Music: Gengahr

Leftfield pop psychedelic sounds

I’ve just had my wisdom teeth pulled out, so you will have to forgive me if I talk a bit funny. It’s not the best, I must say,” says Felix, singer and guitarist with up and coming band, Gengahr. “Just a local anaesthetic, so it really f*****g hurts.”
It seems Felix is prone to a bit of mouth bother every now and then, as he recalls his Great Escape experience earlier in the year… “We played The Haunt for the NME, which was great, and then a house party at 2am. That was completely mental. I had tonsillitis for both those shows… I shouldn’t have even been playing. I just trashed myself and then lay in bed for a few days.”
After a few false starts, and a name change, the band have been on roll the last year or so, and life has changed dramatically. “When we signed to Transgressive, we all quit our jobs, and then realised it takes months for an advance to come through, so we were screwed for a while. ‘Got that record deal. Right, I quit!’
“I’ve been in bands for years, when we were 12 or 13, with Dan (drums) and Hugh (bass), mucking around.” Eventually, they hooked up with the superb guitarist John Victor, and eventually the band started to really find find its feet… “We needed to give it a proper shot and do it seriously. We got back in the rehearsal room, knocked up a few demos, put them online, and within a couple of months we had quite a lot of love from all the blogs. We got an agent and manager off the back of those demos.

“We did that many times before that, and no one cared. I thought they were good, but I had thought that the last four times we chucked stuff online! It was funny, because we didn’t actually look back at the site until a good month or so had passed. I remember then checking and going ‘wow’, people had been commenting they really liked it and sharing it. It was word of mouth at the beginning and that was the basis from which we could build on, from that small, scattered fanbase.
In June, the band released their debut album, A Dream Outside, a wonderful amalgamation of summer-soaked, hazy-cum-dynamic indie psychedelia with influences from the likes of Tame Impala, Deerhunter, Twin Sister and Conan Mockasin. And, as for the name of the band? “We put stuff out under the name Rez, but we got some message from some angry rapper in New York who implied we would have to change our name… we quickly came up with the name Gengahr. We were in the pub having a few beers, and it seemed like a funny idea at the time. It doesn’t mean anything. We stole it from Pokemon, we thought it sounded pretty cool.”
Komedia, Tues 6 October, 7pm, £8