What is Fever Rouge?

Ollie Hughes: It's a sickness that overcomes you, it makes you wanna laugh, dance and cry. It's mainly love actually. It's red and black, death and romance.

Your cover art is really amazing, it's all hand drawn and painted and feels authentic.

Ollie Hughes: It's Ryan Poulter. Originally my Pa did a couple of them but then we wanted someone who was close to the scene and they were just amazing. I was really drawn to the political messaging they do themselves in their art. There is a big piece in their house which blew me away and I really wanted to work with them. In this age of art that's devalued, fast and always being consumed and AI I always want to have something real. I want to make everything real.

A lot of the lyrics of songs try to comment on recent issues you feel that should be talked about. What do you have in mind when you are in the writing process?

Ollie Hughes: It tends to come naturally, because I'm politically minded and I think it's very important to be aware of what's going on. I feel like you need to be aware to make a change, I feel like what's going on right now is too important to ignore. We are kinda shifting away more to actually be more personal, direct to ourselves. The songs we have been writing right now, instead of these big concepts, it's more based on how I feel. I wanna be less metaphorical, more literal.

Oli Mooney: We all write the music together, we have these conversations a lot. Especially over long car journeys. We will be talking about music and just change over to politics chatting about it for two hours straight. We all discuss it a lot and I feel it's important to have these discussions and really find out the nuances about all the things that are going on. That's brought up through the lyrics. With Ryan's art, there's such a depth to it. When we first started working with her, we really loved her work and it was a collaborative process of saying like what we imagined and then transforming it. Like using newspapers to have a background or stories or different things.

Can you tell us more about your single ‘Boys Will Be Boys’?

Ollie Hughes: This one is probably the most on the nose that has been political. We wrote it at a time last year, just after all that far right marches. I was angry to be honest. The way that people used the flag was just so wrong. You ignored the fact that British culture is colonialism and from that we have become such a multicultural society.

What's the creative process like making a song like this?

Oli Mooney: Ollie basically made the demo for that but that's not normally how we do it, we normally just jam and record it on our phones and listen back. We have little sections, take them and tweak them and build a structure.

Ollie Hughes: It's quite interesting because when we played an acoustic set the other week, when you bear it down to the bones of two acoustic guitars and the two vocals you can hear how raw the song actually is and how it holds up.

You have the other single as well, ‘Burn It All Down’. It’s a short song but so chaotic. Is that the kind of style you’re going to lean more into?

Oli Mooney: That's basically the end of a song, it's normally an outro. I think that heavier, messier, louder stuff isn’t going to be going towards that too much. Maybe in small doses not as focused on that.

Is it true you have the Green Door Store urinal?

Ollie Hughes: No, we are part of the UTI, Urinal Trust Investors. I didn’t actually put anything in but I'm on the placard. It's at our friend's house, Zen. It’s beautiful. It's drilled into the outside.

Do you have any tours coming up at all?

Ollie Hughes: We went on one in spring. Our van got obliterated.

Kieran: It was our Alain’s van, his dad used to drive to primary school in it. It's been in his family for a long time. Luckily it wasn't on any of the tour dates. It was his birthday and we drove to Bristol to see a band but on the way back we broke down and we got a jump start and everything should have been all fine. We then had a complete electrical failure in the car, all the lights, the air bags failed, everything. The whole car shut off. We pulled over on the hard shoulder and basically watched this 16-ton lorry just smash into it. We were all out of the car so we were fine but they think he fell asleep behind the wheel. It was the day before Homegrown as well.

What’s next for you guys?

Oli Mooney: We’re writing and are going to record in September a new EP, a live album and a single out towards the end of the year.

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