Leeds’ explosive four-piece Fudge. have released the video for their new single Your Fall From Grace, the second to be taken from their forthcoming EP, The Town Hall Session, recorded and filmed live in Leeds Town Hall.

Described by the band as a “rebellious love song”, Y.F.F.G. is as close to a love song as their style will possibly allow.

Fudge. are, by their standards at least, more restrained here and it pays off in allowing the narrative to come through and grab your attention. Come the chorus, however, the band provide us with a powerful blast that is almost another song within the first.

The band pride themselves on their live performance which, repeatedly, is eulogised by those who find themselves caught within the chaos of a Fudge. gig. Their epic live performances have now met head on with the grandeur of the venue in which they recorded The Town Hall Session.

Unfazed by the building, the band and the team captured their hectic performance in stark polarity to the splendour of the venue. You wouldn’t think to pair the two, but it works beautifully.

So, we caught up with Cam (vocals) and Angus (drums). It felt at times like they were doing the interviewing, but that’s OK, we pushed on through.

P3dro: Where are you and what are you doing?

Angus: Sat at my laptop, speaking to you. Less specifically, I’m down at Newark, living at my parents’ house, like a true rock star. Doing little bits of everything, going on walks, going on more walks, watching lots of stuff. And playing lots of drums. Keeping busy.

Cam: I’m currently at my Dad’s, but I would normally be in Leeds with my girlfriend and doing fuck all.

What are you up to, Pete?

P3dro: I’m in Liverpool. I’ve just been out in the rain to walk the dog. She wasn’t very impressed.

Cam: What football team do you support?

P3dro: Liverpool!

Cam: Yayyyy!!! Go On!!!!!! I thought you may have said Everton.

P3dro: Well, there are some people who do support Everton, but anyway, give us a little potted history of the band.

Cam: I came to Uni in Leeds and had the intention to start a band in my first year, I met two lads who were originally the drummer and the bass player and they introduced me to Otto, our guitarist and we formed Fudge. We parted ways with the drummer and the bass player and Angus came in.

Then we played phat gigs together until this absolute shithouse of coronavirus happened. And that’s left us stressed depressed and lemon zest.

Angus: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly how I feel.

P3dro: Where do you think you get your influences from? We’re guessing there are quite a few Rage Against the Machine CDs in your collections?

Cam: Right, this is mad, but I’d never really listened to them. I only knew a few songs until Angus showed me more. I’d never proper listed to them until Angus told me about them.

Angus: Quite honestly it can’t have been long before then that I actually got into them as well. Before that, my teenage years were die hard Arctic Monkeys. From there, I think you can either go wishy washy indie or you can go to the riffy / indie / rock route. And that’s where I went. From there you get Queens of the Stone Age, Biffy Clyro and, obviously, RATM.

You can’t go wrong with a stinky riff.

Cam: We all share similar music tastes, but we also have different tastes as well.

Angus: Yeah, Otto and I went to school together, so we introduced each other to lots of stuff. Cam is into all sorts of stuff like Neil Diamond and Bruce Springsteen that probably don’t influence us directly. But there’s all that kind of back catalogue as well – I’m into Led Zep, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple – I love all that shit.

P3dro: We think it’s interesting, because a lot of bands will say they have diverse tastes and influences that get mixed together in the pot, whereas if you’re all into the same band then you end up sounding like that band.

Cam: Yeah, but writing songs with Otto and Angus sometimes proper pisses me off! They know so much more about music than I do and they want to put so many intricate things in there, whereas I just want to push it more.

Angus: I think Otto and I have recently got into a kind of math rock [thing]. Almost like a new age jazz era fusion of really complex music that we couldn’t dream of playing, but we’re desperate to prove ourselves! So, we’re trying to incorporate that and then poor Cam has to sing over it.

Cam: We still smash it though, we still get on with it.

Angus: That’s the essence of our weirdness. We don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re just trying to be good.

Cam: Yeah, I’ve put some words over some mad riffs. To be fair, there’s a definite Fudge. sound now. I feel we’ve grasped that, but when we first getting going there were variations of songs and one song would be poppy / indie and then another would be the most Slipknot sounding thing ever.

But, now I feel like we’ve got it down to what our sound is. Until it changes again!

P3dro: What would you say is the Fudge. sound?

Cam: Well, Otto, being Otto has to have a phat riff in there somewhere with a kind of filthy guitar sound. Angus twats his drums like no one else and I just do what I can over the top of it.

Angus: It’s chaotic in its structure before its ever a song. Its definitely an acquired taste, but we do have hints of normality in there as well. It’s mostly chaotic, though.

Cam: Talking about chaos, you should see some of our gigs. That’s definitely our favourite part of it.

Angus: Yeah, it’s the biggest reason why we do what we do. But I think we’ve done pretty well at refining that chaos and making it more consistent. We were on a good track up until Covid. We were starting to do some good stuff.

P3dro: Tell us about the Town Hall Session EP. How did that come about?

Cam: I wanted to do some live video. And we managed to get that.

Angus: It came about by accident, mostly. Otto was working for a brewery in Leeds – North Bar – and they were running an event at the Town Hall. Otto was carrying a keg or something through the building and thought it would be a great place to shoot a music video. It turns out he [happened to have] said that to the person who takes the bookings for the Town Hall.

So, she said they had no events booked and she could arrange to get us in for free. So, we snapped her fucking hand off. We got in for one session, but we were double booked with the organist who was tuning that massive organ in there. So there was us in there, along with the organist. He needed complete quiet to tune the organ, so we had to wait for ages while that was done.

So that gave us only a really small window before the choir was booked in for a practice. We managed to get the three singles recorded and videoed. But because we’d only had a limited amount of time, we managed to get back in and record the rest of the songs for the EP.

Cam: There will be five songs on the EP and we have three live videos. They’re all live takes apart from one song where I had to redo some vocals.

P3dro: We think [the video for] Y.F.F.G. is absolutely superb. It’s a kind of piece of our time, being played to an empty room.

Angus: I think you’re right there. The really strange thing about it is, by this time last year [February 2020], we had already recorded it. But Covid wasn’t really a thing at that point. We’d recorded those videos to nobody in a room, but it was a foreboding of what was to come and it’s become very relevant right now. And we didn’t even know.

It’s now a very eerie video. It was intended to be an empty Town Hall. It’s an epic venue, but the fact there’s a bunch of empty seats and they remain empty to this day and we were probably the last “gig” in there to this day …

P3dro: There’s a fair amount of politics in most of your songs, Money to be Made, for example. Do you think you have any kind of responsibility to shout that kind of message?

Cam: Yeah, definitely. I can’t remember quite what, but something had happened in the news, the Tories being dickheads, or something. I was pissed off at my job, hardly making any money. Just grafting away. I wrote this song and there was a lot of stuff in the world that I wasn’t happy about. Which is still the case, they’re still dickheads.

All of these reasons came together and that song came out. The lyrics were just planted onto a page. Angus and Otto had been working on it for a while and they had the riffs and stuff. I just remember one day it came straight away.

Angus: It’s a great song and it carries that sort of anger we all have. We’re all very frustrated with life and how it is. We’re quite well off, to be honest, in comparison with a lot of other people, so, yeah, absolutely, we have that responsibility. Regardless as to how many people see our message, every little counts.

P3dro: Are you in a position to make any plans for the future. Have you been able to write any new music?

Cam: I’ve been doing some of my own stuff, writing songs on my guitar. We’ve still got another single to come out and then the EP to drop. We managed to spread that out. Otherwise, they all would have been out by now.

Angus: We don’t have firm dates for those releases as yet. Some artists are quite well suited to releasing music during a pandemic, but we’re not. For a start, we don’t have the technology or the knowhow to make something absolutely quality ourselves.

The ideal environment for us is to release a song and then go and gig. To make a big show of it. To be quite honest, we’re struggling and constantly re-evaluating after every release.

And, none of us are together, we’re all separated. I’m also in a high risk category, so I have to isolate from everybody else anyway.

As soon as we can get back together, it’s going to be A Good Day.

P3dro: Recommend a band or an album you think we should be listening to right now.

Angus: Them Crooked Vultures. Without a doubt.

Cam: An album I always come back to is definitely ‘Similarities’ by Biffy Clyro.

Anyway, what have you been listening to, Peter? Apart from Fudge. obviously.

P3dro: We’ll go with The Twilight Sad, from Glasgow. They have released two live albums this year, both on BandCamp on a pay what you like basis. We think they’d go down well with you two.

Thanks for your time, guys.