Mercia the band from Stoke On Trent were the first to band play at 2023 Call Of The Wild Festival and you can read about their performance on Friday reviews of the festival. I was lucky enough to bump into one of the band’s guitarists up in the media area and as I rather enjoyed their show was given the chance to get the lowdown on the band themselves. Here is what went down sitting in the corner of the busy press room.
CGCM: Thank you for allowing me time on behalf of CGCM to chat with you. Being a very new band to me and no doubt many of our readers I wonder if I can start by asking about you and the band you are a part of?
Tyler: Yes, well I am Tyler Kent and one of the 2 guitarists. Yeah, there is me and Tom and we share lead lines and harmonize.
CGCM: Could you give us a bit of background to how the band came about?
Tyler: We started during Covid, just writing songs just as it seemed the perfect opportunity to get everything done. So we hunkered down making a bunch of tunes and from that essentially managed to get a bunch of gigs for the up-and-coming year. Then low and behold progress as we see. The other members of the band are Vernon on bass, Ash is on vocals, absolutely mental, (laughs) and Kirk on drums. We work really well together.
CGCM: How did you all kind of meet?
Tyler: Oh, so primarily it was Ash and Kirk that thought of the idea, because the drummer Kirk came up with a melody line and went “let’s see where this can go”. It appealed to Ash. Our drummer used to live in Brighton but he came back to live around Stoke and I got a message from Kirk and it was a case of seeing what we could make. We did have a previous guitarist so Tom isn’t our original guitarist. We started making tunes with these guys so… that’s how we started writing and our songs are based on law of old Mercia area so all the shires. We like to base our songs on legends, it just tells a story.
CGCM: (Me getting it ALL wrong😀) So I take it you are all Lord Of The Rings fans?
Tyler: (Putting me right) No, no, no no. It’s based on real things. It is like one of our songs is “Molly Leigh” which is based on a witch who was a legend around I think Staffordshire (he is correct). We like to incorporate that kind of thing into our songs.
CGCM: Silly me. My first thought when you said “shires” was to think Lord Of The Rings forgetting that there are loads of “shires” in England. (Laughing at my own stupidity which Tyler joined in saying he understood)
Tyler: Yeah we mean Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and some buggers going to kill me for forgetting the other (laughing away) and the other one! We really enjoy playing together and now we have an EP out currently and we are just working on hunkering down to write more music. We don’t want to just blurt out music, not taking our time with things. We have just released a new single called “The Light” along with a video for it and we have another in the works which we are sorting out a video for. The way we are doing things is to release singles until we have enough to form like an album.
(This from Google about Mercia… “Mercia was one of the three notable Anglic kingdoms founded after Sub-Roman Britain was settled by Anglo-Saxons in an era called the Heptarchy. It was centered around the River Trent and its tributaries, in a region now known as the Midlands of England.“).
CGCM: So, what are the main influences you bring and indeed others bring to the band, even if they are not particularly obvious?
Tyler: (laughs his ass off at the question😂) Well this is the crazy thing, we are all from relatively different backgrounds in terms of music. I am primarily in your funk and blues area. That’s where I was brought up with jazz and funk, blues although my day was into rock. Ash is 80s rock, hair metal, that kind of stuff. Vernon is I think Bruce Springsteen who he is massively into. I think Kirk and Tom are into that kind of grand operatic type of metal…
CGCM: Symphonic metal?
Tyler: Yeah, yeah. That’s what they are getting into. There is a massive span, I mean I could be listening to like Prince one minute and playing metal the next. I mean it compliments when we are writing music, we are able to gain different perspectives from each other and not all having the same helps. It turns out kind of as alternative melodic rock. We like to make it as raw as possible, it’s the best outcome that we have found. The best thing is taking our time. There is a formula that many fall into but we don’t want to do that so we like to take our time.
CGCM: So you said you are working on new material but will there be more gigs or tours in the near future?
Tyler: So up and coming gigs we have Rockmantic (Carlisle 2024)… he says another festival which it seems is abroad in summer).
CGCM: So is it a case of focussing on music before perhaps touring the UK?
Tyler: In terms of engagement it is better to have multiple singles released consecutively to keep the hype going. Rather than hitting folks with a whole album which could drop off after a short while, but if we drip feed it keeps folks’ attention over a longer period. It seems to be doing well so far. I mean singles are where the whole market is going these days. Some of the band members like Kirk, he is very keen to make a very progressive song that is between 8 and 15 minutes long, but we like to keep the attention of folks at the same time. It is all about finding the balance. We love doing that kind of thing as well.
(At this point on the recording I take time to mourn/rant about the good old days where people bought and listened to whole albums as the bands had worked on them. I explained my disgust on finding out folks just made “playlists”. Tyler laughed but agreed that it was a bit sad. Nice of him to let me do that😂)
Tyler: (stops my rant) It will be a case of when we have enough for an album we will just put all the songs together. Also, the storyline kind of works with that kind of thing, you know going through all the different laws of Mercia and you can change from story to story. With Mercia being the shires where there were wars at some point you know, it is history, the songs being based on the area and the legends that were happening in the region. It is very historical.
CGCM: So you are doing for the 3 shires in England what Sabaton are doing about war. Telling the stories of the past.
Tyler: Oh God yes! It’s all facts, real characters, real stories. We are looking at our songwriting to take this further, it’s not a necessity but we would like to come out with more. We will be working on it as we hunker down.
At this point, we chat generally and I take the time to thank him for allowing us to find out more about the band. Definitely, I was more interested than ever in them due to what Tyler had to say, especially lyrically. Hopefully, for those unaware of this band, I recommend checking them out. Musically they are very accessible, hard rock mixed with AOR but with some oomph about them. There is a dark vibe and now I understand the back story it all makes sense. Again just to say a huge thank you to Tyler and to wish the band continued success.
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Check out my other reviews and interviews here. Tom
