#badnerves

Are the fans on Twitch a little younger?

Bobby: It’s half-half.

Jon: I have noticed a lot of older people didn’t know what Twitch was, but they joined up on Twitch just because Bobby was doing a Twitch stream.

Bobby: It’s funny, because people message me saying 'I’ve never used this platforms before, I’m only on here because of the band.' It’s a fun medium. I like the idea of trying to embrace different things, because my instinct was never to do live streams. I just wanted to be in a band. Ultimately, because you are communicating with fans and it’s more engaging, it’s more fun. I am glad I started it.

Jon and Sam after their second Swiss show in Winterthur, through my Olympus Trip 35.

Could we talk about Still Nervous? I was wondering about the story was behind the cover photo, because I find it legendary. It reminds me of old school rock albums.

Bobby: That’s what we wanted to do, like The Damned or The Stooges.

Jon: Yeah, all the classic albums had the band on the front. We did a photoshoot with Ryan Jay in New York, and we got a bunch of photos back. He absolutely crushed it. And there was that one photo we saw, and we were like ‘you know what. That one looks like an album cover.’ There was a little bit of resistance towards it coming from outside sources, people saying we need to put a fucking goat on it or something.

Bobby: They said it was not modern.

Jon: And we said, ‘you know what? Fuck off, we like this, and it’s so rare we all agree on something. This is perfect’.

Bobby: I can’t think of any current band – putting the band on the front doesn’t really happen that much anymore. I am quite glad we did that, because it’s a throwback to the records we really love.

Jon: It was the whole point of it. We wanted it to feel like a classic album. Hopefully it will be.

Jon during the show in Aarau.

I also wanted to talk about the song You’ve Got The Nerve, because I feel like it could be your theme song! Like for the band the Monkees for example.

Bobby: That song has taken a life of its own! I think people appreciate the message in it, which is basically ‘you’ve got the nerve to do what you want to do’. It resonates with a lot of people, because that’s what we’re doing. We’re just saying ‘fuck you’ to everything else.

Jon: It’s my mom’s favorite song!

Bobby: Really? Bless her (laughs). There is a line in it which says ‘you better pack your job and fast, unless you’re never gonna grow’, which I found so true in my life. There was a time where I was working in a place and I quit when I was quite comfortable, I didn’t need to. It was terrifying, but my life took a whole other direction for the better when I did that.

When I saw you guys touring in that huge bus with Nothing but Thieves back in Zurich, I wanted to cry. I remembered your gig at the small pub The Old Blue Last in London -

Bobby: God, that was years ago! Isn’t that when we first met?

I think so!

Jon: Yes. I remember.

Bobby: I hate playing that place (laughs).

The sound wasn’t really good, wasn’t it?

Jon: And the load-in was horrible.

Bobby: It’s just too small.

Jon: Downstairs, there’s just a collection of office workers that just wanna get pissed.

This is my final question: while we are doing this interview before your show, the city of Aarau is currently covered in snow. Are you guys more of a ski, sledge or snowboard people?

Bobby: I am actually more of a sledger. I went skiing once, and I’ve never been snowboarding. Outside of my family home is a hill. We would always sledge down it, and it was fucking awesome.

Jon: I used to snowboard every year. I skated as well, but I broke my foot and fractured my ankle. After that, I got a bit weirded out strapping my feet into boards. And it’s also very expensive to do it a lot.

Are you guys still living in London ? I remember you told me so back in 2017.

Bobby: I actually lived in London for a year, in 2017.

Jon: Now we live in Essex. It’s east London-ish.

Bobby: Just slightly outside of it ! We all come from Essex.

Jon: London is just not cool anymore. During the pandemic, so many venues shut down. What little scene we had really suffered. Now I never go there really.

Bobby: It’s very expensive.

What’s your life like when you’re not touring ?

Jon: It’s so boring ! We have quite normal lives I guess.

Bobby: I spend a lot of time writing and recording. We do go in the studio and rehearse.

That sounds amazing. Do you guys manage to make music full time now ?

Bobby: Not really. Financially, definitely not.

Jon: We all have other jobs, apart from some who lost them recently because of doing the band.

Bobby: I haven’t had a job for about 10 months now.

Jon: This is like, the crunch time where we have to make it work, because all our jobs are getting fed up with us going away all the time. There’s still bills to pay.

Bobby: It’s a different thing when you’re a bit older trying to do a band, because you don’t live with your parents. If you’re fortunate enough to live with your parents when you’re younger, like we were – we don’t have that privilege anymore. A band is not the easiest way to make money !

Jon: There’s a bit of a myth about our band at the moment. I read online that people are saying ‘they have loads of money !’ It’s so far from the truth !

Bobby: Yeah, and some deal with an american label. What the fuck are they talking about ?

Jon: That’s not how it works. We haven’t seen a penny.

Bobby : They are helping us with tour support, to go to America.

Jon: Or else, we wouldn’t be able to afford to go there.

Bobby: We don’t make any money personnally from this band. Not yet. We hope it’s going to change. We’ve been at this our whole lives and we have yet to make any money. It would be nice to make enough money to pay our rent. That would be a dream.

Jon: Money has never been the motive though. We’ve been doing that band for six years and never really bothered about money up to the point when we needed it to play shows.

Bobby: We break it even for the most part, but the whole band/business side of it is just waiting for money to come in from shows, because there’s a huge delay. You don’t get paid straight away, months pass and you need that money to buy the plane tickets to the next show, and sometimes you haven’t been paid for these shows. And then you’ve got no money, and you have to pay for those plane tickets with whatever you have.

I expected it to be bad, but not that bad.

Jon: We sound really depressing ! (laughs)

Bobby: We’re not depressed. It’s fucking great ! It’s not easy, but it’s fucking fun and worthwile.

Bad Nerves' set at Tropical Riot festival. As you can see, it was a happy chaos.

Can we also talk about your latest releases, like Alive in London ?

Jon: That was recorded at the end of our first headline tour, in a funny bar in London called The Basement. It blew us away, because up until that point – we played England a bit, but no one ever really seemed to care that much. And then we did a run of our own shows and a bunch of them sold out. We decided to record the last one because it was in London.

Bobby: We didn’t even really know it was being recorded. Our manager said ‘I’ll record it !’ and we replied ‘yeah, whatever.’ I didn’t even remember !

Jon: It was the most insane show, in a tiny pub in London. The recording cuts out because all the recording equipment overheated. That’s why the record is so short. You can hear it break halfway through. I’m surprised no one died at that show to be honest ! (laughs)

Bobby: It’s the hottest show we have ever played ! I remember seeing Sam coming off stage – he had so much steam coming off of him, and he was just sitting hunched over. I didn’t know if he was alright !

I also wanted to talk about how you said in an interview that you wanted to bring rock and roll back to the masses.

Bobby: There’s loads of bands that we love who have scrappy recordings. We’re trying to do more modern-ish and powerful recordings, but with that scrappy character in it. In that sense, that is what we’re trying to do. Because mainstream radios don’t really play this scrappy punk. So we’re trying to get some of that scrappy stuff and give it a more modern recording.

Jon: We’re trying to influence younger bands to play a style that’s a bit forgotten. You don’t see a lot of kids doing it. Now, we’ve seen a few bands pop up who play this style. That’s the reason we do it, passing the torch !

I think we’re from the same generation – growing up, rock and roll was still on the TV and on the radio. We had bands like Green Day, Oasis, The Strokes, etc. Those bands introduced us to rock and roll. I share your vision, we have to bring it back, even if it’s-

Jon: -Just guitar music ! Going to festivals as a kid, it would be all guitar bands. And then that just died out and it started being, I don’t know, Beyoncé or something.

Bobby: It’s nice having a mix of genres in music, but it seems that rock and punk are shut out of a lot of mainstream. Is that because rock and roll is more prone to being protest music and half of the corporations that control this industry don’t want that shit playing ? I don’t know.

Jon playing during Tropical Riot Festival in Ullastrell.

Could you guys also tell me more about Green Day ? Have you met them in person ?

Jon: It’s funny, because they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. I started playing bass because of Mike Dirnt from Green Day, and they are the nicest people ! They’re lovely. I’ve met a lot of bands, and they are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.

Bobby: We played a festival in Czech Republic, Rock For People, and they were headlining. We watched them play this crazy healine set. Afterwards they invited us to come and meet them backstage. It was just us, them and maybe one or two roadies just sitting there and talking about music. Billie said he really loved the record !

Jon: It was surreal. Billie has been super supportive. He messaged us all the time. He truly cares about the band, posts our stuff. A true legend.

Bobby: You’d expect these rockstars to be ego maniacs, and a lot of them are. But not those cunts ! It’s funny because they’re one of the last bands around from our generation still going, that we genuinely like. We met Green Day’s manager and he said that Billie sent our record to him. The thought of him sending our record is surreal.

What can we expect from Bad Nerves in the future ?

Bobby: We’re just going to keep writing songs, playing gigs until… we die ? (laughs) We’re going to keep putting out records that we like, which is hard to do. It takes time.

Jon: We want to make our stand on this kind of genre in years to come.

Bobby: It would be nice to be able to look back and think ‘we had a good go at it.’

https://badnerves.co.uk/