gives our creative juices meaning is giving the listener an experience we used to feel when we had to go out and buy records because you loved or were at least curious about the artist. To have someone come up to us and say the lyrics and what we do in general makes their lives that touch better, we’ve done our job. Not via socials but face to face.
What are your favourite venues?
Most of us have toured internationally or have been around the UK scene a fair bit in previous bands, so it’s definitely a hard choice. Based on staff, crowd, sound and overall experience it’s hard to top The Fiddlers Elbow in Camden playing as Fonzy and Company. Top contenders as individuals though, O2 Islington, King Tuts Scotland and The Joiners Southampton have always been great venues.
Do you have any habits or rituals you go through when trying to write new music?
We aren’t the ritual type. The music should come naturally to us, we have scrapped so many ideas purely because they haven’t maintained our attention. Fonzy tends to write the initial idea and the band add their unique voices to the track as it develops which has really worked well for us.
What do you find the most rewarding part of what you do?
Getting to do what we love is something we don’t take without huge appreciation. We never ask for charity as it’s something we embrace and don’t expect the general public to fund what we enjoy. Finding people who have told us they love what we do is an assurance and an amazing experience, that in itself is rewarding enough.
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
We are gigging all over the UK right now, with videos coming out as well as planning some dates overseas now covid seems to have calmed down. The podcast is doing well so doing more with that. Come have a chat, have a drink, have a laugh.
Photo credits: GLK Media
