Thursday night, Manchester’s own Delphic took the outdoor stage at Dangerbird Records to bestow the crowd below with the urge to dance.  After a set perfectly infused with a wreath of synth, guitar, vocals, and drums, the boys headed backstage to relax, while coyly avoiding the crowd gathered around the television that was showing the last quarter of the Lakers game.  It’s OK guys, we all know that “football” is the thing in the UK and doing an interview for China Shop over watching Kobe Bryant was a good enough excuse for me.

Q&A with Delphic’s James, Matt, and Richard:

Do you guys self identify with any particular genre?

James: Vegans

Matt: When we first started out, we were thinking the same thing, – where do we fit? We don’t really fit anywhere, so we kind of made up our own one, which was called “ambidance.”   Then that kind of got poo-pooed because, well it’s rubbish.

Richard: Then my dad said, you sound like a post dance band and we were like, “That’s fantastic.”

Matt: Like post rock but dance!

Richard: Yeah, we’re just so post dance.  We’re so over dance that we’re just post dance.  I think the main point is that we spent ages trying to find some other people’s trends and when we started our own band we were like “f*ck it, we’ll just start our own thing and forget what other people are doing.

I was reading in your bio that you hosted illegal raves back in the day.  Tell me a little bit about that.

Matt: Oh that was so badass.

Richard: Again it was like the genre thing, everything we’ve done has been reactionary.  So we’d all grown up in Munster playing music there and we just got so bored with all the gig venues.  All the same kind of people got into it so we basically auditioned our drummer and the things we liked about him was that fact that he was the most phenomenal drummer and he had a generator which meant we could just go out into the countryside or wherever in a warehouse and put on these raves.  So we did that and it was much more interesting.  It’s just rebellion basically, just rebellion against what’s going on in the city and again just carving our own path – doing our own thing.  We just started doing our own gigs and it just kind of built from there.

What is the name Delphic all about?

Matt: Well, it seemed to fit with what we wanted in terms of our general kind of aesthetic as a band.  We started off with that very kind of  ‘it’s all about the music’ kind of thing – that very naive and innocent and optimistic kind of thing that you soon realize is caked by the industry, but we wanted a word that didn’t mean anything already.  I think certain band names kind of lead you down certain paths.  If you call your band Bastard Kittens, you’re probably gonna be a pretty nasty little band.  We wanted a name that was kind of open that we could color in ourselves.

Richard: It kind of popped up and we grabbed it.

James: And Vampire Weekend was taken so…

I overheard you guys saying you were supposed to play Coachella but couldn’t make it because of the volcano?

James: Yeah.  Really, really a shame.

Are you gonna try for next year?

James: Definitely, if they want us back.  It would have been quite an experience.

Matt: They might have not believed us because it seemed such an outrageously ridiculous excuse you know: A volcano is blowing dust clouds from Iceland and we couldn’t go to America.

James: You know we’d never been to America before and just touching down on Sunday was our very first time we’d set foot in America.  Unfortunately Coachella was lost to us.  We would have really wanted to come over here and play the show but hey, we’re here now.

Matt: Two days before we had this killer-killer journey planned.  It was a gig at 5:00 in the morning in France and then we were going to straight to America.  We showed up to the airport to go to France and it was canceled and there were like 200 people in the airport all crying.  And then we realized we couldn’t go to America and then we were the people at the airport all upset and [laughs] crying.

Words by Nicole Pajer with photos by Dustin Downing