Feature: The Checks - It's True What You Heard

But the real doozie was when NME editor Conor McNicholas, who was in New Zealand at the behest of the Music Industry Commission, happened upon a queue winding around the corner and had his curiosity suitably piqued. The upshot of that was The Checks receiving an invitation to travel to England to join in the 2005 NME New Music Tour, and the rest, as they say, is history. From the contacts made there they eventually signed to indie label Full Time Hobby, and, after spending the best part of a year living together in a flat in Kilburn, North London, The Checks have recently finished recording their debut album 'Hunting Whales' with producer Ian Broudie (Lightning Seeds, The Zutons, The Coral, Echo and the Bunnymen), at the prestigious Rak Studios.

It's Monday night and Sony BMG, who look after band's interests on this side of the world, look like they're bringing out the silver service for their young protégées, with a drinks and nibbles evening to unveil the new album. The following day there's interviews divided neatly into 30-minute segments, with NZM deftly managing to wrangle an extra 10 minutes and that all-important first interview of the day. All this and an invitation to attend one of two sold-out shows, but sorry folks, no CDs to-go. Note to self; Sony definitely playing cards close to their chest with this one. All five members are at both the unveiling and the interviews; yet too young to be jaded by all the industry carry-on I presume. After a brief introductory spiel from frontman Ed Knowles, delivered from scribbled notes with delightful home town candour, we get our first taste of 'Hunting Whales'. 

From the first fiery riffage of Mercedes Children it's apparent that there's a little more muscle on the wirey frame of The Checks' retro-rock than was evident on What You Heard. This is borne out later with a thicker and gutsier re-recording of that debut single, so I ask if this was Broudie's influence or something the band themselves were shooting for.

 "I think it was us actually," replies lead guitarist Sven Pettersen. "I think we just got better at delivering the sound that we wanted to hear, and it so happened that it was a bit more gritty." To which rhythm guitarist Callum Martin adds:  "It's also an environmental thing - we actually had a nice studio to work with, and when you have that your performance shines through more."
Resisting the urge to write new songs in their fabulous new Kilburn surroundings, the band concentrated instead on working with what was already in the bag - a 45-song swag of well broken-in songs that didn't require a whole lot of overhauling. "We did a little bit of structure stuff," volunteers bassist Karel Chabera. "But mainly it was already there. A couple of verses got dropped, adding a part here..."

"We fooled around and changed the feel and put them together to see how we could make them the best they could be," chips in drummer Jacob Moore.

"Anything we could try and do in those first three weeks we did in pre-production working with the producer," continues Chabera.
"And even before that we did about three weeks rehearsal, so it's all kind of gearing up for when you step into the recording studio, it's almost sort of premeditated [smiles from the rest of the band] and you can just get on without having problems."
Broudie's input seems to have leant more towards coaxing good performances out of the lads than pitching new ideas at them.

"He didn't push anything different too hard," says Moore. "He just sort of came on board to have strictly an objective point of view, someone who was there to listen to our ideas. It was small things, the sort of things you'd say in band practice, 'Let's go into this bit here...'"

The nine weeks they spent at Rak is a pretty expensive chunk of time for a well-rehearsed and fairly basic rock band, so where did the bulk of the time get chewed up?

"The guitar sounds," admits Martin slightly sheepishly. "The first day we got the drum sounds and the bass sound pretty nailed and we'd do small tweaks per song."