THE likes of the 1975, Oasis, The Smiths and Courteeners all began in Manchester, and in 2016, Manchester welcomed a new band, the Delphina Kings, who continue to rise the ranks with their new single Electric.
Lead singer Chris Gibson tells all about the new single, the process it took to release it and what goes on behind the scenes of the Delphina Kings.
“We’ve been together for a year and a half as Delphina Kings, but Andy and I have been writing songs together since we we’re sixteen, and Pete the drummer is my brother,” said Gibson.
“We put a new song out on Friday December 1st, it’s called Electric. It’s self-recorded, self-mixed, self-produced, we’ve gone super DIY on this one,” said Gibson
The lead singer describes how the band use a similar song writing process to David Bowie.
The late singer was known to cut up newspapers, and put the pieces together to make lyrics.
Instead, Gibson cuts and pastes together pieces of Andy’s poems, and Delphina Kings lyrics are born.
“I have to take those bits and pieces and put them back together in a way that doesn’t lose what he was originally trying to say,
“It’s a back and forth between us to make sure we don’t lose his original meaning. The process with the lyrics is always like that,” Gibson explained.
“Generally our lyrics are around themes of love, being drunk or generally being sad. It’s really hard to write a happy song!” He said jokingly.
This is the bands first release since their early 2017 single Lovestruck.
“In terms of the sound, the new song is a different sound.
We’d kind of just turned the corner with Lovestruck, which had a kind of fuzzy, angular sound, and now we’re trying to build on that sound, rather than what we were doing before.”
Chris described Blur as one of the songs main influences, saying: “It’s pop at it’s core, but we wanted to see if we can pull it in weird directions.”
“For the first couple of singles we went in with Sugarhouse, who produce a lot of the bands in the North West,” said Chris.
Sugarhouse are particularly well known for their work with Viola Beach. While the band really enjoy working with them, Chris expressed that as they did almost every step already, Delphina Kings wanted to take the leap into self-producing with this new single.
“The demos were getting so detailed that we just thought why not put that extra bit of effort in and finish the track ourselves.”
He said the band are planning to release an album in the future, once they have built up their local fanbase though single releases and local gigs.
Gibson said: “The dream is to release something every couple of months.
“When you’re at this stage it’s difficult. When you haven’t got the captive audience of a huge artist, you’ve gotta keep trying to build the excitement through singles, to try and keep people’s attention.”
“Once we’ve got people who care enough to invest in an album, we’ll definitely be making one.”
“That seems to be the best way to operate in the new music industry landscape, getting your head around streaming and that sort of thing, everything’s totally changed.”
“We’ve been mostly focussing on Manchester, but in February we’re doing a big show at the Parr Hall in Warrington for Independent Venue Week.
“You’ll go and see a band if you really really care about them, but other than that people just don’t have the time, so it’s nice to do something that supports the independent music scene.”
The music video for Electric is now up on YouTube, which was also recorded and produced solely by the band.
Chris said: “It’s kind of a weird music video. It’s not supposed to be the focus of the song, it’s just a fun thing that we made together!”
“The bands been around for a year and a half but this sound is even newer than that.”
“We’ve always got something new cooking, even when it’s behind the scenes.”
The name of the band is quite unusual, and has an equally unusual back story.
“Our producer ahd a baby, and he was looking for functional ‘Dad shoes.’ He found a horrible pair called Delphian Kings. We thought that would make a great band name. Andy is dislexic so read the name wrong as Delphina Kings and told everyone that’s what we were called.” But they decided Delphina Kings was even better, so the band name was decided.
“The song is on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon and Deezer, not that I’ve ever met anyone who uses Deezer,” he said jokingly.
Tomorrow ? #NewMusic #delphinakings #NewMusicFriday #indiemusic #merseyside #Manchester #music #bbcintroducing #art pic.twitter.com/NPXXnBD5DB
— Delphina Kings (@delphinakings) November 30, 2017
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