‘Four Chords And A Fucking Chorus’

With fans including Paul Weller and Oasis, Oldham three-piece Twisted Wheel have been causing quite a stir of late. The band have just released their self-titled debut album, a collection of raw, stripped-down tunes with bucketloads of energy and attitude. Do the group feel that they have more of an authentically punk sound than their contemporaries?

“Yeah, man,” affirms Twisted Wheel singer and guitarist, Jonny Brown. “We listen to loads of music, like folk, punk and ’50s rock and roll, and all of the influences come out on the record. But I think we’re just a bit more straight to the point than a lot of other bands. There’s not loads of twiddling about – it’s just, ‘Here’s four chords and here’s a fucking chorus’, you know what I mean?”
It’s a manifesto that could easily have come from the mouths of Noel or Liam Gallagher.
“Well, yeah, they inspired me to pick up a guitar,” notes Jonny. “When I was about nine, they became massive. Soon after, I really got into playing music myself. The bands I was into before them, like Led Zeppelin, I could never imagine following in their footsteps, because they looked like superheroes, with the long hair and flares and shit. But Oasis made it feel more real and I connected with them.”
The Mancunian icons have invited Twisted Wheel out on tour, as has Paul Weller, who first saw the band play at the 100 Club.
“We sent a CD to Weller’s studio,” recalls Jonny. “We included a number and he got in contact and gave us some good feedback. He kept in touch, and he came down to the 100 Club when we played there. It was another fucking surreal moment. He’d had a few beers, so he was well up for having a bit of fun, and we went out afterwards. It’s the same with Oasis – you wake up the next morning and you go, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ To have people like them into our music means a lot.”
Although Twisted Wheel have had some great nights out with rock royalty, they’re more than capable of getting up to hi-jinks on their own. As bass-player Rick Lees recently explained on Twisted Wheel’s blog, Jonny and a member of the band’s crew ended up in A&E a while back after a particularly heavy night on the tiles in Bristol.
“Me and our merch man had been in a club,” Jonny winces. “On the way home, we saw this billboard with these two plastic heads on top, and we both jumped up and grabbed it. But he slid down it and chopped half his finger off – it was hanging on by a thread. We were in A&E for around eight hours, but we managed to get everyone into Twisted Wheel. As they were all leaving, they were like, ‘See you Jonny, we’ll check the band out later!’”