Red Light Riot!
By Nicole Stewart Rushworth
When four guys, all with different tastes in music, decided to get together to form a band, Red Light Riot was born. Matty McLaughlin, guitar and vocals, Reece Chopping, drums, Alex Hoole, guitar, and Jordan Kenningley, bass, draw their influences from the likes of grunge, punk and rock, “each to their own” says Jordan.
The group have been together for a few months and have written a few of their own songs. One song they seem quite proud of is called Panic, written by Matty, and from what I’ve heard it’s pretty good.
“We have a good few songs that we play regularly, one of them is Supersonic by Oasis, it’s an ace song... it was a song that when we first played we felt like a real band that we were going to stick with.”
Alex was the newest member to join the band as the former band mate Danny Birkill left due to friction within the group. After only being apart of it for a few weeks he seems completely at ease with the lads, it looks like that they’ve been formed for years by the way they all mess around, completely relaxed.
“We don’t want to be stuck up and completely serious but we don’t want to be just messing around,” says Jordan, keeping laid back but not completely horizontal, they are serious about the band but don’t treat it as life and death.
“We’re not aiming too high, we all have different ambitions... we just don’t want to come across like trying Coldplay or U2, we definitely don’t want to be Coldplay.”
They played Supersonic for me (Oasis cover) and by the end of it, any doubts about whether they could make it or not had vanished. They had real stage presence and confidence even though it was just me; I could tell that they could easily be at home in front of a screaming crowd at the likes of Leeds Festival and Glastonbury.
They’ve got plans to release a demo by the end of the month and get some air-time on local radio stations. They were scheduled to be playing at the charity gig at Alverthorpe Working Men’s Club but due to unforeseen problems had to cancel their set. The group plan to get their music up on a Myspace page as soon as possible and also on Facebook.
I predict great things from this local band and can’t wait for the day when their first album is on sale in music shops up and down the country.