Velofax

Here’s one for you: what do you get if you cross a Frenchman, a Londoner, a couple of Channel Islanders and a whole host of musical flavours ranging from sharp, discerning electro krautrock to groovy, hook-heavy disco funk? You get part-time revolutionaries, Velofax, that’s what.

Ok, so the punchline may be lacking a little punch, but the band themselves definitely aren’t. ‘The best way to appreciate our music is to come and see us live’ claims James Bell, the fella charged with providing the Velofax spasmodic drums. ‘The live set is quite energetic, it gets people moving. We’ve got upbeat numbers and do quite well at winning a crowd over’.

A bold statement indeed, yet one that is totally substantiated. XFM's John Kennedy championed their eclectic electric cause early on, as did the Rough Trade record shops, and, as a result, their hard work reaped its rewards - small independent record label, Maven Records, came looking for their signatures earlier this year. Although it’s not exactly rags to riches, it’s a breakthrough nonetheless.

In days of yore, Velofax were but a small three-piece on the island of Jersey. In order to ‘try to step up a level’, the band performed a strewd relocation exercise to the mainland because ‘for the size of the [Jersey] land mass, there’s a high concentration of bands. The only thing it is lacking is a music industry’. Once in town, they acquired a keyboardist and from there the stringent work ethic fell into place. ‘You have to work your way up in terms of getting gigs and getting your name about. It’s a snowball process, really’.

Several delicious live slots have since materialised alongside the likes of Razorlight, The Futureheads and Datarock. And it’s this propensity towards the stage interpretation that drives the band toward their prog-rock destination. ‘At the moment we are writing songs in rehersals, so we’re writing them in the live format’ explains Bell, ‘for us, now, gigging is the important thing’.

The set up of the band is very conventional – guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, singing – but what they’re trying to achieve is ‘something that has a good sense of rhythm and sounds experimental, yet not run-of-the-mill’. Surely that’s House, Mr Bell? ‘There are definitely influences of dance music in there. Whether it’s with the bass lines or whatever’.

When the output has a myriad connotations the input must, equally, be one of dispersion. Bell calculates this in a simply equation - ‘if you added all our influences together it would be a ridiculous number. The interesting thing about this band is that each individual is different’. And he’s not even joking, either.