Interview With: IST IST

Posted on Tuesday 28th March 2023 at 16:00

Atmospheric yet angular; premiere post punk band IST IST includes band members Adam Houghton (guitar / vocals), Andy Keating (bass), Mat Peters (guitar, synth) and Joel Kay (drums).

The Manchester fourpiece have previously impressed with debut album Architecture and sophomore record The Art of Lying despite the release of both mired by the COVID lockdown. They have released their records on their own label Kind Violence and have gone on to play sell out shows in their home city of London, Bristol, plus many more right across mainland Europe.

Now, IST IST get ready to launch their latest LP Protagonists. Featuring killer singles “Stamp You Out”, “Mary in the Black and White Room” and “Nothing More Nothing Less”, it reveals a confident band on the cusp of a major breakthrough in terms of an artistic statement and commercial success. It drops on Friday 31^st of March – grab your copy HERE.

They have also just opened doors to their very own KVR Studios; a brand new 4,000 square foot community recording and practice space available to all performing artists in the region.

Next month sees IST IST hit the road in support on new album Protagonists and tickets are on sale with Gigantic CLICK HERE to book yours right now!

IST IST are also booked to also join the incredible line up of Tomorrow’s Ghost Festival. The goth rock big weekender hits Whitby Pavilion from Friday 28^th till Sunday 30^th of April, and features headliners Cold Cave and New Model Army plus many more dark delights – tickets available HERE!

We got to speak in depth to Andy Keating ahead of their spring tour about the importance of sticking to DIY distribution, setting up the KVR Studios, what to expect from their next album Protagonists and upcoming tour.

How did you guys meet and get the band started?

We started out as a three piece – we're a four piece now. Me and Adam [Houghton], who is the singer, go way back to sort of 2007 to 2008. We played in a in a punk band called The Casinos. And Joel, our drummer, we'd never played in a band with him before until this, but we kind of just knew him from around and about on the scene. [He] played drums in various bands and I think Adam heard his band that he was in, in at the time on the radio in late 2014. And he just rang up and said “Do you remember Joel from whatever bands he was in?” I was like “Yeah”, he was like, “Oh, we're just gonna go and have a rehearsal on Sunday, if you fancy it?” I was like, “Yeah, cool!”

We started late 2014, wrote a bunch of songs, played our first gig on January 15^th. Became a four piece in 2018. We kind of got to a bit of a crossroads with being a three piece. And it was either just be like Nirvana or get an extra member kind of thing. I’ve not really got a problem with being Nirvana, but it wasn't really what we want him to do. So, we needed someone else to flesh it out. And then Mat [Peters], who's our keyboard player and guitarist as well, worked with Joel in a music shop in Manchester. He was he'd been in bands had disbanded and was looking for something else and just kind of just kind of did that really.

The sloppy comparison that everyone makes is Joy Division. But who else are your big influences?

Adam and Mat are massive Radiohead fans, the electronic elements come from that. I know, it's done to death; “Who's your influence?” And someone says “Radiohead”. Interpol… As a bass player, I grew up listening to loads of punk music really, there was always like punk records in the house. So, I grew up listening to things like The Damned, Stranglers and stuff like that. Me and Adam, when we were in a band previously, loved The Clash.

I think being from Manchester and growing up learning to play instruments, Joy Division and New Order and bands like that they're just part of the fabric and it's one of them. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Growing up listening to alternative music, being from Manchester, you can't really get away from it. It's part of the history. None of us [are] classically trained musicians, we just play by ear. I grew up putting on Joy Division or Stranglers or whatever like that and learning to play along to it. So of course, your style is going to be influenced by that.

But then there's some of the more modern elements post punk that a lot of you start listening to, Protomartyr and Preoccupations and things like that. Don't necessarily know about influences or inspirations, but that sort of thing’s on our radar.

I think in some of the electronic bits of our songs, you can start to hear some of those sort of Radiohead-y bits, Adam and Matt just run with that. They're just kinda like studio songs. Me and Joe, the rhythm section, we'll just fucking back off and let them do their own weird shit.

Obviously, the post punk shadow looms large over Manchester, as you say, before it was slightly obscured by the rise of Madchester in the 80’s. And now post punk is huge again, and it’s become the dominant sound in indie. Why do you think there’s a whole new wave of people getting into it again?

Without becoming particularly political about it, I think music reflects a lot of what the current social climate is. You look at when punk was up and coming, and you look at the sort of governments that were at the time and you look at the sort of economic situations. And then you look at post punk, when it came out sort of ’79, through early 80s, it was almost like a thinking man's punk.

Everyone knows the stories, about that famous Buzzcocks gig at The Free Trade Hall in Manchester where apparently, it was only 40 people there, but about a million people have come out of the woodwork since and go “Oh, I was that and I set up a band because of that!”

I think you've got to look at the sort of current climate and I think post punk always carried – as did punk – that kind of anger with it. Almost a social commentary, but not necessarily explicit in the way it was expressed. It was more sort of a pent-up kind of feeling within. Look at a lot of the world, because post punk is not necessarily just exclusive to the United Kingdom. Look over in America and Canada and places like that, I think it's just a very unstable climate. And I think that just sort of breed something that is a little bit edgier.

Go and look at Britpop. It was it was all quite triumphant. Really. Look at the time. Mid 90’s, a very vibrant government coming into power in the UK and a technology boom. That was quite exciting and in that time in Britain people had their dicks swinging. “This is a great place to be. Everything's lively, everything's on the up!”

Talking about music being determined by wider factors, your debut album Architecture dropped right in the middle of the pandemic. Were you worried it would get missed with everyone focused on by global events?

We announced the album in late January 2020. And at the time the COVID thing was just sporadic news stories really. There's this new flu going around China and you go “Well that happens every fucking three years”. No one really paid any attention to it, I don't think. But obviously, by the time we dropped (Architecture) on the first of May 2020, that was peak lockdown.

Tour got cancelled in late February, early March when it was all this bullshit about things being advisory. We advise you to go to the pub, we advise you don't go to events and stuff. Everyone got spooked so the tour got dropped before that.

The only hurdle to releasing it was a logistical thing. Because it's been fulfilled from a warehouse, we checked with them and said, “Are you closed, or do you still have staff in?” And they said “Yeah, we're doing all sort of social distance stuff. All sorts of hand sanitising” blah, blah, blah, whatever it was at the time. “We can still fulfil your record”. And we just decided, we may as well do it. Just put it out there. Because we'd waited long enough for it, fans have waited long enough for it.

It's funny, because loads of people say, “Architecture is my lockdown record”. And I never think of it like that because we wrote and recorded that in mid to late 2019. I associate certain things like some of the release and whatever with it, but the actual sound of that album and things like that, one of us associate that with lockdown. Whereas you get people after shows buying a copy going “This was my lockdown record!” and you're like “What the fuck?!”

It was released on your own label Kind Violence. That must have added an extra level of stress?

Yeah, a little bit. Pre-sales had been good, though. We’re quite a physical selling band. Digitally, we’re a very, very, very small fish. But we've just got that kind of following that like physical records.

We started out selling sort of homemade CDs, just in like a cardboard sleeve with a stamp or a sticker on the front at gigs. Built up from selling 25 at gigs to 50, then you run out. We built a bit of a cult thing, do these limited releases, they’d sell out and we'd never press any more. With our early EPs and the early singles, we've always said we'll never repress themselves. And as of yet, we've held firm. Whether we do get tempted sometime, I don't know.

Part of the reason for putting out on our own record was we just never really had any offers, or any offers that were particularly suitable. It's not it's not really about the money. And it never started out being about that. But can we front this ourselves? And can we put this out ourselves and fund it ourselves through gigs through selling Limited Edition releases? Through selling merch? The answer is yes, we can.

And that means that we completely own all rights to it. If someone's going to come along, and they go, “Right, we want to sign your next record” and you go “Okay, what's the rights?” (They say) “We own the masters for 10 years” and you go “Well the money better fucking last as a couple years then!” but there's not as much money in the advances. The money that indies or whatever could offer might get us through one year of playing and touring and everything. But after that one year, you’re going “Right, where's the revenue stream?”

Yeah, you've got your touring and so on. Yeah, you've got your own merch. But essentially, you've signed a 10-year-deal to be paid for one year. And it just made sense each time it's coming around to doing another album to go “Well, it's just gonna be on Kind Violence again because that's who we are.” And I mean that that.

Having that sense of independence must be a wonderful feeling. But there must be times when it’s scary being alone, knowing if you did fall flat on your arse there’s no one there to bail you out?

Yeah, there's always there's always the worry. I wouldn't necessarily worry. Me and Adam out of the band, we deal with a lot of the finances of it and stuff like that. We had to get an accountant for VAT purposes and stuff. So, they do all our books.

We're quite considered in the way that we plan things. We're not going to go “Right: we’ve sold 1500 vinyls say of the last album, let's order 4000!” You’re going “Well, let's go to 2200”, summat like that. Because our entire journey has always just been incremental. It’s never just gone BOOSH!

We know the next album is very likely to sell more, because the kind of fans that we have, if they were here yesterday, they're definitely going to be with us tomorrow. But it's kind of incremental. We would rather sell out of a record and repress it or something like an album, then commit absolutely tonnes of money up front of it. And then go, “Oh my God, we have to get this back!”

And now you have just launched KVM Studios community space. That’s going to need a TONNE of cash to start up and support! How did you get involved in that?

We rehearsed along with a lot of other bands… in a big industrial mill in Manchester called Brunswick Mill. I’m gutted it's closed down because so many bands rehearse there, there must have been 70-80 bands in there by the time it was closing down, lots of band’s room sharing. It must have been 40-50 rooms, but it had been it had been run into the ground. Arts Council don't want to fucking know about things like that. I can't remember the names of the guys who were running it. But they were basically putting in their own money.

The Arts Council love middle class endeavours. But if you’re involved in anything like rock music, it’s very hard to get the support.

Yeah, there's not the support. It had been left to crumble. This mill was in Ancoats, it sits in all that the council house area, so gentrification is only just reaching it. People who are getting pushed out of the city centre, low income, or homeless or whatever; a lot of people would sort of congregate around that area. So, it did end up being a place where a lot of people would go in, taking drugs or squatting and things like that. And it's because it's not looked after. And it's because people have been sort of pushed out that way.

So that got taken over for property development – fuck knows who they are going to develop it because it's just crumbling. We were going to be out of a rehearsal room at the end of last month at the end of Feb. Adam got laid off from his job or paid off from his job in November - December so he got a little sort of Golden Handshake there, which has been put into the studio. Our aspirations are to go full time as musicians. We needed a rehearsal studio, we've been able to front the cash to start renting and building our own rehearsal spaces there and we're doing summat good for the Greater Manchester music.

We started looking at trying to find other rehearsal spaces, and just a premium, and you're either paying by the hour, you're either being charged through the nose, or it's in another mill, that in two- or three-years’ time is going to go the exact same way as the one you've just been in. We're a little bit out in the city centre, we're out towards Oldham way, but it's still accessible because of the Ring Road and stuff. But yeah, we're, we're aiming to open in the next couple of weeks we're going to have four or five rooms when we open and by the time it's complete, there's going to be nine rehearsal rooms [and] a photo studio as well so bands can do videos and shots and everything in there.

You didn’t record your next album Protagonists there then?

No, that was recorded at a studio out in Chorley called Milkshed Studios. A little studio just on a farm and it’s only like one live room and a control room. But really, well-equipped studio. The previous two we recorded in a studio that was an industrial estate. And it was good studio and everything. But it almost felt like going to work. Because there's people working next door, there's a carpet shop, there's a tile shop, a bathroom showroom.

Whereas recording this, it was just on a farm, and you'd go out for a smoke or whatever, or you go out to the shop and say hello to these goats and the sheep or whatever. Then I'll go back in and do another take or something. We did it over three weekends, I think three long weekends. Nine days or so. And it was like just going away for a little holiday every, every weekend for three weeks out to the countryside.

Has that fed into the music and changed your style? Has moving from a gritty area to a nice environment led to a change to a big, anthemic sound?

I think there's an element of it that. I can't quantify out how it affected it because the album, (Protagonists) was already written by the time we went in there, there was no real writing going on. It was all meticulously demoed and rehearsed. It was a case of going in and just plugging in and pressing record really.

I think there was a much more relaxed atmosphere. Not that it's ever tense with us, but it didn't feel like being in a waiting room or anything like that. I just sat on a couch somewhere, there was definitely more relaxed vibe.

Joel, our drummer, some of the tracks on the album he nailed on the first take., I think there's about four or five on the album that are just fucking one take wonders. When you listened that you were going “Do you can do any better than that?” and he’s going “Nah”. It wasn't the case of I can't really be arsed to do another take – it genuinely was! A couple of my bass takes were one hit takers. Some of that was just being quite relaxed in that atmosphere. I don't feel it changed the sound, but certainly the process certainly felt a lot more comfortable.

“Stamp You Out” has such a killer bassline. Did you just want to get a big fat sound out there, and that’s how the song was conceived?

On the first album, on Architecture, there's quite a cold, icy sound, and there's not as much of that dirty bass on it. Like I say, I listen to punk music, that's my kind of thing. But I think on each album, speaking for me, writing, and playing it, I think it's more just becoming more relaxed in what we do in who we are, where you go. And I don't feel obliged to necessarily write this style because people expect it. I'm going to plug my bass and I'm just gonna turn the fucking gain up and crunch out a baseline or something and that’s what we’re going to do!

If you go back to the three-piece days, Adam is the singer and rhythm guitarist, singing and playing lead parts and that’s a very, very, very acquired skill not many people can do. So, the bass was always taking the lead on a lot of stuff. Some of the stuff on the new album feels like a little bit of a throwback to the earliest stuff, where the bass needed to feel a lot more space, because we there was no real keyboards or anything like that.

I feel like we all kind of got to the point where this is what we're comfortable doing. Don't feel like there's any sort of preconceptions, or if there are preconceptions of what we sound like, I don't really care what they think. Mat with the keyboards and synth and sort of textures if you like, they're a little bit grander than they were. I think it's just a being more comfortable in what we do.

Bass is a totally underappreciated instrument.

Oh God, yeah!

And people tend to take bass for granted when they listen to music. Everyone is drawn to the singer, a flashy lead guitar riff or even an energetic drummer gets more attention. But do you ever feel overlooked as the bassist?

Yeah, sometimes. You mind of get used to it though, don't you? There's times when I genuinely don't care but it's noted in the mind. Sometimes you read reviews of a festival or something where maybe someone's seeing you for the first time and they’re saying “The vocals sound icy, the drums are really leading it in, the keyboards sweep in and they have such a big sound” and I’m like “What the fuck? Do you want me to turn my amp off and then you can see what I was doing? Do I need to do I need to do that? Do I need to just walk off?” and then you can go “The bass player walks off and it all went to shit!”

Ever tempted to just smash the bass like Paul Simmonon on the London Calling cover?

Yeah, next album cover IST IST in green and pink. But some people who've commented on Facebook or Twitter or something, they go “I'm a bass player and a baseline on such and such is dead good” and it's nice to read it.

But we all say, the best place to be is servants to the song. Adam’s vocal is a big part of our band. We could get away with doing most styles of music really want it because it's blatantly as soon as you hear the voice. Because it's quite a quite a unique voice and style that he's got. Even he goes “I just see it as just another instrument in the band, rather than a focal point”.

It's nice to read things. But you're not really doing it for that though, none of us are doing it for that attention, you're doing it because that is what the song needs.

That begs the question of how you go about writing songs. Do you tend to have a theme and ideas in mind? Or do you just jam something out and apply a concept to it later when you’re happy with the sound?

It kind of varies. Summat like “Stamp You Out”, for example, that was just a rehearsal room song. That got written in a day. Some of them that's all they need. Some songs just arrive very quickly, and they arrived fully formed. And that is it.

In a recent interview that I did, someone said “How did the COVID lockdowns affect you in terms of writing?”

And how DID lockdown affect the writing?

Some songs we've always written remotely anyway… the genesis of it be written remotely and then brought into the rehearsal room and then fleshed out from there. With COVID, it didn't change that much in that we were already used to this kind of remote way of writing. The problem was that was the only way to write for three or four months. When you’re writing like that, interspersed with writing rehearsal or whatever, and if that becomes the only way of writing (you’re thinking) “Fuck me! This is a drag!”

When you listen to the record, Adam and Matt run away with the electronics, a lot of them are a lot of them we don't really record anything but the vocals at the studio. You don't have to be in a recording studio to record keyboards, you just need some decent preamps and a fucking workstation. A lot of the sort of more like digital tracks with like the drum machines and the keyboards, and most of them are recorded anywhere, Adam’s house or the rehearsal room, and then we just take them into the studio, use the studio quality microphones and live room to do the vocals, and they're done.

“Nothing More Nothing Less” Adam wrote probably 60 to 70% of that remotely. Sent it across and then we took it in the rehearsal room and each member kind of put their own spin on the parts they played. But it didn't change massively because we all listened to it and went “Fucking hell! That's good that!”

Is there an overriding theme to the new record?

Adam does all the lyrics, but from what I gather from the lyrics and what I interpret and what he said, it seems to be more about strained relationships, which is strange, because he has a perfectly healthy relationship with his wife and daughter. So, I don’t know what the fuck that’s about. It seems to be about tension or sort of misunderstanding between two sort of protagonists, not necessarily the same people every time.

There's a song that's called “Mary in the Black and White Room”. If you go on Google or Wikipedia and type in, there's something called Knowledge Argument. So that there's a concept that the subject, Mary, is kept in a black and white room, but is given vivid descriptions of what colour looks like. There's an argument that can you then expose that person to (the idea of) colour, can they recognise what it is from just the descriptions that they've had. If they've lived in black and white forever, would descriptions be worthless? So, fuck knows how he tied that into a song, but he did. But then again, some of the lyrics in the verse is sort of about maybe sort of drifting apart and things

I don't really ever get involved in lyrics. I might only when it's being recorded. “Why not try that?” Tweak instead rather than wholesale changes. I leave him to it. There's a track called “The Protagonist” on but we just felt as though a lot of the songs had little sort of stories interwoven, and that there was a lot of different protagonists on the record.

It almost sounds like you’re straying into concept album territory.

Potentially but there's nothing absolutely blatant running through each song. There's just a few common themes and these seem to be about groups of people or two people really, rather than “THIS is about a particular subject matter”.

And can we expect to hear a lot of the new material on the upcoming tour?

We’ll be playing a lot of the tracks of the new album. Of the ten-song album, I think eight of them are sort of suitable for playing live. You'll probably laugh at this, our producer, any songs that don't have like live guitars, or drums, or electronics, he calls up loser songs. On the album, there's two loser songs, which are just drum machines, keyboards and synth, vocals, effects and shit like that. Great songs and they very much work in the, in the flow of the record, but I don't think they really lend themselves to being played live, if you will.

There's peaks and troughs in our sets. But we like, to a degree, to keep the tempo a bit. I just don't really like giving, giving audiences a delay and piss break. Where they go “Fucking hell it's that song. Off to the bar!” We've made that mistake in the past off of some of the earlier EPs. There were some slower ones, and we did use to play them live and you could just see that the audience was gone. Either they didn't like it when it was on the EP or listen to it. Or it just didn't grab them sonically when they were in a gig space.

Sounds like an exciting tour coming our way!

I know it sounds like such a cliche band thing to say but we do genuinely get better every time we tour. After finally getting back out properly touring, last year was our busiest year for gigs. Finally got out and did Europe, we're heading to South by Southwest next week. I think we're arriving at a point where the live show is really good.

Never had a complex as such but I think maybe four or five years ago I might have been, not scared about going up against sort of any big hitters in the industry, but you might if you were being brutally honest with yourself thought there was a quality difference between such and such. Whereas now, I feel I live wise and everything I’d fucking put us up against anyone!