[Written by Maria Jeleńska (she/her)]
[Image Credits: Maria Jeleńska]
I spoke with Nekkuro Hána after their gig at the very first Great Western Festival. The festival took place in several venues and pubs in Glasgow’s West End, which gave it a very chill and local feel. Nekkuro Hána spoiled us with a soul-touching mix of psychedelia, beat poetry, rock, and jazz with exceptional, easy-to-fall-in-love-with trumpet sounds. Let’s see what the boys from Nekkuro Hána told me backstage after their gig at The Hug and Pint.
Hi! So are you guys all from the Uni of Glasgow?
Yeah!
How would you define your sound for somebody who’s never heard it before? Your music seems to be very experimental and not like anything I’ve ever heard before.
Our music is a mixture of many different things, because we all listen to different music. I think that especially our earlier songs sound so different than anything else; when we first started to write, somebody would have a chorus idea and then everybody would add something to it, so it would be more chaotic in a sense; now it is more like people coming with a ready whole song or more developed ideas. So, good words to define our music would be “melting pot”, “stew” or maybe “fried rice”.
So you developed your own kind of music style throughout your adventure together. When did you start to play together?
Two years ago, we all lived in Murano [dorms]. Murano was the glue. We all kind of started to talk about music and started to play together. The good vibes were everywhere so we continued to create our own music.
What are your main inspirations that aren’t musical?
-Sports [laughs]
-Movies
-Words. George writes all the poetry and for me it’s my favourite part of the band: we already have the music and then George comes with some mad words.
Your music is very exceptional – I wonder, what is your creative process like? What comes first: lyrics or music?
It’s always music first, then words. Or life experience that we share. We went to Art School once and got really twisted. George was like “I’m a lizardman!”; I heard it, and I was like: “We have to make a song about it”. We have a lot of ideas, but the song won’t happen unless there is a real story behind it. In songs we can talk about random stuff like landscape, or a dragon turning into a snake. We don’t have to explain it to anybody but there are a lot of allegories. We daydream, we are sharing a daydream.
You collaborate a lot with other artists, could you briefly tell us about that experience?
It is always fun! As a band, we obviously collaborate with each other making the songs, but we also collaborate with artists from outside the band. We finish the song and sometimes we feel like something is missing: maybe it’s a violin, maybe it’s a beautiful female voice. And then we ask other people: can you do it? I used to be in a band where the structure of the songs was verse, chorus, verse, bridge – where everything was clearly formulated. Here, it feels more like theatrical mess, like a whole cinematic thing. So, the reason we need other people is because we need other characters to fit in.
How do you like the concept of the Great Western Festival?
Definitely a good vibe, we are going to see some gigs later! There are a lot of interesting bands playing.
Check out Nekkuro Hána’s music on Spotify.
