Booking gigs isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s as simple as a venue returning a band’s email. Sometimes, or at least one time, the band’s lead singer saves the life of a British musician while vacationing on a Grecian island. For Oklahoma City’s Electric Sunrise (linktr.ee/electricsunrise), the second option actually seemed simpler.
The four-piece band, which released its latest singe, “Forget,” on May 16, leaves for its first UK tour and first tour ever in June after local performances at Paseo Arts Fest on May 24 and Core4 Brewing Company on May 30. We sat down with Winter Ference (vocals, guitar), Triston Silva (guitar, vocals), Tsyrus Neumann (bass) and Ben Griffith (drums) to talk about booking an international tour, getting bloodstains out of the backseat and “pickle rock.” Well, we didn’t set out to talk about most of these things, but it kind of just happened.
OG: How did this UK tour come about?
Winter Ference: I’m forcing them to do this. It’s a long story about why we’re doing this, but essentially, I was in Greece a few summers back and saved the life of a British dude that was on vacation.
He had crashed his scooter motorcycle thing out in the middle of nowhere on an island.
And I’m a paramedic by trade. We saw him. I passed by. My fiancé at the time was like, ‘Turn around. Go drive back.’ And we went back. And I was like, ‘Oh, this guy is, like, dying actively. And long story short, we ended up throwing him in our rental car, all bloodied up and, you know, the works and brought him like 45 minutes to a hospital because we were in the middle of nowhere. And no one spoke English there. It was a very remote side of this island. And yeah, this guy was going to die. They tried calling an ambulance. They said it was going to be over an hour. And I was like, ‘He doesn’t have an hour.’ So we booked it to this hospital and
he ended up staying there for 26 days, then got air-lifted back to England. … He’s a singer of a band in the UK called The Strikes. And they’ve broken up. But he wanted me to come visit and do some acoustic shows with him, and I was like, ‘Well, why not just book a full tour if I have a little bit of a connection there? So then we ended up being able to book a full run of tours all over. And we’re playing a big show with his band on June 8 at Leeds Irish Centre. And his band’s doing a reunion show just for that date. It’s called Punctured Lung Fest. … So yeah, kind of random. Just a guy that I happened to stumble across dying who I managed to bring to a hospital, who lived and then wanted to play some shows.
Ben Griffith: But did he pay for the deep cleaning of the blood off of your car?
Ference: No. It was fine. Clorox wipes.
Griffith: He didn’t pay!
OG: So what all have you been doing to prepare for this?
Griffith: Some bands will be really like, ‘You got to play all sorts of new stuff at every show,’ and they have hundreds of songs on their list. But because these are all originals, we just have a solid two sets or so. And we’ll just mix and match and play it by ear. At least for me, that’s what makes it fun. If it’s literally the same freaking set, then it’s less fun. It’s less spontaneous.
OG: How did you book the other shows in Scotland and England?
Ference: Essentially, went onto Facebook and joined a bunch of musician pages … and just posted, ‘Hey, I’m trying to put together a tour. Do you guys have any recommendations on bands to play with and also venues?’ And I got hundreds and hundreds of responses from people. … Then once I got those venue names secured, I reached out to hundreds of venues. Literally probably 500 emails were sent, and I’d say that about 100 responded. Not all of those responses were ‘yes,’ but it was kind of easy once I was able to narrow it down. I mean, it took months to put together, and I was doing it DIY. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never booked a tour, so I was just kind of winging it the whole time.
I literally just made a template email and said, ‘Hey, we’re an American rock band. We’re touring in the UK June 1 through 15. We’re looking to play a show on XYZ date.’ And then it got to a point where we had already booked it, and then more venues would reach out trying to confirm stuff. And then I have to turn venues down, which was kind of weird, but we’ll come back.
Griffith: The amount of self-promotion and work that Winter puts into this is awesome.
Ference: Unfortunately, I’m glued to my phone. Once we get big enough, I’m literally hiring somebody to do all this because I don’t want to ever. I would love to have, like, a flip phone and never talk to anybody.
OG: How do you describe your music to people?
Tsyrus Neumann: I give comparisons. I think the obvious one is Paramore and Hayley Williams. Sometimes I’ll say, like, Arctic Monkeys as well with the awesome classic guitar solos, but it’s hard to give us a definitive genre.
Ference: We are definitely genre-less. We play blues. We play rock and roll. We play more pop-driven stuff. … But yeah, I’ll take a Paramore/Arctic Monkey baby all day.
OG: Did preparing for this make y’all consider your band in a different way?
Ference: Honestly, I feel like UK goes hard for their musicians. … British rock and British pop definitely have a very particular sound, and we’re not even close to that, but I feel like we can bring enough energy that people can get into it.
Triston Silva: I think they’ll dig it. Or if they don’t, I think they’ll be like, “Hell yeah, American band.” Or whatever.
Ference: But also I will say we have more followers on Instagram that are from the UK than we do America. All the promotion that I’ve been doing, we’ve grown almost double in the past month alone. … So yeah, I’m just hoping they like us there for realsies, and then we can just be famous over there. We don’t even need to be famous here. It’s hard. It’s more expensive and harder to do a tour here than it is in the UK, in my opinion.
OG: How so?
Ference: Because I feel like venues here are so, like, you have to know somebody or whatever, especially in Oklahoma City. I’ve only lived here for a few years, but to me, the music scene here is extremely picky. We couldn’t get a show booked for months. One bar took a chance on us, Grand Royale in [the Plaza District]. Love them. OGs. And we packed it out, like, wall to wall. You could not even move in there. Then people are like, ‘Oh, OK. They’re legit,’ or whatever. It shouldn’t take that if you’re trying and you have some semblance of following and you have music out that’s decent. … I’m from Minneapolis originally, which has a very teeming music scene there and a lot more inviting, in my opinion. So it’s been frustrating here, and then it’s like the UK is like, ‘Yeah, you’re good. Let’s go.’ And it’s like, ‘Why? Why? I have literally zero percent draw.’ You know what I mean? They’re not motivated by our draw. We have, I don’t know, 12,000 listens on the entirety of our catalog on Spotify, maybe a little bit more. Not a lot. So it’s not like we’re this large artist, but we were not turned down here. It’s like I emailed venues in this city multiple times and not even received a response back. And so why would I expect that out of any other city in America? I could just go to the UK.
Griffith: I’ll be honest. It does make me wonder if it’s because we’re American. That’s my assumption. It’s like if somebody from Britain’s like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be in your country. I’m flying 8 billion miles over to you guys.’ I’ll be like, ‘You’re definitely going to get a spot. I’m not a dick.’
Ference: But again, you have to think about the fact that music is still business at the end of the day. Every single venue that I reached out to said local support is necessary. They’re still motivated by having a crowd there. They just don’t care if we happen to be performing as long as there’s people in the bar. You know? Some of the venues wouldn’t even let us choose the local support. They pick the local support. So it’s still definitely a factor. I just think that they were more open to putting together a bill. Here, I feel like venues don’t usually put together the bill.
Griffith: I have a tendency for imposter syndrome. I have a million excuses to say, ‘I didn’t earn this.’ But at some point, you just got to be like, ‘Holy shit. I’m playing in England. I’m trying to kung fu my own brain like, ‘Dude, that’s cool,’ and just leave it at that. Because my natural tendency is to be like, ‘Oh. No, it’s just another fluke.’
Silva: It’s just another day of playing in England.
Ference: He doesn’t know I’ve already replaced him.
Griffith: Good. I’m floating my resume around with some bigger rock bands in Oklahoma City.
Ference: Pickle rock?
Griffith: I said, “bigger rock bands.”
Ference: Oh. I like “pickle rock.” Oh my God. What if that’s our genre? What if we just tell people our genre is pickle rock, and let them think about it?
OG: Anything else?
Ference: Triston, take the floor.
Silva: Tsyrus’ bass has recently been fixed by his own hand.
Neumann: I tinker.
Silva: He’s been tinkering on his gadgets and gizmos and he’s fused a couple things together. Ben recently checkmated Tsyrus in less than three moves, a new world record. He Queen’s Gambited his ass. And Winter has installed a new pond in her backyard. So can we just do a round of applause for her?
Ference: Courtesy of the Nov. 24 tornado.
Silva: And I think that about sums up the band.
This article appears in Oklahoma Gazette Online.