Hummer

We're made up of Will Atkinson, aged 18, on bass and vocals, Joe Watson, aged 17, on guitar and vocals, Matthew Cain, aged 16, on guitar and vocals and Matt Jennion, aged 16, on drums. Most of us have been gigging for a fair while - myself (Will) and Joe played in a local punk trio called S.F.R for about two years, and Matt played drums in another local punk band around the same time.

When S.F.R's old drummer left the band late last year Matt had recently left his old band as well, so he was asked to fill in for a few upcoming S.F.R shows, but soon decided to stay.

We played a couple of gigs with this three-piece lineup (Will/Joe/Matt), and still under the name S.F.R, but in early 2008 we asked Matthew Cain, a mate of Joe's from college, to join as a second guitarist.

Cainy made his live debut with us at Manchester Academy 3, in February 2008, and the extra ‘beef’ in the sound, which the second guitar brought in was instantly noticeable.

With Cainy on board we carried on playing regularly up and down, at the same time writing lots of new material to phase out some of the older, weaker songs.

At this point we now had a line-up different to the old S.F.R, and the new songs gave us a sound quite different to, and more varied than the thrash punk we'd initially been playing, so we thought it a good idea to effectively shake off the past, ie. by changing the bands name.

We changed our name to Hummer (after a while deciding what to call ourselves) in early May. In essence we're a new band, seeing as we've only been formed as this lineup for five months, and only had this name for the last two.

Our genre could only really be described as 'rock-based' - we don't really see much point in giving ourselves a definitive genre and sticking to it; a genre carries a prejudice anyway - you may be showing a recording of your band to someone, they take a liking to it, then say "so what sort of genre are your band", you might say "rock/punk/indie/metal/emo/screamo etc…", and they immediately respond with "oh… err... I don't like rock/punk/indie/metal/emo/screamo etc…" and from that moment onwards choose to ignore your music.

Our ethos is simple - we believe it’s best to play what "sounds good", rather than what "sounds punk", or "sounds rock" etc., so we give ourselves no musical limitations.

You can listen to 'Simon Christ', a song Hummer have recorded by themselves, as part of a batch of new demos they're still currently working on. It is a rough mix of the song, which needs some tweaking, but the final finished product plus others will be uploaded to their myspace profile, www.myspace.com/hummernoise, very soon