First of all, how are Bones UK?
Rosie: Well, we are tired,
Carmen: but we’re doing well.
Rosie: We’re OK, thank you for asking. It’s a bit intense, but it’s OK.
Tonight’s gig is in Camden, e.g., your hometown. How does it feel to be playing such an iconic venue? Do you have friends and family coming to see you?
Rosie: Tonight, our show is in Camden, and it is a homecoming. This is where we started Bones UK. Me and Carmen actually met down the road in the Blues Kitchen. We’ve played at this venue before, but it’s one of our favourite venues of all time to play. We have so many friends and family coming tonight. It’s insane. So much so that we’ve rented out the Good Mixer pub for the afterparty. And yeah, we are so excited. No one’s seen us play. We haven’t been in England for five years, so none of our families has seen us play for five years. They might be horribly disappointed or very impressed, we’ll find out.
On this tour you’re supporting Eagles of Death Metal, what’s that been like? Were you fans of the band previously?
Carmen: It’s been great. They’re really good friends of ours. We met them in L.A., and it’s just been really fun to be on tour with them.
Rosie: It was a long time coming as well. It originally got cancelled because of the pandemic, so it’s something that we’ve been excited about for ages. It kept getting moved and now it’s finally happening. They’re amazing. Jesse’s wonderful. All the band’s amazing, we’re pumped.
I first heard your music when Pretty Waste was featured on the Amazon Prime show The Wilds. Have you found that having your music in these big shows has helped spread your name?
Carmen: I’m sure it has. I mean, it’s something that we don’t really see because it’s other people’s shows. We get messages occasionally from friends being like, oh, I heard your track on this. So, I’m sure it really does help.
Rosie: But it’s one of the best ways to get your tracks out there, these days. Touring is amazing, but it’s quite a slow burn, with this you reach a lot more people very quickly and you kind of pick up fans from the show. So, it’s amazing. And also, just like the association with really cool shows. Our first single was with Orange Is the New Black, which is like the best thing ever. We were like, oh my God this is excellent. So, we’ve had really cool ones. We tend to get things that are for cool programs that kind of work with us. We tend to gravitate towards things that are appropriate, which is nice. We haven’t had like some horrible like, you know, racist Nazi drama yet.
Carmen: Yeah, we wouldn’t let that happen.
"you spend a lot of your life thinking that when you get X, Y or Z, you're going to feel like you've made it"
You were asked to record a cover of I’m Afraid of Americans by David Bowie, for a David Bowie tribute album. What did this mean to you? Were you worried that people wouldn’t like your take on the song?
Carmen: I don’t think we were worried about people not liking our take on the song, we were just excited that we got asked to do it by Howard Stern.
Rosie: We didn’t know the song before. It’s one of the lesser-known Bowie songs and it’s one of Howard Stern’s favourites. We love our version, and we’ve found that a lot of people don’t know it’s a cover. So, when we obviously live in America, playing American festivals, a lot of these big rock festivals are like Southern America. So, we’re like, “now our next song, I’m Afraid of Americans!” and we literally have the whole crowd booing us, so now I always preamble it by saying this is a cover version.
You’ve already accomplished so many incredible things as a band, is there one thing that tops the rest?
Rosie: It’s weird when really great things happen to you. There have been some unbelievably wonderful things, but you spend a lot of your life thinking that when you get X, Y or Z, you’re going to feel like you’ve made it and that you’re a success. But in actual fact, that never happens, and that’s kind of the beauty of it all. It’s about the journey, not about the destination.
What’s next for Bones UK?
Carmen: Finishing the record.
Rosie: Finishing the bloody record. It’s just everything’s taken so much longer because of what happened. We’re ready to roll, we’ve got everything ready and lined up, but there’s such a backlog of musicians getting albums ready that it’s taking a second. But we’re ready to go.
“Arctic Monkeys and The 1975… get your fishnets, Dr Martens, Stone Island and Fred Perry out,” joked Matty Healy, lead singer of The 1975 who had stepped in last moment to headline the Sunday of Reading Festival, in place of Rage Against the Machine.
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The 1975 return today with their new single ‘Part Of The Band’ – the first taste of their highly anticipated forthcoming new album ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’.
