What inspired the name of the band? What are your influences and are they the same as when you started out?
Elephant Takedown as a name came off the back of conversation between Phil and Alex shortly before Ben joined the band as vocalist. There wasn’t any particular catalyst so much as it felt like it rolled off the tongue and gave us a little genre freedom.
Our influences are many and varied. There are probably a core few bands that we all enjoy, Shinedown, Nirvana, and Foo Fighters to name a few, but our personal inspirations are quite disparate. Alex likes progressive metal, bands like Periphery, Phil likes some of the older, more industrial bands like Black Sabbath and Rob Zombie. Simon’s very punk orientated, Blink 182 being one of his favourites, while Ben likes Billy Talent and Enter Shikari.
We’ve found that while it can be a bit of a weakness at times, having such individual tastes does mean that we coalesce more around our own sound. If we tried to write like one of the bands one of us is most inspired by then no one would be behind it.
How do you approach songwriting?
Each song tends to be approached a little differently, though we do definitely have a preference for certain song structures. Sometimes it’s lyrics first, more often it’s guitars or bass first. The music almost always comes together when everyone piles onto the spark of an idea that just happens to pop into existence in the middle of practice, rather than coming with anything prepared in advance. A lot of the time, this means the music that sticks is the stuff written in the shortest time period, because we’ll all be equally enraptured.
In terms of themes, though everyone takes the occasional crack at lyrics, Ben and Alex in particular often swerve towards some of humanity’s stranger tendencies. The human penchants for paranoia, selfishness, and sociopathy make for interesting writing material, in our opinions at least. While the specific subjects vary, those are certainly consistent themes.
Why do you write what you do?
We like high energy music. There’s a lot of enjoyment of music that allows you to dance, or headbang throughout our tastes, even if the bands we enjoy aren’t particularly well connected. That then becomes the aim; what can we write that we’d enjoy playing every night? What would make us dance, sway, sing, or headbang? After that it’s making it flow, or making it a little more interesting and special to us that consumes the remainder of the writing time quite often.
How do you decide what to play live?
We’re quite a young band in terms of the amount of content we have. That means at the moment almost all of it goes into the set list. In terms of how we then arrange those songs, we try to think about how it would flow best. We try to choose songs that ramp up and slow down gradually so that tension builds, then the crowd gets a break after a crescendo or a particularly high energy song. We’ll always try and start and end on something that’s either catchy, or impactful though.
How do you decide what to play live?
We’re quite a young band in terms of the amount of content we have. That means at the moment almost all of it goes into the set list. In terms of how we then arrange those songs, we try to think about how it would flow best. We try to choose songs that ramp up and slow down gradually so that tension builds, then the crowd gets a break after a crescendo or a particularly high energy song. We’ll always try and start and end on something that’s either catchy, or impactful though.
What plans do you have for the future?
We’ve a few plans in the works and a few dreams we’re trying to achieve. We’re very actively working to finish writing our first album. We’ve made great progress towards it and are almost there. Hopefully we’ll be back in the studio in May/June 2022. We’re also working to get a few more shows scheduled at the moment, the local music scene is becoming more active, but we’re also looking to further afield. One of our bigger dreams is to play one of the big festivals, and it is something we’re looking into.