Mikey Chapman of Mallory Knox discusses his vocal inspiration and more
I recently sat down with Mikey Chapman of Mallory Knox during their run of the Vans Warped Tour in Camden, NJ. A down to earth and humbled guy, Mikey had some fun answers:
You guys recently announced your Homecoming Tour that kicks off in September. How stoked are you about it?
Very stoked, I mean, our focus at the moment is very much here at Warped Tour and to be going home to a very fantastic tour is amazing. It’s our biggest tour to date, and there seems to be a lot of hype around it at the moment. I’m really excited to see how that goes and what adventures we have on that tour. We’re hanging out with the boys in Set It Off over here and really kind of bonding with them and we get to take them back home and show then our home country.
Compared to your previous tours, how different is Warped Tour?
There is nothing the American people do better than camaraderie and teamwork. I love that the festival here is so… It should be logistically impossible to do for such a long time and so well. It’s a real feat. And the fact that it’s been going on for 20 years now shows how organized and structural it is, and it’s just fantastic. Not to say that festivals at home aren’t like that, but we only really have one or two dates really like that.
You’ve played with big music names like A Day To Remember, Biffy Clyro, Frank Iero, and Pierce the Veil. Who else would you kill to tour/play with?
For me, Paramore are some of my biggest song inspirations. Hayley vocally is one of my biggest inspirations. To tour with them would be quite a special thing for me, for sure.
What are your relationships like with the other bands on this tour?
I got told a while ago from Jaime from Pierce The Veil that you get out of Warped Tour precisely what you put in. And I’ve kind of taken that ethos and really run with it. I wanted to meet, interact with, and become friends with as many people as possible on this tour and so far so good. I think it’s been very easy with everyone in the same mind frame. It’s kind of like a big summer camp with your friends. The people in Beautiful Bodies do my head in (laughs).
Back when you guys first started, how did you feel when you started booking a bunch of shows and tours and projecting yourself?
Back home in Cambridge it was a very tough scene to break through, you had to put in a lot more work and sort of have to steel yourself into playing empty shows and persevering regardless. And I think with that, once we started to build a fan-base that we were happy with in the UK, once we moved out of that it became much easier for us. We could afford to go to places where the scene was much stronger and the kids were much more receptive to that kind of thing. We started very slowly and found ourselves moving toward something much more… Not easy, but manageable. And we’re so fortunate in that respect and also obviously with the team that we managed to acquire around us.
What is your favorite part about interacting with your fans?
It’s meeting the different kinds of people. You meet people form all walks of life, going through many, many different experiences at that one moment in time. Some of those people are real low in their lives and it’s a fantastic opportunity in whatever form it may be to uplift them for however long you can. People are really quite inspiring. People that have gone through times like that and to come out the other end and find solace in bands on the Warped Tour or through other means, and its great to talk to them about that and learn how they’ve coped with those things and in turn you can pass that onto others. I think that network, that fan network, with the way people communicate with each other and have that similar conversation point can lead to other fantastic conversations is that magic of playing to fans for sure.
Be sure to listen to their latest album, Asymmetry, and catch them on the remaining dates of Vans Warped Tour!
