This event is 21 and over.
$25.00 – General Admission
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets available at The Independent box office (628 Divisadero, SF) with no service charge.
All doors & show times subject to change.
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The Heavy
The Heavy formed in the mid-00s. Taylor and Swaby clicked straight away when they met working in the Bath branch of Gap. Swaby, an old-school crate-digger, noticed Taylor had a copy of The Face magazine and the two started talking about music. They found they had some common influences and began introducing one another to the stuff neither had heard. Taylor was from a classic rock’n’roll background and was enthralled by being introduced to the world of hip-hop and sampling. A guitarist who had been in bands growing up, all Taylor ever wanted was to work with someone who had a brilliant voice. When he heard Swaby sing for the first time – possibly whilst both were slightly inebriated in a club – he knew he’d found his man. “I was like, ‘he can sing!’ It sounded real and authentic.”
As soon as the pair heard what happened when they combined Taylor’s dirty riffs with Swaby’s soulful voice, they sensed they were onto something. “We knew that was our sound and something we could develop,” says Swaby. After attracting frenzied crowds to their Open Mic sessions – they would put up posters around Bath advertising themselves as The World’s Fattest Twins and The World’s Heaviest Bastards – they realised they needed a proper band (and a proper name) and Ellul and Page were recruited. “As soon as you put the four of us in a room, it made so much sense it was gonna work,” says Swaby.
The relationship between Taylor and Swaby is the key to understanding what makes The Heavy tick. It’s a classic songwriting partnership: the self-assured, confident frontman taking it all in his stride and the deep-thinking, analytical guitarist. “I don’t think about practicing. I just do it, it’s within us,” says Swaby. “I take it all seriously. There’s a pressure I put on myself. It has to be really fucking good otherwise what’s the point?” adds Taylor.
“The Heavy is a fragile beast but it’s a fragile beast that the four of us understand,” says Swaby. “The band has always been about taking the best part of our influences and making it work. We’ve become really good alchemists to figure out exactly what we need.” Everything they’ve done over the past decade feels like it has been leading to this point. They’ve mixed the lightning bolts of their live show with a batch of their strongest songs yet. It’s the best they’ve ever sounded.
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