Dizzy meets....The Luka State
The Luka State are a band with an understated soulfulness pounding away behind lead singer Conrad Ellis’ stadium worthy vocals and epic guitars. When I caught up with them last week, they played The Camden Monarch as if it were Glasto. It truly was epic. I sat down and had a chat with them in a chilly beer garden about what’s next for the band who are currently recording with the Manics’ man of sound Dave Eringa.
Who are ya?
Conrad: We come from a small industrial town, a salt mining town, there’s fuck all to do – you either play music or play football – that’s the way of growing up in our town. There’s a lot of towns in England like that – and those are the towns that will churn out some good fucking bands. Jake: In London, a lot of bands are formed to be part of the scene, whereas bands like us and where we're from we don’t have a scene, we create one.
Conrad: I think a message in what you do is important, I mean take Lies, Lies, Lies where in the video I’m losing my mind a bit... It’s about the media and their lies and deceit.
Sam: Then obviously '30 Minute Break' (starring Game of Thrones' Thomas Brodie-Sangster) was much more obvious, about the fact that male domestic violence happens too, and it is just as an important an issue as female domestic violence.
Conrad: The latest one is a bit more fun. We do house parties all the time so this idea sort of fell into place about filming it. It's just us being ourselves, except somebody filmed it.
Whats Next?
Conrad: We're working on the debut album now , and we're happy to sit on that until it's completely right. We've got a load of gigs coming up - we've already done about 30 gigs this year. We're not going to put the album out until it's perfect really.
Jake: There's so many bands like us out there, that are great bands, and they disappear after a year or so because they don't have the money to carry on, so the industry gets monopolised by these Brit School bands but we are lucky that we have people behind us and love what we do as much as we do.
Conrad: At the end of the day... We're a working class band, from a working class town - making rock n roll music and ultimately, we want people to believe in us.