With a band name inspired by a line in Toy Story, it’s evident that the quintet Not Today are all about looking on the brighter side of life. Recently released sophomore EP, Headway, is a musical testament to that fact, its 5 tracks bubbling with bright, upbeat effervescence. “When it comes down to it, pop punk is an absolute blast to play,” says vocalist Alex, his PMA unshaken by the crowded state of the UK pop punk community; “The scene might be a little saturated, but we try to make sure that our music isn’t paint by numbers pop punk and has its own character”. Get to know the band better, as they answer the A-Z interview…
A Song Which Made You Want To Make Music: Feeling This by Blink 182. Basically everything off that album. Basically Blink 182 actually.
Best Album Ever Written: Out of all of the undeniably spectacular “Now That’s What I Call Music” albums, “Now That’s What I Call Music:: 62” was pretty defining for us all. We ain’t no hollaback girls.
Craziest Moment You’ve Experienced In The Band: It has to be the Headway EP release show. It was just the craziest crowd we’ve ever played to. People were crowd surfing, there were inflatable animals all over the stage and we had confetti cannons for our last song. We even watched Sam getting crowd surfed whilst playing guitar for the last song!
Deepest Lyrics One Of Your Songs Features: Our acoustic song, These Few Months, tells the story of being lonely after a break-up and missing the person regardless of the things that they did to you. We initially thought Alex wrote this song about Domino’s, except Domino’s has only ever done good things for people so we’ve had to rethink its origin.
Easiest Song You Wrote: This Song Sounded Better In My Head. Within a couple hours of our first jamming at our new practice space, we got this song almost entirely finished!
Favourite Show You’ve Ever Played: Again, our EP release show was absolutely insane. We basically spent all of our time playing in the crowd rather than on the stage! It was one of our first headline shows we’ve played and it’s definitely one we’re gonna be remembering.
Guest You’d Most Like To Feature On Your Record: Jeremy McKinnon. Easily one of the most diverse vocalists around. He gave us a sweet little name drop at the end of Neck Deep’s Kali Ma, which was kind of him.
Happiest Moment You’ve Experienced In The Band: After our EP release show (have we mentioned that too much yet?) we were at the Deadbolt club night and our lead single, Growing Backwards, got played. We were allowed to get on stage with the DJs to sing (badly) and dance (terribly) along to our own song. It was amazing!
Interesting Fact About One Of Your Members: Kristian isn’t actually a human, he’s a very well designed humanoid robot. He’s actually very well constructed, most people don’t even realise he’s 2 tonnes of metal and caffeine until we have to give him his weekly reboot.
Jokes You Have In The Band: Ever since Halloween, Kristian has become “Spook Master Kristian”. He is also the “Overlord of Not Today”. Kristian is basically the only funny one in the band, every single recurring joke we have has started from something he’s said. Simon is also a hairdresser named Sharon. He’s available for bookings!
Kicking Off Your Set Is Best With Which Song: This Sound Sounded Better In My Head. Starting off a set with a song that’s fast paced, has a catchy chorus and 2 breakdowns for everyone to go crazy to really gets us pumped for the rest of the show.
Longest Distance You’ve Travelled To Play A Show: We drove around 200 miles at the beginning of this year to play a show down in Southampton. We met some of our favourite people down there and Kris treated us to a pack of Top Trumps: Horses & Ponies, so we class that trip as a success.
Most Inspiring Musician You’ve Ever Experienced: Andrew Tkaczyk from The Ghost Inside. Watching that video of him playing drums again was beyond inspirational, that guy deserves all the respect in the world.
New Band You’d Recommend: All These Years and On The Open Road. Great bands on the heavier side of pop-punk and absolutely wonderful people.
Opening For This Band Would Be Ideal: Sum 41. Or Four Year Strong. Or Neck Deep. Why can we only pick one?
Place You’d Most Like To Tour: We’re simple people, so a small run around planet Earth would be more than enough for us. Maybe Mars, but we’ve heard the Martians don’t have a big pop punk scene up there.
Quote That You’d Like To Pass On To Readers: “Greetings, traveler.” – Rexxar.
Reason For The Title Of Your Recent/Forthcoming Release: “Headway” was chosen because it’s the most fitting word for how we feel about this EP. We put in a lot of time, effort and drumsticks into making this EP as good as we can and it feels like we’re starting to make headway with getting ourselves known for our music.
See Us Live At: Pheonix Bar, High Wycombe – 16th July
The River Rooms, Stourbridge – 13th November
The Old Days Of Music Were Better Than Those Current, do you agree: We’re going to be safe and/or boring and say both are equally as good. Whilst a lot of great music was wrote either when we were kids or even before we were born, there’s so many great up and coming bands who are doing all these weird and wonderful things within specific genres that’s really breathing new life into new music.
Unusual Merchandise: Enter Shikari giving away condoms named “Johnny Sniper” is definitely up there. What’s stranger than handing out condoms at gigs?!
Variations You’d Like To Do On Any Of Your Songs: We actually had a doom metal version of These Few Months prepared, but unfortunately we forgot to bring our 10 string guitars to record it.
What Bands Have You Seen Live and Regretted: Sam saw Asking Alexandria at Download 2012 during Danny Worsnop’s decline. Too much whisky, horrendous sunburn and a vocalist that seemed very disinterested in playing the show all amalgamated into a terrible decision.
X-rays or any other treatments needed for band related injuries: Mitch cut his hand open during practice once and covered his Telecaster in blood – remnants of that blood is still on the guitar. Like every young adult, the treatment was ignoring it, pretending it didn’t happen and getting a beer.
You could have written any song in history, which would you pick: Happy Birthday. Then we’d get royalties from every single birthday which we could use to buy even more inflatable animals for shows.
Zoo animal that best describes the personality of your band: We are all penguins playing with stones, whilst Simon is the zookeeper stopping us from the throwing stones at each other.
