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What inspired you to first start making music? And how did you come to be in your current incarnation? Or if you prefer, a brief bio about you.

Fionn was in a band in his teens, in which he was the guitar player and the main songwriter. The band broke up, as do most bands when you’re a teenager, but in 2016 Fionn was looking through the songs again and thought some of them held up pretty well. He rewrote them and changed the arrangements around a bit, then asked Dave if he’d be interested in singing lead. Those four songs were our first demo which we put out in 2017, and our first show was at the Gothic Species festival in Leitrim that summer. We went through several different drummers until last year we recruited Jordan behind the kit, who used to play with Midwest Mindset in Canada before he moved to Ireland.

Provide us with some info about your latest release…

Flamingo is our first release with Jordan behind the kit. We weren’t that happy with the production on our first EP and didn’t really suit what we were going for, so for this one we worked with our producer Peter to make something a lot more natural and warm-sounding. We only used real guitar and bass amps, there are no amp plugins on this at all; no AutoTune or quantisation; every snare hit you hear on the record is a real snare, not a sample.
The songs on this EP are a lot shorter and more straightforward than the songs on the previous EP. In the previous EP all the songs went on for five minutes and had a lot of different sections, but with this one we decided to keep it simpler to focus on the melody and the groove.

Which ones would you consider your main influences both music-wise & non-music-wise?

Fionn: Musically, our biggest influences are probably those British post-punk/goth bands from the 70s and 80s, like Joy Division, The Cure, Bauhaus, but also more modern bands like Interpol, Arcade Fire, Smashing Pumpkins. Outside of music, a lot of our lyrics are inspired by books we’ve read, by writers like Douglas Coupland, Ayn Rand, Haruki Murakami.

Dave: Eh, Pixies, the Breeders. Definitely Joy Division and then into the New Order, LCD Soundsystem style of things. I like a lot of folk and blues too. We all bring our own. Fionn has interests and styles from his metal/post-hardcore band Suzaku Avenue – they’re brilliant, check them out. And Jordan brings some hip-hop too, and a few other styles. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on.

In what way does your sound differ from the rest genre-related artists/bands and why should we listen to your music? In other words, how would you describe your sound?

I think with Late Night Pharmacy, you never know exactly what you’re getting. Some bands in this genre go for the accessible, poppy end of the spectrum, whereas some go for the more abrasive, heavy sounds. With us, some of our songs are very “pop” and accessible, and others are really heavy and noisy, so you can never be sure what to expect.
Before Jordan joined the band, our songs had a very punk feel to them, but Jordan’s hip-hop background brought a lot of swing and groove to the songs, which is something you don’t hear much in this genre, I think.

Please name your 3 desert islands albums, movies & books…

Fionn: For albums, Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie, Ordo ad Chao by Mayhem and Ecailles de Lune by Alcest. Movies: Chinatown, L.A. Confidential and Audition. Books: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, 1984 by George Orwell and Democracy by Joan Didion.

Dave: I’d possibly go Funeral by Arcade Fire, Loaded by Velvet Underground, For Emma from Bon Iver. Films: Goodfellas, Once Upon A Time In The West, There Will Be Blood. Yeah I’m going for long films here; the longest films I know. Oh, for books, can we take plays? They’d probably be lighter to carry. Yeah it goes against my length criteria but I might go: Krapp’s Last Tape by Sam Beckett, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, and then definitely Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume I.

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Do you prefer studio or performing live and why?

Fionn: I love playing live. It’s great when you’ve been practising and rehearsing like crazy for weeks, and then you can get up on stage and release all that energy in one go. There’s no better feeling than when you play a song and people in the crowd get up on their feet and start singing along.

Dave: Studio. I like putting the parts and pieces together. It’s a completely different act. Completely different from singing at the top of your lungs in a bar.

Is there any funny-unique story you would like to share with us, always in relation to your music ‘career’?

Dave: On the first EP we weren’t really a live band yet. We just grouped together a bunch of people to record. And as it happened, that group of musicians were never in the same place at the same time. Everyone’s parts were recorded separately: Fionn and I were the only ones in the same room at the same time. We were thinking of having a little meet and greet afterwards.
This time around, recording was completely different. Jordan’s the driver this time, he’s got his own energy. Keeps us going. Keeps us fortified.

Which track of your own would you point out as the most unique and why?

Probably the song “Jynx” from our new EP. It’s based on a song Fionn wrote when he was 19, but changed around a bit. The rhythms are a bit off-kilter, and we played around with time changes, guitars in odd tunings, synth pads and weird vocal samples. And for Dave, the subject matter of the lyrics is a bit different. We’ll leave it at that.

Would you like to share with our readers your future plans?

Dave: World domination.

Fionn: I want to go heavier, funkier, weirder.

Free question!!! (Ask yourself a question) you wish to answer and haven’t been given the opportunity…

The sexiest pair of words in the English language is “caloric deficit”.

The ugliest pair of words in the English language is “financial innovation”.

Photo credits: Yawei Zhang

Curated by: Christos Doukakis

Recommended listening:

Connect with Late Night Pharmacy:

● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/latenightpharmacyband/

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/latenightpharmacy/

● Twitter: https://twitter.com/lnpmusic

● Bandcamp: https://latenightpharmacy.bandcamp.com/