Amongst Liars try to "find the positives" with new single

Forming in September last year, Amongst Liars were looking forward to a year of touring and releasing singles in 2020.
Amongst LiarsAmongst Liars
Amongst Liars

At least the singles have happened.

In all other respects, it has been a question of making the best of a bad situation, says Horsham-based Ian George, lead vocalist and guitarist with the Brighton-based band which also brings in members from Eastbourne and Polegate.

Amongst Liars was formed from the ashes of two bands – Saint Apache and Katalina Kicks.

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Both bands were successful in their own right and toured extensively – actually meeting for the first time and sharing the same bill at the venue Rebellion (Manchester) in 2016.

But April 2019 saw the Saint Apache singer split from the band, and Katalina Kicks imploded in July. Ian reached out – and Amongst Liars was formed.

“I was with Katalina Kicks for about eight years,” Ian says, “and the others were from Saint Apache. We played a lot of festivals and supported a lot of quite big names and we had three albums out, but that all fell apart for me in 2019.”

Something similar happened to Saint Apache: “They played the Isle of Wight Festival and then their singer decided he didn’t want to commit to the band anymore.

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“I thought it was a real shame because I had been following the band.

“I sent them a message and said ‘Are you looking for a singer?’ We realised we had the same interest in modern rock songs talking about modern life.

“We got together and we did a few of my old songs and we did some of their old songs, and it just gelled. I remember sitting in my kitchen when my old band fell apart and I was just thinking ‘What am I going to do?’ And they were in the same position. And it just worked. You can’t explain it. It just happened. It was very weird.”

But six months later, things got weirder still: “We got eight songs recorded pretty quickly and said we were going to spend 2020 putting out singles and we were going to tour.

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“That didn’t happen, of course. We released our first single and we played one gig and three weeks later that was that.

“But we just took the attitude that we were trying to take as many positives out of the situation as we could. We were lucky that we had finished recording our songs. We had the material to put out.

“And then with some of the gigs we were going to do, we got offered the chance to do online stuff. We played quite a few of those, and that went down really well. We managed to get a really good online presence off the back of what we were doing.”

Then when lockdown eased, they were able to get back into the studio and recorded another ten or 11 songs. They have now written another ten or 11 songs – and are aiming to get into the studio to record an album in November.

In the meantime, the latest single is Burn The Vision.

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As for band’s name, Ian admits it took a month and a half to come up with it. So many name suggestions had been taken already; so many name suggestions had connotations they simply didn’t want as a band. In the end, they put the initial letters of their first names (Liam, Ian, Adam and Ross together) to get the word Liar, to which they added the word Amongst.

The idea is that anyone listening to the music is Amongst Liam, Ian, Adam and Ross… in other words, Amongst Liars.

“People ask whether it is a political thing, but really it isn’t. But we tend to write songs about what is happening in the world right now, so maybe it is appropriate. Someone pointed out that the name had maybe negative connotations, but that isn’t what it is about.”

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