Jonathan Markwell

When Bear Makes Ninja head to Lincoln as part of their UK tour, it won’t just be any normal gig: they’ll be playing their hearts out to win this year’s Aurora Promotions Battle of the Bands competition.

The event is a big occasion for musicians in the area, with the sheer number of acts taking part in the early stages meaning competition is fierce and varied.

Sleaford-based Bear Makes Ninja have a good record for impressing onstage, with a spring-loaded Biffy Clyro and Nirvana-indebted sound, making them a favourite with many a rock connoisseur. The band is one of the acts now left in the finals of the competition.

James Palmer, vocalist and guitarist in the three-piece, said: “We had no idea we would get in to the finals because every band this year is so different. I wouldn’t know where to start as a judge!”

Also taking part in the battle on April 7 at the Duke of Wellington on Broadgate are The Red, Out Of Exile and TecTona, fighting for a grand prize of £1,000. Despite the worthy opposition, Palmer isn’t feeling concerned about the night.

“We are pretty confident on how we have been playing together, but that really means nothing at this stage as all the bands will be feeling confident in themselves and that just makes for an even more exciting night,” he added.

Palmer says the prize money would be excellent help in recording their debut album, due later this year, but in the end there are more important things to him and his bandmates: “We just love to play live, wherever and whenever we can.

“The fact that it is a competition comes second to building our fan-base, making friends with fellow bands and helping promote the local music scene.”

On their travels the band are also wowing crowds in Bath, Blackburn, Edinburgh and Glasgow. A full list available on their Facebook page, where they are also keeping a tour diary so you can see how they do in Lincoln and the rest of the country.

Finally, wondering where the band name came from? The name Bear Makes Ninja is actually an anagram of the band members’ names: Ben, James and Karina.

It may still be early days for dance-rock act 3 Hour Week, but you wouldn’t know it. The band merge the electronic excesses of The Killers with the breakneck, quintessentially British pop of The Wombats to create a sound that’s spilling out of the county.

With all the group coming from North Lincolnshire, they’ve been inciting stage invasions and mass sing-alongs at recent shows in Lincoln and Gainsborough, and are spreading the word with gigs further afield — they even offer free downloads of their recent recordings. Bassist and University of Lincoln graduate Ross Simpson spoke to us about the band’s hopes, social media, and middle-class middle names.

1. Give us a brief history of your band, tell us who you are and what you all play.

Well, we all just self-taught ourselves our instruments at school, then a couple of years ago our drummer Jack and I responded to an advert from a local band who needing a bassist and drummer.

When we got there it wasn’t exactly what we’d imagined as the band was made up of 2 older guys debating whether to open practise with “pinball wizard” or “hungry like the wolf”. The other band member was our singer Dave.

You could tell he was a bit relieved to see 2 guys closer to his age and with similar music tastes to him. Before long the 3 of us had sort of branched off and a Danny was invited to come play lead guitar for us after a chance encounter with Dave on a night out. When Danny was added to the line everything seemed to gel and straight away we started writing our own material.

2. Who or what made you want to start playing music?

I think for me I’ve always loved live music growing up. I’d be watching bands and seeing how they connect with a room full of people and how their music can have an emotional effect on so many. It just fascinated me. I think having witnessed performances in that way it sort of made me want to experience it from the other side. Maybe see if one day something we’d written could have that effect on people.

3. How would you describe your music for people who haven’t heard you?

I’d say it’s sort of energetic indie-pop. I think it’s quite difficult to describe our music. There are so many different elements there that it’s hard to say what we sound like as a band. We have quite lively drums, synth, keyboard, catchy guitar riffs and vocal hooks. I think we have quite a big sound. The phrase “pop-catchy” has been used before.

4. Tell us an interesting fact about yourself or your band.

We have some pretty unusual middle names. If we were a more pretentious band then we may have been tempted to go by them but Francis, Hedley, Edwin and Raymond all sound so terribly middle-class.

5. Do you use social networks to promote yourself/yourselves, and do you find it works?

We use Facebook mostly, we tweet every now and then, but in terms of getting our music out to people or letting people know about upcoming shows then I think Facebook is ideal. We used to use Myspace, but I think Myspace has totally died a death to be honest.

6. Where’s your favourite place to play in the county?

Well we’re all originally from Scunthorpe where there’s literally no music scene and as you can imagine there’s not a great deal going on there. We played at Tokyo in Lincoln last year with Dutch Uncles which was pretty cool.

We’ve also played down in Camden a couple of times. That might be our favourite place. I think there’s such a buzz around that place constantly and there’s a great music heritage. People there seem to be all about new music and outrageous fashion. It always makes for an interesting gig.

7. What would you like to have achieved by this time next year?

Well we’re using this year to really promote ourselves and get our music out to people. We’ve starting to get some interest from some of the bigger venues and are trying to build on that by giving our music away to fans. We see it as kind of a reward for their loyalty and support. This year we’re trying to build on our fan-base and play as many shows as we can in front of new audiences really.

Check out the band by listening to a track below: