Delta Mainline Q&A

Your name: 

George Gunn.

Where are you from? 

The band are based in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I’ve lived for the past five years or so.

Name of band: 

Delta Mainline.

Who else is in your band? 

A lot of people. Brothers David (vocals/guitar) and Shaun McLachlan (drums/percussion/synths/vocals), Verity Blanchard (piano/organs/synths/vocals), Gavin King (bass guitar), Greg Walker (percussion/harmonica/effects/Theremin) and last, but certainly not least, William “Willie” Walker (guitar). We’re joined for select gigs by Dr Bruce Michie (brass) who also plays brass on most of the recordings. Quite a mob.

How would your describe yourselves? 

Hard-working and quietly ambitious. Musically: a juke joint band from outer space.

Who are your main influences musically? 

Everyone in the band has their own influences so, as you can imagine, a lot of different elements creep into our overall sound; anything from country and gospel to post-rock and shoegaze. Having said that, we all love Neil Young, The Velvet Underground and Wilco.

What do you hope to achieve in music? 

We’d love to be able to do this full-time. The success of the debut album has given us a good platform to build on, so I don’t see any reason why we can’t achieve that. You’ve got to be willing to think a bit more left-field if you want to be a self-sustaining musician though: gigs and music sales alone don’t pay the bills.

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why? 

Releasing our debut album. It took us literally years to write, record and put together (all independently too) so to see it getting critical acclaim across the board, and from the big boys too, really was something else. We didn’t have any expectations. It’s a beautiful feeling putting years of work into something and seeing it go so well.

And what’s the moment you want to forget? 

Ha, there have been a few. We got sabotaged once. That has to be the winner. Seconds before we were due to go onstage someone pulled out a handful of cables from the desk and mixed up all the faders. Of course, everything sounded horrible. And to compound things further the sound engineers were young students who’d never had to deal with that kind of pressurised situation before. We all felt terrible for them too and ended up abandoning the gig halfway through to a wall of feedback and buzzing. And not the good type of feedback either. We were headlining as well…

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why? 

Dead Beat Blues from our debut album. It’s got all your trademark Delta Mainline elements crammed into four minutes: spacey soundscapes, gospel-tinged vocal harmonies and country rhythms gradually building towards a huge climactic chorus at the end.

Where can we listen to it? 

On our website (where you can also listen to the rest of the album): deltamainline.com/audio/oh-enlightened

Where can we find out more about your music? 

Everything you’ll ever need to know (including links to iTunes and all social media sites) is on our website: deltamainline.com

Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask? 

Yes: we’re going to be recording and releasing a follow-up album later this year. We’ve just been tipped as ‘ones to watch’ by the Scottish press after the “rave reviews” (their words, not ours) we received for our debut.