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Dexeter

Interview with C2C stars Dexeter!

By Zoe from Best British Country Music

“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of doing it, time will pass anyway so you might as well put time to the best possible use” – Florence Nightingale

Dexeter

Hello!

Gareth spent the first half of the interview finding the above quote which I think was worth it as its one of the best most meaningful ones we’ve had on the blog! You know I remember when the pop-up stages were announced last year and I read through and saw Dexeter and thought, thats a cool name for a band! I saw their set and really enjoyed it. A year on they announce the line up again and I’m flicking through, mainly looking at who I want to see perform and who I really want to interview and I thought it’d be great to interview Dexeter but they’ll never want to do an interview with little old me! I was literally jumping up and down in my room and called my mum when I contacted them a few weeks before and they said they’d love to! And I really enjoyed chatting with them; Gareth and Deeanne are two of the loveliest people I met at this years Country 2 Country (and I met a lot of people!) and their music is among the best out there! I know Dexeter are the next big thing in UK Country music and I can’t wait to watch them grow and hear new music from them! Check out our interview below!

Firstly can you tell me about Dexeter as an artist?

Deeanne: So we came to Country 2 Country last year, that was the first time we’d been invited to anything like this it was actually only our second or third gig or something! Since then its just taken off massively, we released the mini album around this time last year, Brighter Skies. We did our first five gigs last year and then to be invited back this year is great and we’ve got a new album coming out in May so yeah it all kicked off really! We originally started this as a writing project and Gareth wanted to write songs to pitch to other artists and then we just started writing our own things and thought well why not go out and play them ourselves and people seemed to like it which was a bonus.

What are your main influences?

Deeanne: We’ve probably got different ones, I think definitely Lady A, everyone wants to be Lady A don’t they? With regards to writing Gareth looks at all types of different bands; Gloriana, Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert to name a few.

Tell me a bit your songwriting process and where you draw inspiration from lyrically?

Deeanne: Our writing process is quite funny actually, I’m not very good but Gareth’s a brilliant songwriter. He writes all the songs, for a lot of them I come up with some kind of drama…

Gareth: Real life drama

Deeanne: Yeah thats going on in my life at the time.

Gareth: And she’ll bang on about it a lot!

Deeanne: But then Gareth works it into a song!

Gareth: And usually the process is like, I’ll bring in a song and Deeanne will say no thats not right or change this line or do this haha! She doesn’t give anything constructive to the song haha

Deeanne: No he’ll go and re-work it and I’ll wait and then I’ll say yeah thats the line keep it haha.

Gareth: Then we’ve got the rehearsals where she has to sing it in every single key until we find the right one haha!

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever written about in a song?

Gareth: We don’t have anything that strange…

Deeanne: Maybe thats what we’re lacking haha!

Gareth: We do have a song about someone who’s well known in the UK scene.

Deeanne: Don’t say it!

Gareth:Thats all I’ll say, they don’t know its about them!

Deeanne: Don’t ask him later after beers because he will just say haha!

Slow it down’s been getting a lot of attention, I really love the song by the way, but I wondered if you could tell me how that kind of exploded?

Gareth: I think we’re pretty prolific on twitter so thats been useful.

Deeanne: It was our first music video too which helped, we’ve never had a video for anything we’ve released before.

Gareth: No and we got a professional film maker in to film it for us and basically when it was finished we shot it in a bar in Leicester, I knew what I wanted it to look like and when we got the footage back it was almost exactly how I’d imagined it, almost cinematic, it was perfect.

Deeanne: Actually, that whole song, we were touring with a few songs at the time and we wrote that one and went back into the band and said no we’re not releasing any of them we’re releasing this one. So they learnt it as they recorded it really. I love it when that happens.

Gareth: We dropped it from the set for a while because we got sick of playing it didn’t we?

Deeanne: Well you did because its hard to play!

Gareth: Its absolutely impossible to play the two guitar parts together because the two guitars are tuned in different tunings and in different keys. Its impossible without two guitarists but the second guitarist can only play in a certain part of the song to make it line up. So we brought it back last week for our “stageit” performance and we’re going to play it again.

What are your “mid-gig” thoughts?

Deeanne: Well I worry a lot, whats my next line, whats the next verse, thats what I’m usually thinking. And then when I get to the second to last song thats when I finally start to enjoy it and then I’ll finish and I’m like oh man I want to do it again now!

Gareth: For the last few shows I’ve had a problem with my guitar and have to push the cable back in as it kept dropping out so I’m always thinking, why can’t I hear myself and I hope I don’t fall off the stage.

Deeanne: At one of our last gigs, it was up in Manchester with Luke and Mel and we’d done the intro of a song and started to sing and he recognised someone in the audience that he hadn’t met yet and he just stopped playing, haha!

Gareth: Well I knew I had some stuff to talk to him about afterwards and that just became my over riding thought! I knew we were going to use him to record some drums and I thought about it and then was like oh I’ve stopped playing!

You can find Dexeter’s music on their website

www.dexeterband.co.uk

 (Gareth tells me theres a new website coming soon!) And all social media’s are Dexeter band so go follow them, tweet them, check them out on youtube and don’t forget they have a new album coming out very soon, Four Thousand Miles to Nashville, so stay tuned for that! I can’t wait!

Thank you!

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Just Zoe x

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Annette Gibbons
Hi, I’m Annette, I have been a huge country music fan since the early 90s those were the days we were lucky enough to have CMT in the UK. I enjoy nothing more than listening to country music whilst having a cold beer (or a moonshine) with friends. I try to as many gigs as I can here in the UK and in the USA; I think of Nashville as my second home and I am lucky to have made some amazing friends in Tennessee. Think Country is something I am very proud of, I just want to share my love and passion of all things country music related with you all.
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