Edinburgh-based electronic artist Thundermoon need to give their booking agent a bonus. The trio have played some particularly memorable, and big, stages this summer one of the most notable being a support for Faithless at Floors Castle in Kelso in August. Thundermoon formed in 2022 and The Decibel Decoder caught up with Casey Kelly, K Messer and Shaz JamiesonĀ to discover, amongst others things, that an ankle injury was not going to stop them fulfilling their dream support slot.
I have to begin by asking about Thundermoon supporting Faithless at Kelso Castle. How was it? Nerve wracking or exciting?
K: Honestly, it was insane. We’ve been describing it as, we think that something happened when they turned on that Large Hadron Collider and there was a shift in the timeline to where we support Faithless. That’s the only way we can describe it. I would say it was one of the best nights of my life. It was absolutely amazing. I mean the whole sentence “Thundermoon opened for Faithless at a castle.” It’s a bit mad.
Casey: I was really nervous right up to the day of, and then we just all went straight into work mode. It went from “Oh my God, we’re playing with Faithless tomorrow.” to “We’re playing, it’s fine. Let’s get on with it.”
K: When you do your sound check you meet everybody. You meet the stage manager. You’re shown around the site. It does start to feel a bit less nerve wracking. And you’re doing your sound check when no one’s there and you’re like “Do you know what, this will be ok.” And also it’s got to be all right, like, you’ve got to smash it. No matter if you’ve got a broken ankle or not, you’ve got to smash it…..
So you were able to enjoy it?
K: Yeah totally. And actually, there’s quite a lot of build up. We had to be there for 3pm. We weren’t on till 6.30pm. So there’s a lot of time where you’re just waiting. I met the percussionist from Faithless in the backstage toilets! Honestly, we walked in and she was doing her hair and doing a vocal warm up, and just sort of went “Hiya”. We got on really well. Had a great chat, and she came to watch our set, which was totally awesome. So for me anyway, as soon as it started, it was like “Oh, this is awesome.”
Shaz: I also just loved being outside. There’s something different about playing like a gig on a stage outside, and singing to the trees, and the sun was just setting. It’s just a different atmosphere from being in a wee closed cave bar.
Casey: We had to do a new cover, because normally we cover ‘Insomnia’ by Faithless. That’s usually our last song. So we had to come up with a new one, because well, we can’t play Faithless at Faithless! It’s not the done thing.
K: So what else can we play from that era that everybody here loves, and we’re at a castle? ‘Castles In The Sky.’
Shaz you had an ankle injury at the gig. What happened?
Shaz: I jumped off my bed to leave in a hurry, and I landed on some metal structure, and literally had about three seconds of “okay, that was sore”, and then just bounced back up and ran out the door because I was already late! My girlfriend’s actually the band photographer so she was coming along with me. She heard there was a bit of a noise, because Iot’s of things collapsed. She was like “Shaz, are you okay?“, but we just had to go. Using the clutch wasn’t fun, I mean I couldn’t coast the whole way. I think people told me to break my leg as a good luck thing, so actually it’s their fault!
K: But as soon as we had done our set, we sold some merch, we forced Shaz to go to the medic tent. We actually had a hilarious time. It was so funny. You iced it for about an hour, which I think was essential, because as soon as you looked at it, it was purple!
Totally respect that you drove and did the gig – absolutely phenomenal!
And as mentioned your booking agent deserves a bonus for this summer because you also supported Jess Glynn in Helix Park in Falkirk.
Shaz: I mean, I grew up in Falkirk. I never imagined, obviously, as a Falkirk bairn coming back with my super cool band, and singing to a Falkirkian audience. So that was quite wild. You know when you’re somewhere and you look back leading up to where you were, it was a good warm up to playing on big stages because it’s very different. We played a wee Robyn cover. That went down well, even with the folks picking up the litter in their High Vis jackets. They were singing along.
Casey. There was a thunderstorm that day as well. They’d to clear the site about half an hour before we got there. There had been a lightning strike so that was quite dramatic. And when we got off the stage, there was some staff at the back, and one of the women were like “Oh, that was amazing. I’ve sent them (Faithless) the video.” And then we supported Faithless!
Can you tell me a little bit about how you came together to create Thundermoon?
K: In about 2022 it was at a friend’s birthday party in Portobello (in Edinburgh). And I think I just accosted you (Shaz) at the party. And I was like, this is basically happening. So me and Casey have known each other for many years and we were together for five years, which is hilarious to think now. However, this is the lore. And basically we’ve known Shaz for about 10 years through friends. Knowing that Shaz is an absolute demon on the keys and can sing, which we can’t much. During lockdown all music stopped and you couldn’t do anything, you couldn’t go to a gig, you couldn’t even meet up to play music together. I tried to send stuff over to Casey to play over it. I just really wanted to start something. I’ve always been in guitar bands, Riot Grrrl stuff was more what I’d done in the past. And I thought I want to do something more synthy, electronic. So we were on board. And then we thought, right, let’s get Shaz on board as well. We just messed about. Did a few covers. And then we did our first ever gig in our friend’s living room in October 2022 with biscuits and tea and cider probably.
Shaz: But it was a good crowd though! I’ve always been musical but I imagined band life to be quite hard. To do anything as a sort of a collective, it’s sometimes quite difficult to find the sort of people that you can merge with well and create. And it takes a while of being very honest with each other. I think we all came to it with our own history.
Casey: We’re all quite different, and our music tastes are quite different, but it works.
Saying that did it take you a bit of time to work out how to be creative together?
K: Totally! This is where we talk about radical honesty. Oh my God this was totally a journey. Non violent communication.
Sorry, did you say non violent communication?
K: Radical honesty and non violent communication. It’s something that my partner says because she’s got a PhD and she’s much smarter than me! With the radical honesty, it took a bit of work. I don’t have a single relationship like this, where we are just very honest. Even with friends that you’ve had for years, you can’t always be authentic. Nobody takes anything personally in terms of creative ideas and stuff.
Casey: There’s just no time to be entertaining things that we’re just not enjoying. You need to get over it.
K: I’ve maybe had an idea, and then I’ll look at your faces and I’m like “I hate it as well!”.
Shaz: It’s important because we’re making it together for us, but the intention is to share. So it goes out into the ether forever. But then that’s a difficult part of the relationship as well, because you’ve got to get it so we all like it, with multiple opinions about the same thing. Then you’ve also want it to be listenable and enjoyable and accessible for our fans. You have to let go a bit and not be too precious. So it’s this interesting combination of caring but not over thinking. We have had to get there through a bit of radical honesty.
K: It’s good as well, because when something is really working, that’s 100% genuine, and totally banging. And I’ve been proud of how we create music, because it’s all shared whereas, you know, everybody’s completely different. I know that’s not everybody’s process, maybe one person will write the music but I think it definitely felt harder work to get to a stage where we all share it quite equally but it’s really rewarding. And we do try and reflect as well. We’re trying to be better at that, because for a while we never celebrated anything. It was just “What’s the next thing?” “What’s the next thing?”. When I was letting these guys know that we were opening for Faithless, we met at our favourite pub, because we never celebrate anything. And I got us a bottle of Prosecco, and I poured them a glass and they were: “What’s happening? I thought we were chatting about an application.” I was like “No we’re not doing the application. You’ll need this. We’re opening for Faithless.”
You’re working with the DIY record label New Teeth in Leith (Edinburgh). You’ve released two EPs to date.
K: We went away on a retreat and wrote the second EP We Can Do Better Than This. We thought, right we’re going to do three singles from this plus the EP all within one year. We’d been chatting with Dan (Crichton), who is in The Micro Band and has his own project Astroturf Inspector. We’ve been friends with The Micro Band for years and its their label so it came about quite naturally over a conversation. The local community vibe of the label, it really aligns with our values. We were talking to someone from London about a label or management and we thought actually it wasn’t for us. I thought why don’t we speak more with Dan, that could be great. And that worked out really well. Now we’ve done a few things with New Teeth, we go to gigs they do and just what they’re trying to create. They’ve done Kelburn for many years as well.
Shaz: They have a library of really cool artists so they’re used to this, in addition to our own promotion and how we do things. It’s this extra visibility.
Casey: Its nice being part of a collective of really cool people who are also doing the same stuff and encountering the same problems.
K: We’re all musicians all trying to promote our own work and them their own work. It’s not something that’s funded, it’s very much a local DIY community. It’s a label by musicians for musicians. Releasing on that has been a step above just releasing ourselves, a bit of support in that way of, you know, maybe sending out press emails and that sort of thing. So it’s been great,
And are you working on the debut album at the moment?
K: We went away in January this year under the Wolf Moon on a retreat for a week, and we wanted to write an album. We went away with no concept, and we worked on all of that while we were away. We didn’t have much sleep, but there was a hot tub and there was a vegan chippy as well! That was good!
Shaz: And also just lots of work. We take ourselves away to be focused on the task. We workshop things and we force ourselves to be in that creative space, away from distractions and then we reward ourselves afterwards with the hot tub!
K: We came up with our own itinerary so we started every day at I think 9am and, we’re having breakfast and already discussing music and ideas. We do try and force ourselves into creativity through different ways of doing it. But that was super successful, and we came away with the concept and some nice, solid ideas. We have the first track from the album coming out on 24 October called ‘The Spirit, The Law’ via New Teeth Records so we’re excited about that. It’s taken more of a dance vibe than the previous stuff we’ve done, which has been a bit more synth pop, synth wave. This has gone in a dance direction.
Shaz: Our BPM has gone up! And we found an amazing team to work with. I think that we know what we want to do, and so that’s really helpful because we know we want to use them for the whole album.
K: Yeah, we’ve got SHEARS mixing for us, and Katie Tavini of Weird Jungle is mastering it.
And you had the single with Megan Black (‘You. Me’). How did that come about? And doing a collaboration, was that fun bringing another creative into the mix?
Casey: We met Megan because we were doing shows for Sofar Sounds in Edinburgh, they had a pride show and that’s where we met Megan. She is just this amazing character, and we wanted to know: “Who are you? What are you?” She’s brilliant. So we played with her there, and I think we’ve done some other shows with her and she’s just become part of our circle, and we really like supporting each other.
Shaz: It was interesting, to bring someone in from the outside to hear their impression of what we are as well. And she’s so set in her way of music making, teaching her radical honesty!
K: So we set a brief for ourselves. She said, let’s write a queer pop anthem and I feel that that’s what we did, which was awesome. We self recorded it so there was a lot of hanging out here. There was a lot of nights in the Dreadnought (Local pub) after recording, and she’d come to our birthdays and just sort of hanging out. We’d joke and say she’s our Gen Z friend. Yeah, that was really good fun. And the dance was hilarious. We just wanted to mimic that old school 90’s, Saturday Night style dance routine. We just thought why don’t we have one?
Casey: It was too complicated at the beginning, we had to make it a bit easier!
K: So just across the road from where we record here there’s the Pride Bridge in Edinburgh, and it beside the pub that we like to go to. So we thought why not just film the dance routine on the Pride Bridge and just invite anyone along. That was a good laugh.
Shaz: We wanted to celebrate the community, hoping that would spread through the rainbow vein.
Have you got any more gigs on the horizon now? Because you must be a well oiled machine after this summer!
K: We’re playing Saturday 6 December at the Wee Red Bar (Edinburgh) with Queer as Punk Scotland, and our friend Suky runs those gigs, and she does absolutely amazing things within the queer community, and puts on awesome bands and brings touring bands. We’ve meant to do something with Suky before, and the timings not worked out, so we’ve finally got that in so we’re looking forward to that. We’ve got something in October that’s TBA that quite cool that we might be able to share soon as well. I am knackered after all the gigs we’ve done though!
Casey: We meet up every Sunday.
K: We keep getting dragged away from recording by all these other gigs, so we’ve got to try and balance working on the music making, with getting distracted by gigging. But I mean, it’s not been a distraction. It’s been brilliant.
Shaz: It’s also about gigging too isn’t it. We have to make slightly different arrangements. We have to reshape our songs to be able to play them live. So that’s also a really good process as well for us to have to do because we’ve got a gig. It’s a reason to make our songs ready to play. It’s good to do both gigs and record.
For more information on Thundermoon please check their instagram and bandcamp.