Indie Dog are an exciting SA band!

GaynorJune 22, 2021

May be an image of 1 person, playing a musical instrument, standing, guitar and indoor

When you’re scrolling through your local community page and you notice a BAND filming a VIDEO on the top of your local shopping centre, what can you do except make contact with them? I love supporting local and I loved the concept that they came up with. So without further ado, here’s Indie Dog! Indie Dog is: Seb (vocals and rhythm guitar), Kian (lead guitar), Yak (bass guitar) and Marc (drums)

Before we even get started, check out their video for Fly High – filmed on top of Bedford in Bedfordview, South Africa.

Hey hey! Thanks so much for taking the opportunity to do this!

You’re welcome! Thanks for the opportunity!

Firstly tell us a bit about yourselves, how did you guys get together and start a band particularly in this weird climate, did you get much chance to gel together and find your identities before Covid began, and how has Covid affected all this?

We played our first ever show in August 2018. Since then we’ve played pretty much all the major venues and clubs in Gauteng and we’ve toured KZN as well. We also managed to fit in a bunch of festivals there too. So fortunately we got ourselves a good grounding in the scene before this whole thing hit the planet. In terms of gelling as a band, we are quite tight. We do a lot of improv jamming which really gets us into a zone where we are very in tune with each other.

Any stories about your name and how you got it?

Well, we’re all for independent music. The more artists can express themselves and deliver their communication without needing to conform to outside pressures of how others want them to sound in order to be financially viable (or whatever else) the more we will get true art coming into this world. It is based on this that I named my dog Indie, a rescue from the SPCA Germiston . And in turn we named our band Indie Dog.

Baptism of Fire is a really cool song and I can hear influences of bands like Guns ‘n Roses and Bon Jovi.

Who would you say has influenced you / who do you guys listen to when not making your own music? It’s also awesome to come across a traditional rock band right here in our hood.

We all have such an eclectic range of music we listen to. If it’s good we’ll listen to it. Personally, I am very rooted in all forms of rock (metal, grunge, punk, good ol’ rock n roll) but I grew up listening to pretty much everything from Jack Johnson all the way to Metallica. A couple of us are big Chili Peppers fans too. So it’s quite a good mix I think.

“Fly High started off as an improv jam and ended as a crowd favourite at shows and festivals.”. I love this! So it sort of morphed out of an idea and a crowd reaction?

We have this thing we do at shows where we dedicate some time in our set to playing an improvised song off the top of our heads. If the crowd likes it then we play it again at the next show. And when we do this enough it kind of writes itself. Fly High was written this way while we were on tour. At one particular show we hit the chorus as you hear it now, completely unplanned, and we got massive response from the crowd. Luckily someone filmed it and we were able to look back at what we did and took it from there. In the studio there was more on the spot writing that took place and finally we have what we have. It’s definitely one of the more fun ways to write music.

It’s awesome to come across local musos passionate about our area and I love the fact that you filmed on top of Bedford! How did you guys come up with that idea and describe the experience?

Fly High is a special song to us. We had been playing a hell of a lot of shows at the time and we all had different things going on in our lives, so the song holds a lot of emotion in it. We wanted the video to convey that emotion as beautifully as possible and decided that, with the name of the song being what it is, we should do it on a high rooftop. When we were discussing where exactly we should do the filming we happened to be having coffee at the Starbucks in Bedford Centre (where you can find at least one of us on the regular). Yak, our bassist, said “Why not do it here?” And we all agreed that it would be great to pay homage to something we see pretty much every day. So we walked straight to the management offices and to our surprise they were very keen to have us. The rest is history.

Filming up there was quite breathtaking and allowed us to get into the same zone we’re in when we perform live, which is exactly what we wanted to capture.

There are a couple of really amazing local venues that come to mind – The Radium and Bailey’s. Can we see you guys there any time in the near future / what has the support from local venues been like?

We’ve played the Radium a number of times and to us it’s a second home. We’ll likely be back there in August as we just played a show there last month. We played at Bailey’s when we first started out and simply haven’t gotten around to playing there again. We’ll get on that!

Local venues have been really great most of the time. As an example, the Radium was our very first venue and gave us a shot at performing – which was a great honour as they mostly only book “the big guys” like Kahn from the Parlotones, Jesse Clegg, Wonderboom, etc. We’re happy to say that we packed the place out and continue to do so when we play there.

It hasn’t really been a wonderful time for musos for the last year or so, but you guys have stayed together and even grown. How has the scene looked for you and how have you managed to navigate it?

Three parts dedication and one part luck seems to be our general state of operation. We were lucky to have landed a great partnership with KVD studios at the end of 2019 and so we’ve had time to be in the studio and write and release music. During the hard lockdown we wrote a song entirely separate from each other over whatsapp voice note, then recorded in our home studios, filmed our own separate parts of the music video and released the track in June 2020 (Moving On). We are dedicated to this band and are allergic to stagnation. As a result we are constantly working on something that will push us higher on the ladder and we hope that one day we will reach the top. And we believe that through dedicated, hard work that it may be possible.

The premise of Tweak the Golden Thread is the golden thread of humanity. It’s a thread which runs through races, generations, nationalities, and genders and which, if tweaked, can move and affect us all. Artists, musos, actors, have an awesome way of doing this. Is this something that motivates you to ‘do what you do’, or ‘why do you do what you do?’ (More about this here) https://tweakthegoldenthread.co.za/the-golden-thread/

I had honestly not heard of that before, but it’s definitely real to me that there is commonality that runs through everyone in the human race that, if explored and strengthened, could pull us out of all the conflict we face daily. As musicians and as a band our sole purpose is to make art that will really talk to people and make them feel things. We don’t write music for the sake of writing, but rather to communicate an idea or emotion that will impact someone when they listen to it. The lyrics, the music, everything is directed towards this purpose and I think that runs very close to what you are talking about with Tweaking the Golden Thread.

What’s up next for you guys?

We are currently recording another album at KVD studios and we’re taking our sweet time with it so that we can make it as good as can be. We intend on releasing it later this year.

Other than that, we’ll be in Cape Town in June for a few shows and for an appearance on the SABC Expresso show. Then in August we’ll be rocking the stage at Misty Waters in Lake Umuzi.

Is there anything you’d like to get across to us?

Thanks very much for doing what you do! Artists need all the support they can get and it is a rare thing indeed to find someone willing to truly and selflessly help them along.

Thanks for our personal greeting Seb!