Drawing their roots from classic Americana, their sound is filtered through a very Glaswegian sensibility like a gang of renegades on a cold dark night. Their songs enter your head like very slow bullets, deeper and deeper, and impossible to shift. They are pretty magnificent.
Coming together through a love of guitars and the power of great songs, Kassidy looked like the last gang in town before they had even played a note together. At their first full rehearsal Lewis Andrew, knowing that he and the rest of the band were multi-instrumentalist , asked when they were going to plug in.
The answer from the other 3 – guitarists/vocalists Barrie James O’Neill, Hamish Fingland and Chris Potter, was a definitive “never”. “We started to think this is what we were meant to be doing,” says Barrie.
“People might think it’s a gimmick cause its not the usual thing you see, nowadays anyway, but I think it makes it more pure. It becomes very obvious when its a good song if you can do it without all the paraphenalia, the tricks and synthesisers and the security of electric noise. And it’s exciting. If you miss a chord or a string, people are gonna hear it, and that’s what keeps us on our toes. It’s mischevous, that’s the way I see it. Its about seeing how long we can go without screwing up, seeing how tight we can get with this. There’s thirty strings on stage, and any one of them could break at any moment.”
There is nothing gentle or precious about Kassidy. They have a vigour, pop sensibility and unadulterated passion that is purely Scottish. They stand side by side across the front of the stage like a gang of outlaw gunslingers and take no prisoners.
The funky rhythms of interweaving guitars, the stomp of a beat box that BarrieJames whacks with his foot, harmonies that stack up on the chorus like Phil Spector producing the Beach Boys, all can be heard on their debut 5 track ‘Rubbergum EP’. “We kind of take that acoustic west coast thing and shake it up in a pot with more modern influences and see what we can get,” according to Lewis. “ When it all gets going its like a wall of harmony, its mystical.”
The band all live and write songs together although Barry may be their prime motivator, an intense, driven young man from the down and dirty area of Yoker, who says he has never dreamed of anything other than playing music. “There was always an Echo Range acoustic guitar in our house and when I was really young I’d sit there looking at it. I was told that it was an ornament, ‘you’re not allowed to touch that!’ but I lusted after it, and when I picked it up it was comfortable right away.”
“I believe in melodies in the air,” says Barry. “You don’t even need a guitar or any musical instrument to write a song, there’s melody everywhere in everyone. Everytime you see a guy washing the windows, he’s gonna be singing or whistling. When a conversation flags, people start humming in their heads. Some of our songs are about things that are hidden, clandestine secrets, things that you can’t see but you know they’re there; some are mystical and metaphorical; some of them are about girls; and some of them are just rhythms and melodies and words. But when we play them, they sound like whatever you want them to be.”
Kassidy’s forthcoming album is produced by man of the moment Jim Abiss (Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian, Noisettes, Stereophonics). “Big Jimmy, we inhaled his knowledge,” declares Barry James admiringly. “And spat it back out!” They did a lot of recording live, with few overdubs. “We did it the old fashioned way. It was like ‘can we have the lights dimmed? Can I drink a glass of wine? Can I smoke in here?’ Superficial things to get into character.”
The name of the band, in case you’re wondering, is a play on Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. And Kassidy certainly evince the gang spirit and never-say-die attitude of their outlaw western heroes. “We went into it together to see where it takes us,” says Barry. “And if we screw up, at least we’ll screw up together.”