Interview: Gringoh discuss new single, evolving as a band and London's Music Scene

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Tell anyone who's not heard your new single 'Red Flower' abit about it?

It’s a song we wrote about power, the idea of ’Red Flower’ was slight reference to the Jungle Book. In terms of style its a slow sensual song, with an old school cuban salsa influenced beat. We were influenced a lot by some traditional cuban salsa artists like ‘Kako and his orchestra’, and some of the old samba artists like ‘Cartola’.

This time round you recorded a music video, what was that like as an experience?

Yeah it was great! We wrote the song with a whole visual concept in mind. It was the kind of song we felt needed the video to complete it - we actually finished the song over a year ago. We wouldn’t of had a chance without the help of the guys working with us, and really Despina and Yonly (the dancers) were the ones who brought the whole thing to life. They really took time understanding the song and ideas behind it and from there we left it all to them to choreograph. It wasn’t an easy experience but we were really proud of how it came out.

Do you feel like you learnt anything from releasing your first single that you've taken into the new one, if so what?

Our first single was a massive learning curve in music production. I think we’ve developed these skills but this song was written and produced with a different approach. Because it was written around a concept we scrutinised our ideas a lot more and what we started with was very different to what we finished with. We tried all sorts of versions, at one point we decided to scrap pretty much 90% of the song and go back to scratch.

You recently did an open mic night where you performed the song live, how was the night and do you think you'll be doing more?

Yeah the night was great. Feargal was playing with a freshly broken hand but he managed it somehow, even if he was shedding some tears. We’ve been working for a while on transferring our songs to a live set. We did this one acoustic but we’ve started to merge our set to more of an electronic vibe.

How do you assess the local music scene around you?

We’ve been lucky to have grown up with a musical bunch around us. I think West London is quite cut off from the main London music ’scene’, but that forced us into making our own local scene, and so all the musicians we gigged growing up with are now launching some really cool projects. Our old band mates Xadi and Jude the Obscure are releasing some real nice stuff at the moment. WILDES has just put out a real good EP as well. I do think a lot more could be done to encourage local artists. In comparison to the other parts of London especially, West London should definitely be showing off its music scene more. There’s definitely some great stuff happening here.

Do you have any aims for 2020?

We definitely want to get gigging properly before summer. We’ve been working on so many ideas to make it a proper performance we want to show it off. We’ve also had our next single in the pipeline for so long, we’re exited to get it out when we can. In the background there’s an album being formed which would be great to finish this year.