Summer. Fun. Friends. Music… these are the important and easy things in life. But in today’s reality, summer often means a lot of rain or too much heat. Fun seems to happen between the free minutes you get at work. You only have time to speak to your friends via Skype, because they all seem to move away to study or to work somehwere else… So there just seems to be one thing to hold onto – Music.
You hear it in your head, on the way to work, when your hanging out, when you’re shopping, chilling with your friends, but the best bit is when you can dance to it. It seems like the solution to a better life and even if finding good music isn’t obvious nowadays, we’ve finally found someone we can have fun with: Villa Cola- a new band from England. Fresh and young; with a sound to move to in your secret life!

Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves? Where do you come from and who are you?
P.B: I am Paul. I live in London. I play bass and record & produce the music.
R.D: I’m Ranya, the lead singer in the band. I come from Quebec.
A.W: I’m Alex. I play drums, but I am not a Machine! I come from Essex.

How did you come together? It can be very difficult to find others with the same tastes and goals?
P.B: I saw an ad on Gumtree, that Ranya had posted asking for a producer. I replied, although i’d never done that sort of music before, and it seems to have worked… Ranya knew Alex from a previous band and when we decided we wanted a drummer, he was the first choice.
R.D: Paul just took my songs and made them better than what I heard in my head, so I figured, I should keep hanging out with him! Then he started writing awesome songs, that I added some vocals too and it was a match made in heaven!

Villa Cola – this is an interesting name for a band? What’s behind it?
P.B: It’s an anagram of ‘Lilac Oval’, which is a pub near where I used to live in Epsom, Surrey that we used to go to a lot.

For somebody, who doesn’t know your music and never has heard it – how would you describe your style and sound?
A.W: It’s music you can dance too.
R.D: Elements of the past and elements of the future combined to make something not quite as good as either!

Where do you produce and record your music? Do you own a studio?
P.B: We produce it at each other’s houses. I have a Macbook Pro and we make everything on that. We use a Focusrite interface to get the sound that we are recording into the computer (vocals and bass) at the best quality we can. The drums up until this point have been programmed, because that is how we started doing stuff, but we are slowly beginning to integrate the drum kit on the new EP.

Who or what inspires you the most?
P.B: David Bowie, The Stones, Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Beatles. Joy Division/New Order, a lot of unknown New-Wave/Cold Wave from the late 70s and early 80s. The sun and good food also play a big part in my creative workflow.
R.D: The past, being in love, the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s. Nostalgia. New York in the late 60′s and “Happenings”. John Hughes, Molly RIngwald but most of all – Jeff Spicoli.
A.W: My brother. The Future. Tommy Lee, Mitch Mitchell, Jamie Oliver, Punk & Hardcore.

London is one of the classical music markets – there are many bands. How difficult is it to get noticed or signed by a record label today?
P.B: I think, its very hard to get noticed, if you are only gigging all over town, but aren’t doing anything else, ie. have no demo for people to hear. We’ve had to put our fingers in a lot of pies to get some sort of recognition and not go down the traditional root of gigging every night of the week. A lot of places have you play alongside bands, that don’t go together, just to get the numbers up so you are never going to be playing to people who actually want to hear your style of music.
R.D: Yeah, we got booed really badly when we opened for this Kiss Tribute act. That was our last gig…
P.B: That’s why we’ve started our own night to get like-minded people together and make sound waves, moods and bodies move as one!

What’s your biggest success to date?
A.W: Our biggest achievement is shooting two videos on super 8. Lots of bands are making videos using old footage, but Paul bought his girlfriend a Leica 8mm camera and we’ve been going through the whole process like they did back in the day!

Where do you see yourselves in 5 years- in your personal life and professionally?
P.B: I live in the present.
R.D: Yeah, I can’t even think about next week.
A.W: Let’s not talk about the future. I turned my back on it!

What’s the next step this year? What’s coming up for you guys?
P.B: As mentioned earlier, we have this night that we’re putting on (www.nakedroyale.com) which will be a monthly event. It has its focus on live visuals as much as on the music. We’ve got VJs all night mixing video to the music.
R.D: Yeah, we met this other band called the Rive Amps (www.myspace.com/riveamps) who have the same outlook on music as we do and it’s just really inspiring to be surrounded by a group of people, who push us and want to work with us.
A.W: We are also going to have a video out on the 30th August for our song “Modern Lovers” which was filmed, directed and edited on an old Super 8 handheld camera by Paul’s girlfriend (www.emmyland.com) who is also VJing at our night.
R.D: Once this first event is out of the way, we will be focusing on our second EP, which has been recorded and is just sitting waiting to be mixed and finalised. The night has taken up so much of our time, that there hasn’t really been room to work on that lately. The release date for that is the 4th October.

Last question – what would happen if somebody took away your instruments and you had to find a new passion? What would you do?
P.B: I would dive head first into typography and invent a new font to take over from Helvetica and conquer the world.
R.D: I’d be a mathematician or a botanist. I would just grow plants.
A.W: I’d be a wig maker.

Sounds funny – thanks for your time!

Website: www.villacola.com

Photos by Emmyland
Interview by Emanuel Sprosec