The Tab interview The Other Tribe

R: Give us a quick introduction to The Other Tribe!
M: We’re a band, there are six of us, and we met through being at different universities in Bristol and seeing each other out, being naughty, on the clubbing scene! We make dance music, basically, sit in the studio writing everything with our live element in mind. So we write simplistic drum lines so our drummer can do some complicated stuff during shows, simple bass lines for me to play over, obviously add the vocals and Max can do any synth stuff that he wants when we play live.

The Other Tribe in full gear

H: I caught the end of your set at Bestival, how was it playing one of your biggest venues?
M: We actually ended up playing three times at the festival – once as a band and then doing two DJ sets as well. Ollie and I only got to see Stevie Wonder all weekend because we were literally busy for the entire thing! We were in a dressing room stuck between Justice and Sister Sledge though, and we got to talk to Justice’s manager. He was really French so half the band thought he was one of Justice for quite a bit!

H: So has it just been this summer that you’ve really broken out of the Bristol scene and started to gain a lot of recognition?
M: We’d had a good run of smaller festivals last summer and then when we were in the south west playing some larger stages, we thought that was it peaking. Then ‘Skirts’ got picked up and we got label interest and booking agents involved – it all kicked off.

[At this point in the interview, we revealed to Miles that Henry had in fact met one of the members of The Other Tribe’s mums at a garden party in Chichester. This only invoked confusion, so we moved on.]

R: What advice would you have for people trying to get their own music together?
M: Yeah, we didn’t really do it on purpose, we just tried really hard and played as many gigs as possible and tried to make our live show as professional as possible!

R: Who’s idea was it for the costumes for live performance?
M: It was a collective thing that developed over time and there was a bit of a question as to whether it was a good or a bad idea but now we do it every show and it’s become part of the pre-show ritual. We’ve had ideas to actually extend our performance but the main issue we have at the moment is that there isn’t room on stage for extra performers. We did a gig in Manchester where halfway through our set, the big bad wolf and three piggies came on stage and started chasing me around which was very weird – they were dressed in really spooky outfits! And it wasn’t even like Halloween! But yeah, we’ve had loads of ideas about having dancers on stage, having fire performers and hula hoop artists. We do our best to go as mental as possible and make ourselves the performance, trying to have the whole audio-visual thing…and other senses like taste and smell are accounted for if you get close enough to the stage!

Miles from The Other Tribe

H: Is there anyone that you are looking to collaborate with right now or do you have a dream collaborator?
M: Well at the moment we’re looking to collaborate with Dr Meaker, we’re going to remix each other’s upcoming singles. We’d love to work with Justin Martin because he is awesome and I’d like to work with Paloma Faith because she is lush!

R: We’ll make that happen.