From The Sticks Q&A

Your name:
My name is Rick Butcher.

Where are you from?
I am from the fenland outskirts of a small city called Peterborough in Cambridge. In a small village called Holme, which in fact hardly has roads worth the name and hardly any street lights as well as one shop.. no actually that just closed down so no shops.. and an internet that may as well be powered by hamsters running in a wheel. But what you lack in comforts you gain in the view. It's quite nice walking the wolf at night and actually using the stars as your street lights.

Band name:

The band is called From The Sticks and is clearly quite suited.

Who is in your band?

We're a four piece consisting of myself as vocalist, Tom Ellingworth Guitar, Nick Thompson-bel Bass and Adam Mansfield Drums. We're simply four strangers, three of whom met at an open mic night at a local pub The Duck And Drake and the fourth Nick who we found in the gutter outside somewhere and handed a Bass guitar.. luckily he picked it up very quickly.
We all jelled straight away, yet we didn't really aim for a genre and when we had played a good couple of shows had been classed as an "indie" group by many people. But truthfully we're just winging it and we will never see a band and say let's be like them its just not our style.

How would you describe yourselves?To be honest i could only describe ourselves as four very strange guy's who quickly have grown into brothers. Our music varies from serious topics to not so serious topics that have humour but every song always has an underline message that we rather let people figure out for themselves. If they get it then great and if they don't it doesn't really matter as long as they enjoy it and can tap their feet and hopefully forget the world for a second.

Who are your influences musically?

Our musical influences are always the toughest question to answer. We literally like everything from classical right down to prog-rock. I'd say Tom brings a good jazz feel to things, Nick brings the funk with his pops and slaps, Adam gives a good almost punky beat with a dancey indie twist and well myself I guess my writing style is what gives it all that root indie feel too it, but I sing from the soul even when it may not be classed as 'singing' .

What do you hope to achieve in music?The world. No but seriously, to simply make 40 quid a night and be able to just about survive doing this thing we already live and breath and just know that there's even 50 people out there who get and love what we're doing just as much as we do. Because at the end of the day yeah we write this stuff for ourselves but its for the people who want to listen. We'd be nothing without them. 

What's been the highlight of your career so far?

We played the Willow Fest in our home town and got to headline on the Friday night to thousands of people, most of them probably to drunk to remember our names the next day, but we didn't mind being their one night stands, we'll still plan to play it again this year.

And what's the moment you want to forget?

Urm we had a gig recently for charity and I didn't really think about what I was saying afterwards as I said 'don't forget to hand your money to the guy with the pot' - that was a pretty epic fail.

If you could choose one song to represent your music, what would it be and why?

Hard to say. We really try to switch it up with each song but not so much people think they're listening to a different band. But I guess DMT has become a little bit of a love child for us so we'll go with that considering the recent success with the DIY video for it which I spent six months making out of bits of tissue paper card straw and whatever I could find! 

Where can we listen to it?

You can watch it on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XzW_5SBb1k

Where can we find out more about your music?

You can find links to all of our social networking sites including our itunes via our website www.fromthesticksband.co.uk