Would you like to give us a brief history of the band and the members?
We were three friends who decided to start a punk/garage band in Oslo in 2004. We started of with covering songs by artists like The Jam, The Saints, Love, Phil Spector(River Deep, mountain High). Soon we came up with our own compositions, and we played our first gig in february of 2005. The response was overwhelming. It seemed like people in Oslo had been waiting for band like us to come along. So it generated more and more gigs, and two tours of europe, making the first EP. So in 2007, we made our first long-player with Big Dipper Records.
Your debut album is out now. What was the people's reaction to it?
We have gotten a lot of good reactions to the album. Reviews have been mixed, but for the most part they have been very good. Its a record that has been produced a lot for a garage/punk trio like us. But still its sounds really hard and uncompromicing.
Your sound is really cool and while it's firmly rooted in the mid 60's,
you aren't afraid to incorporate liberal amounts of '77 punk energy and late
60's fuzz Detroisms. Was that calculated or you just can't help it?
This first record concists of a lot of our earliest material, but still has about 4-5 new songs. We tried our best to keep all that stuff together with the production. We certainly had a lot of inspiration of 60`s detroit stuff, pluss production favourites like The Misunderstood. But we`ve also said from the day we started this band, that we wanted it to have a great deal 77-punkfeel to it. And we also wanted it to sound fresh, get our own feel to it.
You're off for a European tour. Which countries are you going to visit?
Funny you should ask, because we just finished our european tour. We visited Denmark, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and Italy. This summer we will be playing a week in Holland again, and we`ll most likely be playing in Moscow.
In your photos you seem to have a cool mod look and you play some cool
instruments. Is your image and choice of vintage gear important to you?
Our image is not a contructed thing. All three of us have always thought of the sixties as the most classy/cool looking decade for fashion/clothes. We`re not mods, but we just love sixties fashion. The reason we play on old instruments, is that new instruments dont sound any good(with some exceptions). And old stuff is much more easy to fix if theres any problems. And of course, the sound fuckin better!!
Finally, do you have any plans for the future? Anything else you'd like
to add?
The Cheaters is a band who loves to tour. We did two europeans tours before our record was even made. This autumn, we will record a new album. Then we will tour as much as possible. Visit the countries that we havent been able to go to on our first tours. See you!!!!
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