“Love to Yorkshire though, we love Yorkshire” say Liverpool band Stone ahead of their Tramlines Festival gig

Ahead of their performance, Elliot Gill and Alex Smith sat down for a chat with The Star, and Elliot gave us a brief overview and history of the band.

“Stone as it is, it’s the four of us. Me, Fin (Power, vocals and guitar), Alex (Smith on drums) and Sarah (Surrage, bass). Me and Fin met about eight years ago at a party through mutual friends, he was just like “I’m Fin Power, 24-hour”, and I thought I like that. I wish I had a name like Fin Power that I could use for 24-hours a day. I just thought that this kid’s cool.”

“He said that he was looking for a guitarist and asked if I wanted to join his band, I thought that I could give it a go. And we just ended up stuck together. This was in 2018. We also met Alex in 2018”

After a couple of years working together and gigging ‘things started drying up’ for the young band, however they were in a better place creatively, ‘we were writing better songs and having better ideas about our music and working out our sound. But we weren’t happy with where things were going. So we decided on starting a new band.’

This is where the band’s name came into being, “Fin was like, let’s call it Stone. It was after his mother’s maiden name and has ties to his family’s Jewish heritage as well as the honour with that.”

They did have one concern though, notes Elliot who recalled asking...

“Fin, what are we going to do with Google when people search for Stone?

And he was like, ‘Don’t worry about that, we’ll come up’.”

“It was like sound, so it was great to have a great optimist as a sort of springboard.”

But the band was not yet complete, “we went through a couple of bassists and then it was 2020, just before the world shut down when we found Sarah. She was absolute key, she had a great vibe, a great energy, she was just dead cool and a great player… we got her in and the world shut down. We had four singles ready to release, we’d saved up money and we were like stuck in doors, like what do we do now?”

“We tried to work through that period, released a couple of tunes and built up a bit of a following. And then we eventually got through until the end of 2021, we were booked for Isle of Wight (Festival) and Reading and Leeds Festival.”

"We had waited so long for this moment and we just took that."

Listen to the full interview with Stone on the Chris Talks Music podcast, you can sign up to receive all episodes of the podcast at: https://anchor.fm/chris-talks-music

It was the beginning of a breakout 12 months which was capped off by the release of their debut EP, Punkadonk, in December last year. A rousing release which fused frenetic rock with a more intimate exploration of their take on Gen-Z experience.

If I were to describe their musical output to date, I would say that it’s an insightful, introspective, brutally honest and self-critiquing body of work, which is unapologetically forthright in its social commentary analysis. Case in point being their blistering new single I Gotta Feeling, which is a spoken word, punk tour-de-force, attack on 'toxic masculinity' and the lingering faux bravado that often accompanies it.

All the while their steadily growing fanbase began to include some of music’s biggest names, which has since led to handpicked support slots from the likes of YungBlud, Inhaler, Sam Fender, as well as Louis Tomlinson’s Away from Home line up in Malaga.

Leading into this year's Tramlines Festival appearance they performed at Glastonbury Festival, where they showcased their euphoric new single, I Gotta Feeling.

Alongside this wave of fan and peer-led excitement, Stone have also been tipped for even bigger things with multiple plaudits from the likes of NME, Dork, Rolling Stone UK, MTV and their music has been championed (deservedly) on BBC Radio 1 and 6Music.

"That moment for us have just been lift off, long may it continue. Some of the gigs we’ve had have been so energetic and the crowd have been well into it.”

First up though they have a performance at Tramlines this weekend, something that the band are really looking forward to as both Elliot and Alex profess their adoration for the region, “We Love Yorkshire” and on current evidence, you could say that it’s only a matter of time before South Yorkshire returns the sentiment.

It's been one heck of a crazy year for this Scouse quartet, who have stormed straight out of the new era Liverpool scene with a formidable live reputation preceding them and a boom in their online following — it’ll be interesting to see where they go next.

I Gotta Feeling is out now on all streaming platforms and you'll be able to see this brilliant band at Tramlines on Saturday, 22 July, 2023.

You can follow Stone on all of the main social platforms:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stoneliverpool/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STONELIVERPOOL

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2UjknL3o-JILuB4h2KDCw

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@stoneliverpool?lang=en

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1br1PqvafIUOis4rBUvv1H?si=iskY2oMVS12-Tq_OKGBnZA