The New Shoes

A most memorable experience was winning the Portsmouth Original Artist of the Year 2018 competition at the Wedgewood Rooms.

“Ideas and inspiration will slowly build and when the time feels right I will write a few songs in a short space of time”

The music process for The New Shoes is a two-step process. The first step will be mine alone (Elliot Shulman) – the songwriting. Ideas and inspiration will slowly build and when the time feels right I will write a few songs in a short space of time. 3 songs of the current set I remember writing back to back on a Saturday afternoon about a year ago. The next step will be to present my Garage band demos to the lads and show them their parts. They add their personality to the song and this is where it gets interesting for me. It becomes The New Shoes.

In terms of the band not particularly. Connor Jezard (Lead Guitar) and I have been playing music together since we were 13 years old roughly. It’s amazing we have stuck playing music together after all these years!

When we formed our first band we instinctively worked out our roles. I could write songs. Connor is a bandleader and a real driving force. I would probably be playing and writing songs in my bedroom to this day if it wasn’t for that guy. This is how we have worked and still do today.

The music itself however is always evolving. Each time the band plays we tend to discover something new about a song, be that a lyric, a guitar part or whatever. This free approach keeps things fresh for us, and hopefully, the audience can feel this too. We generally film our practices and looking back at the footage it’s amazing how different some of the songs sound now.

The biggest challenge we face is availability. We all work day jobs during the week in completely different locations so organising gigs and practices require a great deal of messaging on our band WhatsApp group!

A most memorable experience was winning the Portsmouth Original Artist of the Year 2018 competition at the Wedgewood Rooms. It was the first time The New Shoes played at The Wedgewood Rooms.

The odds were going against us. We were a very late addition to the lineup, we got stuck in traffic, turned up late and I had certainly drunk too much on this occasion.

So when we went to play we thrashed it with no reservations and it turned out to be one of our strongest performances.

The prize was a day recording at Mayfield Studios in Portsmouth which lead to our debut single Little Racket released last week.