TAT

Angel interviews the UK based punk-rock outfit

TAT is a London, UK, based band comprised for front woman and guitarist Tatiana DeMaria, bassist Nick Kent and drummer Jake Reed, whose MySpace ‘About Me’ section describes them as follows:

“Straight from the Queen’s womb, placenta in hand, TAT gate crashed the UK underground, sold 10,000 records independently, took the money, shacked up with US producers Russ-T Cobb (The Academy Is.., Sevendust, Hot Hot Heat etc) and Dean Dichoso in October and recorded their debut album due out Oct 28th in stores everywhere in the US and Canada!

Why an American? Why the US? It all started with an accidental month on the US Warped tour 2006 where the band, who originally set out to play 8 dates, were offered the rest of the tour totalling 28 dates, scoring them some great interest and opportunities including 2007 support tours with The Bouncing Souls, Me First and The Gimme Gimmes, and NOFX round the UK and Europe which they were lucky enough thanx to the bands themselves.

2006 – 2007 was certainly year and a half for the band, but it was not their first. TAT have been churning out hits for 3 years!
“When we got together as the 3 piece we are today, 3 years ago, getting signed just wasn’t a priority… we had to get good first.” says Tatiana DeMaria the bands’ front woman and songwriter.

And that they did! Playing over 200 hundred shows including supports with The Offspring, Therapy?, an arena tour of Poland, playing Reading Festival 2004 and Download Festival 2005 earning them some great reviews and new friends at radio in the UK and Europe. Their debut single – Peace Sex and Tea charted in the UK’s top 100 as did their second single; Pessimist live from Reading festival, which entered the UK BBC Rock Chart at no 18.

TAT kicked off 2008 performing at SXSW, Austin Texas for the Warped/ AP Int’l showcase in March followed by a touring stint with Bad Religion in California. Gearing up for their debut album release in North America and Canada, TAT continued to tour with 2 months on this year’s Vans Warped Tour, incorporating shows with evergreen Terrace on their days off, a live in the studio performance at KTCL – Area 93.3 in Denver, CO on August 12th, and ending their summer with 2 weeks supporting the legendary Alice Cooper.”

We meet up with this great British punk rock band at the 2008 Warped Tour and a quick interview that can be read below.

CONFRONT: How has your Vans Warped Tour experience been this year?

TATIANA: It’s been a lot of fun.  Special things happen in the sense that we have fun stories to tell between us; all sorts of gossip and things.  Aside from that, just playing great shows and having a great time.  We’ve really enjoyed it.  Fans have been great.  We feel very blessed and very lucky to have such cool people come out and check us out, stick with us and yeah…  it’s been great.

CONFRONT: Can you tell me a little bit about how you guys got together?

TATIANA: We all have different stories of how we got into music and how we got into bands.  Ultimately, we ended up meeting through each other and worked this band out.  That was four years ago.  And here we are, doing Warped Tour, four years later.

CONFRONT: You are just getting discovered here in north-America but what kind of following do you have back in England?

TATIANA: Well, we’ll pack out the Underworld, which I don’t know if you’ve ever been but it really depends.  It’s varies.  We haven’t really done anything in the UK since January; so if you go away and come back, you have different shows.  But I mean on average, three or four hundred people in London.  So it’s cool; it’s fun.

CONFRONT: Obviously Warped Tour is a different crowd than you would get in a regular show but have you found that the North-American audience if different here than in it back home in the UK?

TATIANA: I think that people in general… some people are jaded, some people are not; some people are more open-minded, some people are less open-minded.  I think if you have a bunch of people come to a show and listen to music it’s pretty much the same.  It’s more when you put our music in front of people, some might like us some might not.  It’s the same kind of thing that every band experiences.  But I think as far as market goes, that’s where it really varies.  People themselves tend to be human and if they dig music, they dig music.  If they like us, then they like us.  It’s a pot-shot wherever you go in the world really.

CONFRONT: Are there any bands that you have discovered on the 2008 Warped that you might not have heard of were it not for this tour?

TATIANA: The Ore Ska Band…  The Aggrolites.

CONFRONT: Everyone has been mentioning them this tour.

TATIANA: yeah, from Japan.  They are great.  Farwell, they are on our stage and they’re really cool.  There’s a bum load of great bands on this tour.

CONFRONT:  What are your plans for after the Warped Tour?  Are you going back home?

TATIANA: Umm, no.  We have another tour in the moment which we’ve just confirmed.  I don’t know if I can say until we put up our dates but it’s a really big tour which is cool.  We are also going to be on the MxPx tour.  Then we are gonna do Canada again as well- something like ten Canadian dates and a couple more North-American dates and takes us up to October.  Our album comes out on October 28^th, 2008.

CONFRONT: Is this the band’s first album?

TATIANA: Yeah it is.  It took us four years to shoot it out.

CONFRONT: Why four years?

TATIANA: Well we had to get tight as a band.  We had to sort out our touring; then we didn’t have the money to do it.  Then we didn’t have the means to put it out or know how to put it out.  We had this [Do It Yourself] journey since day one and in 2006 we got the support of bands like NoFx, the Gimme Gimmes and the Bouncing Souls; which we did those tours in Europe in our second year as a band.  Then the third year we recorded the album and got back out there.  It takes time to get everything together and we did it the organic way.

CONFRONT: We have a few questions that we ask everybody.  The first of which is: What were your first and last albums purchases?

TATIANA: I think my first album was ‘Dance Club 4′ and it was shit hot.  I was seven years old and it was awesome.  And there was like ‘Top Dance 14′ and it was wicked; it had this track called Libido and it was just like this porno track.  And one day I got all my teacher’s voices and recorded them and put them on tape with all the “unn, unnn, unnn” in between and put it over the microphone in school.  Anyways, so that was that.  And the last was on the internet the other day but I can’t remember what it was.  I know I bought something good.  I probably just added to the Aggrolites collection to be honest with you.

CONFRONT: First and last concert attended that wasn’t your own?

TATIANA: My first concert was G-Squad and Worlds Apart in Paris when I was about nine.

CONFRONT: (laughing) G-Squad was so huge here.

TATIANA: Oh My God… What a crap band.  The thing is I hated G-Squad but my sister was doing the photos for Worlds Apart and it was like this all day thing and she took me to the arena.  I think it was at Bercy which is funny because we played that a couple of years later.  My first sort of punk concert was Green Day when I was eleven or twelve years old.  And my last concert was… I’ve sort of been avoiding concerts lately to be honest.  Hmm…  I don’t know, I really don’t know.

CONFRONT:  And finally, if everything goes to plan, where do you see yourselves as a band in ten years?

TATIANA: Touring on another album.  I mean ten years passes fast.  It’s already been four years and we’re only on album one.  In ten years we could be on album three in ten years time if everything goes well.  And hopefully we’ll be touring in a bus as opposed to an RV and hopefully we’ll have a couple of roadies and it will be cool.

To learn more about TAT please visit tatness.com.

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