By Eleanor Davies
When you think of the natural beauty in the mountains of Scotland you can picture walkers hiking up the hills and taking in the scenery. Add to that the brains behind an electro rock band and the image becomes quite blurred!
That is, however, exactly what you will find in the hills of Clackmannanshire, Scotland, home to the lead singer of the band Kid Adrift.
“I take my laptop and keyboard up the side of a hill and record and write stuff,” Iain tells me. “It’s a lot different for an electro-rock band – it sounds really cheesy!”
Cheesy it may be but all that fresh air seems to have created something of musical genius, as the band have recently been signed to Island Records and are about to undertake a summer touring festivals across the country, including an appearance at V Festival in Chelmsford.
And you can expect to see quite a performance, as Iain tells me, they tend to get a bit over excited!
“We always seem to injure ourselves!” he laughs. “At a recent gig I jumped off stage and landed on a metal stairwell, I didn’t realise I’d hurt myself until later, I’d got straight up and carried on jumping. I’m still aching a bit now.”
Well let’s just hope none of the band injures themselves in the near future as their career is just taking off!
But although it’s only early days, the band’s debut single, Oxytocin, has already been getting airplay on BBC Radio One.
“Hearing our songs on Radio One is crazy” says the 22-year-old "I guess my inspiration comes more from stuff that's happened in my past rather than current things, its all a version of me. People think that our new song Oxcytocin is about a break up but it's actually about something completely different that happened to me a while ago.
“I live in Scotland in quite an out the way place where there’s not much electricity so to get played to a wider audience is really gratifying. Before that I just played to family and locals.”
Well over the summer he is going to be playing to audiences of thousands and together with the rest of the band, Peter Sené, Nico Triay and Becky Woolls, they can’t wait to get on stage and do their thing.
“I think people will be interested in us, we aren’t an electro band with a DJ, the four of us play live and there’s a lot of energy, Becky sing’s a cover of a Deftones song too and she’s got an amazing voice.
“I was doing shows on my own until about a year ago when I took on a band. I grew up with Nico in Scotland and Becky and Pete I met at University of Surrey in Guildford, I was doing a music course and played at open mic nights and I just met them through the music scene, they’re all amazing musicians.”
And now the Kid Adrift sound is more powerful than ever before, but Iain is still leading the way.
“The name of the band is kind of my character, a personality really, I used to travel a lot when I was younger throughout Switzerland and the UK which is what a lot of our lyrics are about.”
Well, Chelmsford can’t promise quite such an amazing backdrop as the mountains of Scotland, but we’ll sure make them feel welcome!
For more information about Kid Adrift, go to www.myspace.co.uk/kidadrift.
And, of course, don’t miss them on the Strongbow stage at Virgin Media’s V festival on Sunday 22 August!