Alberta Cross

Fri 9th Jul, 2010 in Features

Alberta Cross is a band that mixes early 90s rock with country simplicity and gospel soul. FasterLouder spoke to Petter Ericson Stakee the lead singer of Alberta Cross about London, New York and reality TV.

You and Terry originally hailed from London and moved to New York to find more musical inspiration. What was it like starting again as a band and building up a reputation in a new country?
And it is not a small country either. It was new and fresh. It all felt really exciting because there was a lot of music around. New York is crazy and a pretty amazing place…I think it is import for a songwriter to be inspired and London was getting us down because the scene wasn’t exciting us anymore.It felt a bit dead so it was good to experience somewhere new.

Speaking of your London days, you and Terry were in a London band together before breaking off and forming Alberta Cross. What was that band’s name and why did you fraction off?
We changed our name like 200 times. I started writing song on the side because I was really sick of the band and Terry was also really sick of it. I mean he played with us for only about half a year and it nearly killed him… we just didn’t really get on and it was stressful, but funnily enough I think we were doing all right as a band. We had all these label people and record companies come down to our rehearsals all the time and by then we almost got signed but I hated the band and it was an absolute nightmare so we left one day and started to work on our own stuff

This split from the band with no name lead to the birth of Alberta Cross and your self produced EP The Thief and The Heartbreaker. In comparison Broken Side of Time was recorded under ATO Record how did you find the difference in recording process? The Thief and the Heartbreaker was like our first three demos that we recorded as a band… I wrote a bunch of songs and we took it into the Terry’s home studio and tracked it down in five days really quickly… It was also like the baby because it was the first thing we did, but with this album Broken Side of Time, we had moved to America so that was new…we had a producer so that was a completely different experience. I don’t know which one I prefer because they were completely different.

Working with Mike McCarthy as a producer did you loose a bit of control over the sound of the album?
No We had complete control with this album we always knew where we were taking it (sound wise) but we kind of co-produced it with Mike, we took time and worked hard to get the sound… Mike is awesome but his is a nut case and in some ways very similar to us.

The song Lucy Rider from your first EP is featured on BBC series on of Survivor do you watch the show?
No, I don’t really watch TV much if I watch TV it would be something like Letterman… but I can’t really stand TV and reality TV freaks me out… I get really stressed. I hate to watch other people go crazy it is too much for me mentally to take. Anyway if you walk down the streets of New York you can see ten Big Brother shows, you don’t have to watch it being glued to your sofa.

So is it weird having your song on show you would never watch?
Our stuff has been on a quiet few programs here in America, and it is weird because people come up and ask me “Oh did you watch did you watch Californication or Dirty, Sexy, Money” and I have never watched them…

Your band has gain a lot of popularity in America, one of your gigs was so over packed it warranted the police to be called to break it up.
Yeah, we played at this place called the Muddy Waters in Santa Barbara which was brand new and close to the beach… I guess we should have booked a bigger venue but by the time we got on stage the venue had been filled to capacity and people had snuck in the back door and the whole side walk was completely rammed with people trying to get in… it was pretty mad and the police turned up and broke the whole gig up and got us off stage, so we ended up playing two sets… and in the end another band joined us on stage and we played a jam set to three in the morning…we all got pretty wasted but people ended up having a good time.