Heroes Wear Red Interview

Heroes Wear Red was founded by bass player Gavin Wienand and vocalist Timothy Kroon who prove to be a formidable song writing team. New addition Patrick Smith completes the act on drums, perfectly complimenting an already powerful team.

More Than Music got together with Tim Kroon from Heroes Wear Red, this is what he had to say about the band, the new album and the success of their latest single.

How did you guys come up with the name “Heroes Wear Red”?

It was a suggestion from one of our original guitarist, we used to be called Blood Money in 2007. We had quite a bit of resistance from clubs thinking we are a heavy metal band when in fact we were a pop/rock band. Just before the release of the album, we thought that now is the time to change the name to something more indicative of the style, we made a short list of names and Heroes Wear Red was one of the suggestions that we all liked.

The band has been together for three years, do you think the hard work is paying of?

For the first time we are seeing the benefits of the hard work that we have put in, in retrospect we really struggled in 2008, when we started e had our record deal, we had our tours, it was fantastic, but then we decided to take the independent route and we really struggled. We’ve been working with musketeer records and we’ve started to see some success. The new single is doing well and it attracts people to your show and to your website and we’re starting to see the reward, so it was defintly worth it.

You have listed some of your influences as U2, The Cult, Audioslave and Depeche, who are your musical heroes?

One of my heroes is Chris Cornell, they are a big influence from my side. The other songwriter in the band Gavin is more of an 80’s guy, he likes the late 80’s rock/gothic vibe, and his favorite band is the cult, which is more on the rock and roll side of music. In our earlier music those influenced came out quite strong, but recently we moved to a more popular direction like U2 and Dépêche mode.

 Your debut album is “SURVIVING SEPTEMBER”, can you tell us more about the album.

The album was recorded in late 2007 and early 2008, we got together with JP from BE Sharp studios who worked with bands like Sugardrive in the past. BE Sharp sponsored the recording process for the album so we could really take our time with this album. The Surviving September theme came from 2007 when everyone in the band had quite a rough time, both personally and professionally. We pushed through, we got through the album, committed to it, work though it and come out stronger at the end. It was a great record and it was owing to that process

Can we expect a national tour from Heroes Wear Red this year?

There are a lot in the pipeline, we are in talks with Prime Circle and Cassette to piggyback with them in 2009, but for now we want to back the single as much as possible and follow up with a good tour.

Your band interests are listed as Video gaming and fast cars, what games are you interested in and what’s your favorite car?

There’s an internal battle going on as far as cars are concerned, Gavin’s pretty much a BWM man, and I’m a fan of Audi, we are both fans of German engineering. Gavin is a big car freak and he writes in a car magazine in his spare time. In terms of games its pretty much racing games as well so all about cars at the moment.

HWR have had a lot of success on the Vodafone Hi 5@5, do you think that this is an accurate indication of you fan base?

I think the biggest indicator of the impact that the single has had for me was the first time it went to no 1, we had relaxed a little on our campaign to get our friends and family to vote and suddenly it jumped up to 12 spots to no 1. We knew that the song was getting out there and the public was starting to vote.  I think in the public’s mind we are pretty much a new band and people are starting to get familiar with it, people can’t believe that this is a South African band, they might hear the song but don’t neccaserely associate it with heroes yet. This will hopefully get cemented with the next single.

Are you guys planning an international tour?

At the moment we are trying to get our stuff together locally, it would be nice to do an international tour. One of the things that we’ve aimed for from day one was to release the record first before going over.  We still have to convince South Africa before we convince the world in my opinion.

Is there a second album in the planning phase?

Yes, we’ve been constantly writing since we released the last one, so we’ve got this really big selection of songs and in November we want to start working on the next record. We released Surviving September in 2008 and we released it again this year in March so there’s a big time extension between records. We are starting new again and we want to take advantage of the time we have to do a great follow up album. It’s going to be one that the critics are going to be looking at, “can they follow it up with something cool” and I’m convinced that we can judging on the material that we already have. I think it’s going to be much bigger than the first album.

Describe HWR in one word?

Authentic, we’ve always wanted this to be something that we take seriously, it wasn’t going to be something that we do on the weekend. What we strive to be is authentic, that is what I hope we would be, although we transgress from time to time we strive to create songs that people can connect to.

What are your final Thoughts?

The people have recently been paying attention to the band, I think it’s important that the people check us out at our gigs, also that people would take a listen to other songs on the album. It really is an album that we are exceptionally proud of and every song is as strong as the next. It will give you a good idea of what we are about.

Heroes Wear Red’s debut Album is available at all major retail stores and www.rhythmonline.co.za