Next Wave #668: Blossoms

Starry-eyed dreamers...

Stockport isn't a big place – it's a tight-knit Northern town, where everyone seems to know each other's business. So when five starry-eyed dreamers began making themselves known on the local music scene, it was inevitable that they would stumble over one another.

“I wouldn't even call it a scene, to be honest,” explains Blossoms singer Tom Ogden. “It's just like, you start a band with your mates from school. The first people you discover making music with, but it's never anything serious. We do local gigs in Stockport pubs and then you venture into Manchester and you end up doing gigs for promoters who want you to sell tickets, so they make a bit of cash. It's not really how you should be in a band, to be honest.”

Desperate for something more, the group began to seek each other out. Forming gradually, the five members who form Blossoms were all eager to find something with more worth, something that would cut through the noise and touch other people. “We wanted to do our own thing and not worry about what anyone else was doing,” he insists. “People started talking about us and then immediately our sound was evolving at a quicker rate. We wanted to have our influences, but not necessarily sound like them. All those little changes can make such a difference.”

Working with James Skelly at his Merseyside studio, Blossoms have quickly developed into something quite special. From their early psychedelic origins the band have introduced other, more modern sounds, while refining their songwriting into something melodic and immediate, but with undoubted depth.

“I just think we wanted to be a band that just sound like Blossoms,” he explains. “Not even necessarily different, because at the end of day our biggest influences are great pop songs, and they're popular for a reason. We want to be popular, we want to be everywhere but obviously you don't want to be the same as everyone else. You've got to have your own individuality but have the mass appeal if you want to take it to where you want to take it.”

Blossoms is rooted in the chemistry, in the trust that can only come from people who know each other inside out. “It's five people and it just works,” he says. “When we get in our rehearsal room and I bring a song in, it just comes to life. It's like a knock on effect. It's organic, nothing's forced. It all seems natural to us, now. It always did from the start, as well.”

“We started it off just for something to do,” the singer adds. “It was never like, we're going to do this, we're going to get a record deal, we're going to take it round the world. Literally, we just love doing it. And then you get the bug from doing it and you think: fucking hell, we can take it somewhere. We really believe in it.”

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Photo Credit: Jack Collins

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