You Me At Six
Misfortune rings a very familiar bell in the lives of English pop-rock quintet You Me At Six. Their original Australian tour plans for 2011 were to support Parkway Drive on their Mix 'n' Mash Tour, but that had to be abandoned due to label commitments for recording their highly anticipated third album. "We were super bummed out about that, because we were finishing up the third album and everything was going really smoothly and then all of a sudden things turned for the worse, drummer Dan Flint explains. "Things went on at our label, and then Josh (Franceschi, vocalist) became really ill and was held in hospital for a little while and in the end we were told: 'you can't do the tour you have to finish this album'. We actually only just finished that process only days ago. So it has taken us a while to do it because of these complications, but now we are at the stage where we are really proud of it and it is definitely the best album we have done so far." In another stroke of bad luck that really rubbed salt into their wounds, the quintet also discovered that their dream support slot alongside Blink-182, who were at the time preparing to tour, was all but gone. This was due to the famous trio's postponement of shows because of their recording commitments for their long awaited return album. "We did get to see Blink 182 at the Reading Festival which we played also, but literally in the same week we had to pull out of the Parkway tour, we were told that the Blink tour was postponed and we wouldn't be doing it. We were understandably really depressed. It was a stressful week and we all thought at that point that being in a band sucked, but everything happens for a reason so screw it. "In essence the fact we got through that tough time proves how far along our band has come. If that happened a year ago, who knows what would have come from it? We've grown up and become quite a solid unit through the years, especially through touring, and we just realised there was nothing we could actually do about it, so the best bet was to look to the future. Sometimes it's better to be in control of your own destiny instead of relying on bands like Blink 182 to tour. We'll sort it out and we'll be alright." Impressively, maintaining a positive demeanour through these obstacles has paid off for the five-piece as You Me At Six enjoyed the accolade of winning the Kerrang Award for Band Of The Year, as well as rectifying their timetable. We now find the band travelling down under for their very own headline tour with support from We The Kings (USA) and Australia's The Mission In Motion. "We have obviously been to Australia before; we played Soundwave as well as did a headline tour last year and it's one of our favourite places that we have ever been to. So we were always badgering our manager and our label about when we could come back. On our previous visits we have been really surprised by how many people were coming to the shows and had actually heard of us, which was completely insane to us. As soon as we found out we couldn't do the Parkway tour we confronted our managers and we made them sort out another tour of Australia for us, because there were people who wanted to see us at those shows that we had to pull out of. Fortunately we are back this soon and it should be great." You Me At Six will perform at Fowlers on Thu 1 Sep.  |
Issue 524
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