Buffalo Summer
If you go down to the woods today, if it’s in Wales you might find these guys playing and singing and looking… a bit spaced out.
If you go down to the woods today, you might find these guys playing and singing and looking… a bit spaced out…
Andrew Hunt used to be a park ranger. Over beers at London pub the Black Heart, where his band Buffalo Summer will play later, the frontman recounts his National Trust past. “My background was geography, geology,” he explains, “different kind of ‘rock’.”
The Welsh rockers’ new album, Desolation Blue, suggests he sided with the right kind. Cooked up in a remote cottage and recorded at Rockfield Studios, it was created without boundaries. Their southern rock roots come flavoured with heavy grunge, emotionally raw themes and full-tilt party moments, showcased on highlights like If Walls Could Speak. “We let more of our childhood influences come into it, particularly the grunge thing,” says bassist Darren King. “It’s just like any Buffalo record, but we let our teenage selves write a couple of songs.”
Their new album is all kinds of heavy. Featuring appearances from R.E.M’s Peter Buck and The Cadillac Three’s Kelby Ray, Desolation Blue was fuelled by a fiery mix of personal anguish (including “a so-called manager in America who disappeared with five thousand dollars of our band’s income”) and the influence of boyhood heroes like Black Sabbath and Alice In Chains. Not to mention Hunt’s mental health battles – “addressing some of my own issues that I’ve buried, and making something positive out of it.
“We let the heavier stuff come in,” he adds. “It was really about not sticking to a formula.”
South Wales is the new Seattle… It’s been four years since their previous album, the soulful Second Sun, but they haven’t been idle. Hunt has been singing with hard rockers Valhalla Awaits. His brother Gareth, Buffalo Summer’s drummer, also plays in Pearler, and King has a hardcore punk band called Ding Dong Probably. “South Wales is such a small, intimate scene,” Hunt says. “There’s a lot of players and we all jam with each other, there’s a lot of overlap. It’s a bit like Seattle.”
…Swansea especially. “It was a fairly vibrant circuit,” King says. “With regards to classic rock, there was a little bit of that, but there was lots of really cool indie bands, lots of hardcore, lots of metal… Swansea in particular is very Seattle.”
“Swansea was very stoner influenced,” says Hunt. “Queens Of The Stone Age and Kyuss, that sort of thing. Low and slow, that was the Swansea sound. My old band Lethargy [signed to former Classic Rock label Powerage] was a grunge band, but we gigged with bands that sounded like U2, or emo bands. It was very diverse.”
They started out singing hymns… Growing up, Andrew and Gareth listened to their father’s Dire Straits, Budgie and Man records, and they all sang hymns from nursery school age.
“From the age of four, there’s an assembly hall and the kids from all the classes sit down and sing a lot of Welsh hymns,” Andrew explains. “It’s in your DNA. It probably harks back to something a lot more primitive, people gathering round the bonfire and singing songs. The eighties and nineties with Welsh male voice choirs… and then we ended up in bands. There’s definitely a spiritual element to rock’n’roll. It’s primal.”
…then moved on to pubs – and the woods. All the members of Buffalo Summer played in other line-ups before coming together in 2010, and playing their first gigs in their local pub, a haven for local metalheads.
“It’s the only place in town that’ll play that,” Darren says, laughing, “so we’ve all been going there since school. When we started Buffalo Summer we played there virtually every weekend. We funded the first album by playing there. We still rehearse in the basement.”
In the band’s early days they also played parties in the rural stretches of west Wales, on farms or in the woods. “There’s a generator, everyone’s on acid…” Hunt recalls. “That’s like the wild west of Wales.”
It’s all about the music, and also books. Asked about what they’ve read lately, Hunt and King chatter eagerly about their favourite authors, among them Maya Angelou, Stephen King, Jack Keruoac and John Steinbeck – and a lot of Bukowski. “There’s a reference to Charles Bukowski on [Desolation Blue track] Deep Water,” Andrew enthuses. “It’s nihilistic, it’s very graphic, and I just love the way he portrays the dark side of the human psyche.”
Desolation Blue is out now via Silver Lining.