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Still Flyin‘ are a band that have built their reputation on huge live performances which have seen them play with members well into double figures. Music Mule loves live music. It sounded like a match made in heaven. Still Flyin’ front man Sean Rawls kindly met up ahead of two shows at The Great Escape later that day to talk to us about his band and Matthew McConaughey’s bongos!

Tell us a little bit about your forthcoming EP ‘A Party In Motion’
It’s definitely different from anything else we’ve done but not because we don’t like our old stuff! It’s just fun as a band to change with each release. This EP is more Krautrock influenced, the songs are a lot longer.

Currently, what is your favourite song to play live?
Right now there’s a song from the new EP called ‘Bull Riff’, it’s long and repetitive and really fun to play. At the moment on this tour we’re playing it with twelve people but usually it’s about eight.

Do you have a favourite venue to play?
Back home in San Francisco it’s probably The Great American Music Hall, it’s too big for us to headline but we’ve played with a few friends’ bands and it’s great. The Paradiso in Amsterdam too.

What is your first memory of playing live?
There’s a guy in Still Flyin’ called Bryan who plays percussion and sings also. We started playing acoustic guitars together at high school when we were about fifteen. We’d play during lunch break. That morning we’d pass out flyers saying where we would be playing.

What does live music mean to you as a performer?
To me that’s the reason I play music at all. In a band like Still Flyin’ where there are so many people in the band and we live all over the world, it’s so expensive for us to go on tour and so complicated but there are magical moments on tour when it all comes together and it feels so good. When it happens the crowd feeds off your energy and get more energetic themselves and it’s like a big high five between each other.

… And as a music fan?
What matters the most to me is the personality of the musicians. The band has to look like they’re into it and doing more than just playing fifteen songs back to back. I like the stuff that’s in addition to the music.

What was the last gig you played that sticks in your mind and why?
We did a five week tour of Europe in February and March. We went to Italy for the first time, not knowing what to expect, whether anyone would know who we were. The first show was in Genoa in a really big theatre room. It was the first time the promoter had booked a foreign band for that venue so he was nervous but there ended up being 300 people all going crazy so that was really fun.

What’s the best gig you’ve seen recently?
We were supposed to play a SXSW party thing that got shut down by the cops before we were due to play so we ended up going to this other party down the street. We didn’t know them at the time but a band called Lord Scrummage from Detroit played. They were all on keyboards and facing the walls, not even looking at each other or the crowd and they just started playing awesome, dancey video game music.

If you had to name one (and you do!), what’s the best gig you’ve ever seen?
My favourite band ever is The Go Betweens. They were hard to see, I only got to watch them twice and the second time was at a club called Slims in San Francisco. It was around six months before Grant McLennan died, so their final tour. They had to play like four encores, people wouldn’t let them go.

Have you had any bizarre heckles, things thrown at you or the like?
We love getting heckled! The one that comes to mind was in Glasgow on our February tour. We’d never played in Scotland before, the room was small but rammed out of control and at the front there were these guys with shaved heads that looked like the type that fight a lot! They were heckling the shit out of us, being funny but I thought we were gonna get beaten up. Then they mentioned Maserati, a band no-one has heard of that some of the guys used to play in. It turned out they were these forty-five year old superfans and things went from fear to joy.

You get to curate an imaginary festival stage. Aside from your own pick five bands, two old and three new, to play alongside you?
Old bands would be The Go Betweens and Velvet Underground.

Current ones I’d want Matthew McConaughey to start a band and play the bongos. He got arrested once on a noise complaint where the cops had to break into his house and he was naked playing bongos with a bunch of pot lying on his table. He seems like a funny guy!

I’d also get Phil Collins and the Gorilla from the Cadbury’s commercial and they’d only be allowed to play that drum fill from ‘In The Air Tonight’. We’d see who could play it best.

One more would be Lord Scrummage I guess but they might be hard to track down, they were pretty elusive!

If you have an iPod hit random play and list the first three tracks that come up?
The Darkness – Friday Night
The Phones – Zombies
Stricken City – P.S.

In olden times people weren’t thought to be geniuses, they ‘had geniuses’. A genius was a spirit that attached itself to an artist (often animal, human or otherwise) that helped him or her create. What would your genius be?
It would have to be a sloth!