Ivyrise discuss their rise to fame

17 October 2008

Ivyrise are a band who are no strangers to the stage, and have even shared it with rock heavyweights such as Bon Jovi and Kula Shaker. Ahead of the release of their debut album next year, I caught up with humble front-man Ben Falinski to find out about fame, super groups and what its like to play for 25,000 fans.

What have you been getting up to recently, anything exciting?

Well we have just released the new single so the past few weeks have been spent doing promo and interviews and things like that as well as a short UK tour which saw us do a few shows up and down the country. Previously to that we did a show with Bon Jovi at Twickenham which was pretty cool.

Not only have you supported bon Jovi, youve also supported Kula Shaker too, how did these huge bands fans receive you?

Well we were a little bit nervous about Kula Shaker because were a slightly different sound to them but every venue we went to got a fairly big reaction and it was a lot of fun. The Bon Jovi fans were absolutely brilliant and we were quietly confident that they would be nice to us because we like to think were a similar genre of music and it was full when we played too!

Even when we came in to do our sound check there were 25, 000 people there watching us tune up our guitars because you get all these hardcore fans who come in at about 2 in the afternoon and stand at the front watching us sound check and trying to find out who we were.

Wow, how did that come about?

Well we entered a competition about three or four months ago because they were looking for a band to support Bon Jovi on their Lost Highway tour and we entered and our new single was short listed to the last 20 bands and then from there the public voted for us to be the ones to support them! It was quite and experience.

So tell me about the new single youve just released

Its a song called Disguise and its one of the songs that weve been playing now for about a year or so and its basically a three and a half minute commercial rock song. It shows what were about as a band with lots of loud guitars and pianos and nice melodies and its an appropriate starting point for people to get to know us.

Youve been gigging for five years now; why have you only just released your first single?

Well basically the band has gone through various guises over the years because we were at university for three years and we didnt want to do anything whilst we were at university because we wanted to finish up what we were doing there. Then when we all finished studying we moved down to London and spent about 6 months to a year gigging in and around London and then we were picked up by a label about a year ago and since then we have been supporting various bands and a little tour of our own.

We also put out a taster single in April which got to number five in the Indie charts but were now getting to the stage where weve been lucky enough to get alkalis on radio two for the past few weeks so thats been really good and its all looking good.

So if everything goes to plan, where would you like to be in ten years time?

We an average bunch of lads and we have a good team around us and wed like to take it as far as we can and play to as many people as we can. Playing an event like we did with Bon Jovi made us feel really proud and inspired to want to achieve the same kind of thing.

Who do you look up to within the music industry?

In terms of music we all have different interests and have different interests but for me specifically I really look up to Bono and Chris Martin, Im also a big fan of Paul McCartney and all the kind of big names you would associate with the kind of genre were in.

So if you were to make a super group of all the musicians in your genre, who would be in it?

Keith Moon on drums, John Paul Jones on Bass, Bono on lead vocals and our own guitarist Paul Cronin (aka Cro on other guitars. I will be one of their roadies.