Merchandise spent the first ten years as a studio-only band. Why was that?
For years, me and Con just met up as often as we could to make music which we did with anything we could get our hands on. In the beginning it was weird sounds and interesting beats which got us going, we weren’t really writing songs at the time but what we were producing didn’t fit any easy categories. We moved on to developing songs with more structure but kept the odd production. We recorded everything differently and in the way we liked it which would just have made it too unwieldy to perform live without backing tapes, which we didn’t ant to do. But after a while we found that we had a great collection of songs so that, while we still record them as we see fit, we could also strip them down to the bare acoustics and perform them live but without having to worry about the technology. It’s great that we managed to deal with that difference between live and on record and we hope people enjoy that difference. Were you apprehensive about finally playing your songs live? Yeah. I’d been
