Gently Tender

Gently Tender of North London are the band rising from the embers of Lambeth’s Palma Violets. The band split following the release of their second record and founding members Sam Fryer, Pete Mayhew and Will Doyle have been patiently waiting in the background to launch their new project. After luring in The Big Moon’s Celia Archer and London creative, Adam Brown to join the gang, Gently Tender have begun to take their choral harmonies to the smaller stages of the country. Singles ‘2 Chords Good’ and ‘Avez-vous deja’ opt to move their audience emotionally over physically in an extension of Palma’s but with a nod to simpler times. Frontman, Sam Fryer took some time away from his Cricket podcast to meet us in a Kings Cross pub alongside bandmate, Pete Mayhew to talk through the plan and how it all began.

Q: So we know that Sam, Pete and Will met at school but how did Adam and Celia join the band?

Sam: Celia came first as we share the same management. We’ve toured with The Big Moon as well. Celia was very interested in doing it and she’s a very good keyboard player as well. With The Big Moon writing a new album now, there’s a lot of time for her to do something else for a bit. Adam is more recent. I think we just needed that extra guitar layer. He was pretty much at every gig I went to.

Q: How much of Gently Tender is ready to go, is there an album waiting in the background?

Sam: We have a lot of songs, enough to make an album. We are never going to say we’ve got the album, we are always adding to it. Your new song is always going to be better than your last song isn’t it, otherwise there’s no point in writing it.

Q: What makes these two singles the right ones to launch with?

Pete: They’re certainly the oldest songs we have.

Sam: What Pete’s saying there is that we needed to release these now because we’ve had them for such a long time. We couldn’t sit on them any longer.

Pete: They’ve been around the longest so there’s nothing more we can do to them, they’re perfected.

Sam: So yeah, going into them and being honest, ‘2 Chords Good’ is probably the most Palma Violets song we have and ‘Avez-vous deja’ isn’t. I Like ‘2 Chords Good’ and the timing because it shows that nostalgia and what we had. ‘2 Chords Good’ was written in the time of Palmas and is what our third album would’ve sounded like had we not split up. We don’t dislike what we did in the past, we love it but we’ve evolved. ‘Avez-vous deja’ is going into showing people how ambitious we are and that we want it to be epic.

Q: Do you still have an affinity with London? Your aesthetic has moved from Lambeth to more village Green…

Sam: Yeah I think it’s definitely taking a lot more from folk music and the village green ethos. There’s more earth in the music than concrete.

Pete: It’s just expanding from what we already had anyway. It’s more interesting for us to write and for people to listen to.

Sam: We went away to a farmhouse in Wales to write and I think that has become more of a spiritual home for us. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from that place, the times we had there and the people that we met. Our name was taken from The Incredible String Band and the people that lived there were the ones who introduced us to The Incredible String Band. We definitely spent a lot of time listening to that kind of music and it definitely has a grip on this band.

Words by Sam Ford and Josh Whettingsteel |Illustration by Marcus Oakley