On the crest of a new wave

Band are happy to be back on the road with Glasgow and Edinburgh gigs and a new single

SCOTLAND’S The Ninth Wave continue to make a splash.

The Glasgow band’s second album, out next year, looks like it will be a huge step up judging by singles Piece and Pound Coins and What Makes You a Man.

The group – Haydn ParkPatterson (guitar, vocals), Millie Kidd (bass, vocals), Kyalo Searle-Mbullu (keys) and Calum Stewart (drums) – are playing The Great Western festival in Glasgow tomorrow with a line-up including Arab Strap and Anna Meredith. They will also be playing Edinburgh’s Great Eastern on November 27.

Millie talks about the past present and future:

How does it feel to be back playing live?

The feeling is indescribable. We’ve just got back from the most incredible UK tour we could have asked for – you forget there are actually real people who want to spend their precious time and money to let you soundtrack their night and throw themselves about the place.

Being dour Scots, we kind of assumed we would be playing a tour of empty rooms so to have every room at capacity and hearing everybody screaming every word back was a feeling I will never forget.

Are you excited to be playing The Great Western/Great Eastern?

Very much so. We just did two special nights at Oran Mor for the Glasgow leg of our tour, where we did things a little differently to our usual set-up.

It was a seated spectacle with a ton of extra musicians and reworks of a lot of songs.

Maybe it was a bit cheeky of us to make our hometown crowd sit down and absorb the music instead of letting them go wild, but now is our chance to let off all that steam.

I’m super-excited to see the Edinburgh and Glasgow crowds have their moments of mayhem.

Do you think it’s important to have a festival like this now, especially after the lack of help over the pandemic?

The support for the music industry as a whole was an absolute joke. It was as if our entire livelihoods were seen as a pastime, a hobby that people could go without.

Live music is the most important part of our careers. Having that taken away from us for a year took away a lot of the purpose of our job.

How was lockdown?

Lockdown was one of the hardest years we’ve faced as a band for sure. There were many peaks and troughs, lots of obstacles but tons of rewards, too.

We managed to stay supercreative throughout it and ended up writing and recording an album over the course of the year, but that didn’t come without its difficulties. Being cooped up for so long with no real measurement of your progress can be horrendous for your imposter syndrome. I think you can hear this tension and frustration weaved into a lot of our new material.

How did it feel to be shortlisted for the Scotland Album of the Year award this year for your EP Happy Days?

It was completely unexpected but such a beautiful surprise.