Band Interview: Elephant Takedown

Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life are pleased to bring you an interview with punk/hard rock band, Elephant Takedown.

1. How did you get started as a band?

Elephant Takedown started off as a jam session in January 2019 at Resonant Rehearsals, Cambridge between bassist, Alex White, and lead guitarist, Phil Bartlett. A week later they were joined, following a little online advertising, but Simon Philpot on drums.

We started off playing covers of bands like Shinedown, Stone Sour, and Black Stone Cherry, but it became quickly apparent that we have a short attention span. We turned towards making original music. Finding a long term vocalist proved to be challenging however and for the rest of the year we weren’t able to keep a vocalist for more than about 4 months. That is until December 2019, when vocalist Ben Wilson turned up to the last practice of the year. He’d learned some of our material and come with some of his own, instantly all our personalities gelled, and for the next few months we couldn’t turn off the tap. Music just kept happening, and we booked our first time at the studio for April 2020.

2. How would you describe your sound?

Mostly it’s a blend of punk and hard rock, and that blend is what we identify as for the most part. That said Ben and Alex are big fans of modern metal, so those tones do tend to creep in from time to time.

3. What bands/artists would you say have influenced your style of music?

Shinedown is probably the singular shared influence in the melting pot. They’re a band we all love. Those aside, our tastes and influences are often pretty disparate. Phil’s inspired by the likes of Rob Zombie and Black Sabbath; Alex by Periphery and Devin Townsend; Ben by Billy Talent and Enter Shikari; and Simon by Blink 182 and All Time Low. That variety of taste definitely led to our particular sound; heavy guitars, plenty of distortion, but mostly clean vocals.

4. Has the rise of YouTube & music streaming helped or hindered you as a band?

Definitely helped. We would never have been able to put out Forked Tongues & False Hopes (our EP) without the help of music streaming and other online platforms. We all discover a lot of our music via YouTube and Spotify, we have friends who only listen on Amazon music, the list goes on. Putting out a physical release as a limited run is definitely something we want to do, but there’s a much larger financial and logistical element to something like that.

5. What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making music?

We’re all gamers and foodies. If we’re together but not making music, we’re probably eating food and playing games. Alex collects board games, Simon collects rare Nintendo and Sega items, and we all have a range of consoles and computers.

6. What are your future plans musically? Tours?

We’re currently trying to arrange some more shows, we’ve got some applications in with some festivals, local and national. No tours, but we are also looking to finish writing our, as yet, untitled album. We’ve only got a few songs left to write but we want to be as proud of them as we were the first four songs we released, so we’re taking our time. If all goes well, we’re hoping to be back in the studio around May/June 2022.

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