The Automatic

VF meets The Automatic (or Frost, Rob, Pennie and Iwan as their friends back in Cowbridge, South Wales, know them) in the K-West Hotel in West London. "We call it the Kanye West", muses Pennie, the livewire of the band who's as polite and unassuming off stage as he's frenetic and boisterous on it. "All the bands come here. We were having breakfast with Kasabian this morning and you just missed We Are Scientists."

It's been a mad year for the riffs'n'synth four-piece; touring with Hard Fi, Goldie Lookin' Chain, and The Ordinary Boys, signing to the Kaisers' label B-Unique, being tipped for superstardom in 2006 by various pundits, and winning the best new band prize in the Pop Factory Awards, Wales' answer to The Brits. But spend any time with them and it's instantly obvious that none of this has gone to their heads. Charismatic and pragmatic, the four feed off each other and know the meaning of hard work. In fact, they already have the aura of seasoned campaigners...

Virtual Festivals: So how did The Automatic come to be?
Pennie: The other three have been in a band since the age of about 13, just messing around. I think Iwan actually played the inflatable chair! They played the odd party and I saw them and thought they were cool. I met them in sixth form and started turning up to practices with a tambourine and dancing about a bit. The guys thought I could be the singer because I enjoyed leaping about like an idiot, but then we realised I couldn't actually sing. I tried doing 'Promises Promises' by Cooper Temple Clause, which isn't easy anyway but I made it sound pretty terrible. Rob was the singer anyway so he stuck with that and I filled in doing the shouty bits and banging things. Then two year ago we met our manager Martin Bowen who runs an indie label in Cardiff. We didn't sign a contract for ages; he just saw we had some potential. We put together some demos, started touring, and here we are. B Unique was one of the first labels to watch us and one that we targeted as the one we'd want to work with.

VF: You put on a pretty full-on live show. Do you psyche each other up beforehand?
Frost: There's no ritual. We're always excited about it but more chilled than we used to be.
Pennie: It all depends on what we've been watching on the bus. We'll pick out bits from films we've watched and start shouting lines at each other and they'll become little in jokes. We'll start shouting those things at each other just before we go on stage. Recently it's been Raising Arizona, the bit when they're about to crash and they just look at each other and shout for ages. We copy that and it seems to help kill the nerves.
Rob: Once you're on stage all fear goes. It's just the few moments beforehand that can be nerve jangling, but it's good to be nervous. It gives you a shot of adrenalin.
Pennie: It makes me want to wee more though.

VF: What have been your favourite shows to date?
Frost: Brighton with Hard Fi was cool.
Pennie: I really enjoyed the gig we did in Sunderland recently. It was a tiny venue with a tiny stage and two monitors. We took one look and thought 'shit' but ultimately it was great to be playing right on top of each other and bang in front of the audience. 

VF: Any festivals for definite yet?
Frost: Oxegen is the only thing confirmed and Fuji Rock apparently. We're holding out for Reading and Leeds. We want to do everything.
Rob: We're headlining a festival in Cardiff as well called the Big Weekend. Spice Girls headlined it once so that's quite funny.
Iwan: Zigazigah!

VF: Do you get fed with constant references to you being Welsh. Should it matter where you're from?
Frost: It could be worse and there's an identity there. We are Welsh so there's no point in denying it.
Pennie: I reckon it's more of an initial thing because a lot of the press are presenting us so they need reference points. Hopefully once people become familiar with us it won't matter where we're from.
Iwan: They do it with every band, Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, they always say where they're from.
Rob: And there's a precedent at the moment where you're hearing more accents in music, from bands like Maximo Park, Arctic Monkeys, and The Futureheads, so maybe it is becoming more important where a band's from.
Iwan: That's a good thing. At least people aren't imitating American accents like they used to.
Rob: And where you come from can often inspire your lyrics so you should embrace any dialect definitely. 

VF: What sort of things do you write about?
Pennie: Just about where we're at at the time really, it always changes.
Frost: We'll always write about what we know, never about what we don't know. Rob and Pennie are the main song-writers but then we'll all get together and go through it and if it's shit we'll tell them.
Iwan: It's like a committee meeting. Proper democracy.
Pennie: It's normally fairly straight forward stuff like being in a band or being on tour.
Frost: If you look at our earlier songs, a lot were about being stuck in our home town Cowbridge and wanting to get away from it. 'Jack Daniels' is a good example.

VF: What's your forthcoming single 'Raoul' all about?
Pennie: The song itself is about getting stuck in a 9-5 situation and wanting to get out of it, you want to escape. Raoul is our escape. He works in a café just over the road from our recording studio in Cardiff. We'll be stuck in this tiny room for three or four hours trying to write songs and we'll go out for some fresh air and go see Raoul and he makes it all better.
Frost: It's also about us being grateful for having the opportunity to do what we wanted to do because we've seen so many of our friends giving up their art to do more academic things and get to uni. The first line of the song is 'Our ambition got cast aside'. Our name The Automatic also comes out of that idea, the idea that you're not actually programmed to do all those things, you just think you are. 

VF: Is this fella Raoul touched that you've written what could be a hit single about him?
Pennie: Yeah but he doesn't understand the scale of it which makes it even better. He's just happy with his family around him. He's just cool, not doing anything amazing, but he's got his family, his kids, his house, and that's it, he's done. We'll always go and see Raoul whenever we're back in Cardiff. 

VF: What bands are flicking your switches at the moment?
Pennie: I like We Are Scientists. I'm really impressed by them. There're loads of good guitar acts so it's a really good time for us to be involved in that scene too.

VF: You've been described as all sorts of things - pogo punk, electro metal etc - what are your thoughts on your sound?
Pennie - We're not a post-core whatever band. We're just kind of rock pop with synthesisers and a few effects. Yeah we might be a bit disco, a bit hardcore, or whatever, but you can't sum up our sound because ultimately our songs are different and they all contain different elements.
Frost - No one can really sum us up yet because no one's heard the album. After one single release people were saying we had a disco edge and were comparing us to The Bravery and all that and were quite cynical about it, which wasn't fair really.

VF: Are you worried about being packaged, about being stuck in some kind of scene and then passed off as a fleeting trend?
Pennie: It's more than that. It's not so much people trying to package you, it's more about people trying to write you off. Some journalists don't want to let you in just so that there's not another new band to worry about. A lot of people are cynical about new bands just because they're new bands.
Frost: It varies between people not giving us a chance and others being more blunt about it and writing that we're total crap. It's straight out. We just want to be given a chance.
Pennie: What riles me is when you read stuff saying 'they're jumping on The Killers or The Bravery or Franz Ferdinand' or whatever, but we've been playing the same songs for the last few years so how can we be?

VF: What about the people that say you're this year's brightest hope?
Frost: That's cooler obviously but it's still annoying because they haven't heard the album.
Pennie: The whole hype thing is good for me because it makes me relax more, but it also means that every gig is hugely important. We can't screw up now because we're being scrutinized all the time.
Frost: We've supported bands like Hard Fi and The Kooks and we do get people coming up to us and saying we were better than the main bands, which is great because they didn't come out to see us but it's like we've won over new fans - converted the uninitiated!

VF: What's been the one moment when you've thought to yourself, 'Yes, we've done it!'
Pennie: For me it was playing London Astoria last month for the NME Awards gig. It was one of our longest sets, biggest crowd, and we were second top on the bill. It was a lot to take in on one day.
Iwan: It was mad seeing people crowd surfing to our music because that's the kind of thing we were doing just a few years ago. I would've liked to have been in the crowd that night. I really want to see us play! 

'Raoul' by The Automatic is released on 27 March. The band are confirmed to play The Full Ponty and Dot-To-Dot Festival this summer, but are expected to be announced for many more festivals. For more info visit www.theautomatic.co.uk.