Ben caught up with Ant and casey from The Futures to talk about their forthcoming free mini album, plans for the future and so much more.

The beginning of 2010 has been very kind to Futures, are you happy with the way everything’s going at the moment?
(Ant West) Yes, it’s been really cool. Things have been happening all the time, one thing always leads to another, so yeah, it’s been really cool so far!

Where would you like to be this time next year?
(Ant) If it continues at this speed…four nights at Wembley! No, we want to be doing a good headline tour, we’ll have brought out our second album, which we start pre-production on when we get home. So I guess just having released our album and a fairly big tour, Manchester Academy 2 sized venues hopefully.

Your new single The Boy Who Cried Wolf is officially released today; can you explain the ideas behind the song?
(Ant) We only remembered that it was released today on the way up! Like most of our songs it’s happy, but it has a message behind it too, it’s got a very poppy feel to it I guess. It’s a song about boys who don’t hang around with girls too long and then it shoots back to the boy who cried wolf. It’s quite a dark song, but it’s real fun to play live.

So you don’t have any plans to celebrate its release tonight?
(Ant) We really should, but we’ve got to go back down to London tomorrow. I think we’re going to save it until the last day of the tour.

(Casey Roarty) We’ve done our fair share of celebrating on this tour already! At the beginning of the tour we hammered it, especially our bassist!

(Ant) And then everyone got ill! George got food poisoning, so we had to cancel Liverpool and Glasgow.

(Casey) All thanks to some mussels risotto! He got a good deal though, it was supposed to be £12, but it ended up being about £7, so he got £5 off food poisoning!

You announced yesterday that your debut mini-album Holiday, will be given away free with the next issue of Rock Sound, how did this come about?
(Ant) First of all they came to us just asking for a page interview, and then the editor heard that we were releasing our album for free and just thought, ‘why not make it the first album free with Rock Sound?’ We’re super excited about it, it sells 25,000 copies.

Do you think you’ll get more from this than you would from releasing it through your website?
(Ant) I think so, because the people who would download it for free would essentially go out and buy it anyway. So I think it’s going to do a lot for us.

This is the first time Rock Sound has done something like this, how does it feel to be involved in this new concept?
(Ant) It’s mad, but it’s really cool. With our old band we always had…not bad luck, but we never had a break like this.

Do you think more bands should follow suit and give their albums away for free?
(Ant) I think it depends on who it is. If you’re a brand new band then it could work for them. We need to get our music out to as many people as possible, so I think it helps that we’re giving it away for free, then more people will be inclined to buy your second album.

Bands such as Canterbury gave their album away for free, but there was an option to name your own price, do you think this is a good method?
(Casey) I think this is definitely a good idea, and if Rock Sound hadn’t approached us we probably would have done it the same way.

In your own words, what can we expect from the mini-album?
(Ant) Erm, I think it’s music that you’d want to wake up to, it’s feel good rock music that makes you want to get up and do shit!

(Casey) We have some darker moments, but it all has a positive message behind everything I guess.

You’ve recently finished doing a couple of dates with Cobra Starship and Boys Like Girls, how were the shows? How did their fans take to you?
(Casey) It was pretty insane, some of the best gigs we’ve ever played. Manchester was pretty insane.

(Ant) Yeah, Leeds was insane too. I ended up smashing my guitar on the floor, but it was amazing!

You have built up a very dedicated group of fans yourselves, you are very approachable guys, do you think it is important to have a good relationship with your fans?
(Ant) Definitely, we set up a street team a couple of months ago which was good because people were willing to help our band. I think it’s really good to have a relationship with fans, that way people will stick with you and tell all of their friends about you. There are a lot of bands that pretend to give a shit about their fans, but when it comes down to it, they don’t actually care.

Are a lot of Futures fans a crossover of Tonight Is Goodbye fans?
(Ant) There are a few.

(Casey) I think our fan base has gotten older as we have.

(Ant) Yeah, there’s a different catchment now, it’s like 18 – 20 year olds, which is cool, because we did some tours that just weren’t right for us, I wouldn’t say we were picking up the wrong type of fans, but now our music is choosing who our fans are, not the image.

When your previous band Tonight Is Goodbye came to an end, was there ever a moment when you thought you wouldn’t make music again?
(Ant) There wasn’t a moment when we thought we wouldn’t make music again, we did split up for a really short amount of time. But we did wonder what was next, we didn’t know whether to go to university or not, but back then we never thought that stuff like this would be happening to us now.

Ant, you’ve got your John Candy side project as well, is this something that has been in the pipeline for a while?
(Ant) It’s just stuff that I do at home, when I’m not writing for this band I write for that. That’s more of just a personal project than anything. It’s just me writing stuff that I don’t get to write with the band.

You’ve stated that a lot of the forthcoming album is about a break up, but you seem to have taken the negatives and turned them around, do you see song writing as a way of dealing with otherwise pent up emotions?
(Ant) Totally. People that know me know that I don’t talk to people about stuff, even girlfriends that I’ve been really close to, I don’t talk to them about anything, I just sit and write it down. It’s a way I can make sense of things, and I think it’s the easiest way. If it turns into a song, that’s cool, but if it doesn’t, it’s still written down. That’s the way I deal with stuff.

What do Futures have planned for the rest of 2010?
(Ant) World domination!

(Casey) We’ve finished writing our album, so the next thing is to record it as soon as possible really. We want to tour at the same time, we just don’t want to stop. We’re going to use anytime we’re not touring to be writing.

(Ant) We’re going back home after this tour to do pre-production, and then we’re deciding whether we should go to the States or not, but yeah, we’ll see!

Interview By Ben Connell