Pigeonholed As Bad Boys By 'Lazy Journalists'

Leeds-bred lads Eagulls made a big splash globally this year with their eponymous debut long-player.

An accomplished (albeit irate) collection of post-punk tunes railing against pretty much whatever you’ve got, Eagulls earned them comparisons to a slew of great bands such as Gang Of Four, Killing Joke, The Sisters Of Mercy and even bigger outfits such as Joy Division, The Smiths and The Cure. But is measuring them solely against other UK bands lazy profiling on the press’s part?

“We listen to a wide variety of music, but I can understand that people pigeonhole us with British bands, because we are British,” chuckles vocalist George Mitchell. “We don’t shy away from our British-ness, and we don’t try and hide our British accent or anything, but I think that a lot of journalism does get quite lazy with people pigeonholing us as ‘bad boys’ and all that, just because our music’s quite loud and ‘angry’ as they say.”

“We don’t shy away from our British-ness.”

In fairness, the album is a fair bit darker in tone than Eagulls’ earlier singles. “It was a subconscious thing to be honest, but around that time I was getting pretty down about just the dead-end life that we were living,” Mitchell continues. “We always wanted to do the band, and it just seemed like everything was pushing us away from it – we had to work in just poor jobs and we were going through the cycle of modern day life, and it just spurred us to write more darker stuff, I suppose. It’s just honest, and it just came out that way.

“[As it turns out] it’s quite strange really, because it’s sort of like we were writing the album thinking that that was the best it was going to get in a way, then everything else happened and we managed to go to all these places and play to all of these different people – it’s like we’ve achieved something, so we can cheer up now.”

“There’s a lot of people who feel like they’ve achieved something because they’re gifted the opportunity.”

Eagulls have always portrayed themselves as having a healthy disregard for all things industry-related, but are they ambitious creatively? “Yeah we want to take over the world!” Mitchell laughs. “Nah, we just want to be creative and write music that we want to experiment with, and push ourselves and try new things. Hopefully people enjoy it. We never really try to think what other people will think about it – we just want to do what we want to do – and it sounds selfish, but we just want to do what’s right and we don’t want anyone to interfere and tell us what to do and what’s right and what’s wrong.

“Obviously now we are a part of the industry, but we do have our own views about certain things. We wouldn’t want to be a band who gets pushed around and told what to do by anyone. There’s a lot of people who feel like they’ve achieved something because they’re gifted the opportunity to be on a record label, and then you see them just lose all identity – that’s not what we’re going to do.”