The Great Escape - Interviews with APRE, Iris, Maisie Peters and Tamzene

Spotlight shows this year included Foals and Lewis Capaldi, whilst new break-through stars such as APRE, Confidence Man and Girl in Red made triumphant statements on the festival.

Ollie Tunmore sat down with a few of the weekend’s most promising new acts; including British duo APRE, Maisie Peters, Norway’s incredible Iris and Scotland’s newest star Tamzene.

APRE

1) For readers who are just learning of yourselves now, who is APRE, and where did the name come from? I know you met at chess club – which is a great story!

“We’re APRE, we’re a duo – we met at chess club about three-and-a-half years ago now. We were doing our own separate projects in music and then we came together to start playing. We then did that on and off for two years while playing in other bands, but our escape was then coming together and writing music together. After a few years of that, we’d written about 60 songs – and realised we could do something with that...!

“We went to an event to showcase our stuff and we met someone from BBC Introducing and it’s gone from there! That was only November 2017, we signed in July 2018, and now here we are. It’s quite mad how quickly it’s happened, it’s definitely a dream come true. And the more we do, the more we want. Signing to Polydor was a real bucket-list moment, it was amazing.”

2) I actually saw you at the Great Escape 2018 – so since then, what would you say has changed the most for you?

“We’re less nervous. Last year we were so scared, we’d only done about four gigs and we had like eight labels in the room. But what’s changed the most... We’re a lot busier! We feel the pressure more.

“The moment it comes out of your bedroom and it’s shared with the world, you feel the pressure to continue writing and continuously do better every single time though.

3) You’ve got arguably your biggest tour to date coming up – what are you most excited for, and what is one of the challenges of touring you find?

“We’re both so excited about playing London Scala. We’ve seen so many amazing acts there before so to think that we’re playing there too is just madness. Recently though with playing a lot of shows, there’s a lot of hanging around. I’m spending about thre hours a day in Starbucks. It’s worth it though, of course. Think the trick is finding something else to enjoy. I want to learn French this tour.”

Iris