Coastal Fire Dept.

Perhaps when you think about the Channel Islands, maybe rock music isn’t the first thing that springs to mind. However, one band planning to change all of that is the Guernsey-based post-grunge crew Coastal Fire Dept.

Listening to the band’s repertoire, you can certainly hear the 90s influence, although the band intend to push itself beyond the boundaries of traditional grunge music. “I suppose we’ve got one foot in 90s guitar-driven music because I think whether it was Britpop later on, or shoegaze, or grunge, or whatever, I thought that was the era,” explains guitarist and vocalist Ollie Goddard. “I think if you look at the older bands, it’s probably your Nirvana and Pixies that resonate for us. And then, more recently, bands like Title Fight and Balance and Composure. So, in the single, What Do I, I actually used a Balance and Composure single as an influence for production purposes.” He adds: “It’s definitely one foot in the 90s. But we try and put a little bit of a modern spin on it if we can because we don’t want to be just 90s grunge merchants. We want to do a little bit more than that.”

As one would imagine, there is somewhat of a grassroots rock scene in Guernsey. “It’s small and busy. So, you could find probably every genre over here. But you’ve probably just got a hard core of people that go to most gigs. We’ve got a couple of really good venues,” explains Ollie. “There’s a really good little music scene going. Most weekends there is music going on. You wouldn’t struggle to go to gigs, but there’s not a lot of us.”

Coastal Fire Dept has been going for almost ten years now.

“The band formed in 2013, as myself, and a friend called Bob, and we we’re just talking about music. Then I just noticed that loads of bands that he liked, I liked and vice versa. And so, we sort of got a band going, and gigged a little bit,” said Ollie. “We went through a number of changes. You know how hard it is to get drummers and we couldn’t find the right drummer. Every drummer was in about five or six bands. We got it up and running again, about three or four years ago, and that’s when we became really quite committed to being a proper band in my mind. Putting out singles, putting out albums, putting out music videos, and actually doing the whole hog. So, we’ve been doing it properly for about four years.”

The band name itself is rather quite intriguing. “I was walking home after work. We’re on an island, and I looked across the coast, and I could see the French coast. It was all red,” explains Ollie. “I thought, oh, it looks like it’s on fire. Then I thought I wonder if they’ve got a fire department to sort that out. And I got home, and I looked on Google, and there is no such thing as a Coastal Fire Department - I thought perfect. It means nothing.”

However, the band name does cause some confusion from time to time. “We often get people saying, are you Firemen or not? And, we’re not,” proclaims Ollie. “I suppose the most favourite story of ours is, there’s a big festival over here called Chaos. It’s run by the local biker guys and there are usually about 1,500 people there.” A biker girl in the crowd got the wrong impression about the band. “I said, we’re in Coastal Fire Department. She said - Oh, yeah, the strippers?” To her disbelief, the band reliably informed the patron – “No, we’re a grunge band. And sure enough, they were very disappointed to see us.”

Coastal Fire Dept will release their sophomore album Outsiders in April. “For this one, these songs have probably come about two or three years ago. And what ended up happening is I take them into the studio with the band, and it’s almost like X Factor. I run them through an idea, or a song and they go yay, or nay and then we sort of whittling it down,” explains Ollie. “After we’ve sort of cut away all the chaff, and we’ve gigged it a little bit. This is what was left, and we recorded it. It’s just there’s an unconscious thread of feeling like an outsider or a bit of a loner or just on the outskirts of things. So that’s why we called it Outsiders.”

Moving forward, the band is pushing ahead creating more new material. “We’ve got a new guitarist on board. So, we’ve just been rehearsing away, getting ready. We start gigging from the 1st of April onwards. And also, when we were recording the album, we actually had a number of songs left over. So, we’re going to be releasing an EP a little bit later in the year,” explains Ollie. “There are one or two really nice songs that we thought rather than just canning them and moving on, we might just finish them off and drop them out. So yeah, we’re gearing up for a lot more gigs and an EP later in the year.”

Outsiders by Coastal Fire Dept will be released on Friday 14th April, via L’Islet Records.

Words: Adam Kennedy Photo Credit: Press Supplied

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