Ciara Minato1

Ciara Minato Interview with Tom Wade Band Name: Stone Raiders What’s the story with the name? Our name came from a list of names I came up with ages ago. We were thinking of calling ourselves 'A Spider,' because we thought that was a scary sounding name, but then I found a list of names I came up with for a band I was going to be in with some high school kids that never happened. I had come up with things like 'The Dodgy Prostitutes,' 'The Touchy Perverts,' 'Free the Pedoes,' 'The Gold Plated Mac 11s,' a bunch of White Zombie song names and 'Stoned Raiders,' which is a song by Cypress Hill. Luke and Marshall liked it but we thought we should change it from 'stoned' to something else so we just got rid of the D. Who’s in the band? There are three of us at the moment, Luke on guitar, me on bass and Marshall on drums. We also have two new people joining, John as lead singer and Stephen on guitar. How did it all begin? It started back in about July or August, a side project I had going with some people died and around the same time Luke's old band Venturi had broken up, one weekend I was telling Marshall about my other band, Sinnister Valley, and he said if I heard of anyone looking for a drummer to let me know. Within that week I saw an ad in the paper for someone looking for a reliable drummer and bassist, I called up Luke and told him how I had a bass, a drummer and a place to practice and it all went from there. We had an ad in the paper for CanFest, that’s how Metalica started so it must be the way to go! Where do you practice? We practice at the town band hall next to Belvedere Restaurant, I played with the town band for a year so they know me and let me have a key to the place so we could practice. How often do u play? Do u have anything coming up? We just finished our first gig, CanFest, which was a big success with a really good turnout. Up next we have La Festa on Easter Saturday but we’ll also try to get some more local gigs once we flesh out our set list some more. How do you go about writing your songs? Where’s your favourite place to write? We don’t really have a lead song writer, we all just play what we like and see if we can make it work. The first song we wrote as a band started as a jam session with a really cool riff we came up with. We expanded on it then went home and worked on it some more to turn it into a whole song. 5 words to describe your sound? Rock, Funk, diversity, bluesy, alternative. What’s your favourite type of facial hair? The more the better. What are your biggest dreams? 5 ferraris, an indoor pool, getting on triple J, making a career out of music, playing at The Big Day Out, making it overseas would make a big difference to us. What would be your dream guitar? A full-body ESP Eclipse in matte vintage black finish with the four tone knobs and EMGs. And since I play bass in Stone Raiders my dream bass would be a Rickenbacker 4003 in either black or mahogany, all the best bassists play Rickenbackers. What's your favorite part of being in a band? Playing good music. It’s very satisfying when a good song comes together, both covers and originals. Who are your musical influences? My biggest influence is Metallica, I’m trying to popularise the whole lead bass idea that he started. Unfortunately when he died the idea of lead bass died with him as no other band has done anything similar since. My other biggest influences are Geddy Lee from Rush, also Steve Harris from Iron Maiden due to his speed and technique and Les Claypool from Primus for his unique floating hand slap style. With Stone Raiders I want to go in a more diverse direction like Faith No More and Led Zepplin later in their career. Who’s your favourite band? Metallica. Have you released any music or CD’s? Not yet, but we started recording some of our covers for CanFest, that got delayed due to the floods but hopefully we return to that soon and even do some originals.

Page: 41 of 155 (26%)