Johnny Mead of Radford

by Max Tremblay

Johnny Mead is flying pretty high right now. His band, Radford, after coming home from a nationwide tour opening up for Lit, has just released their self-titled debut album on RCA records. Despite his band's rapid rate of success at the moment, he remains suprisingly down to earth. During our conversation, we talked about everything from our mutual favorite bands to the amount of hate mail an average band gets, and he treated every subject with a sense of modesty and reality. His prominent English tone, which you wouldn't expect upon hearing his singing voice, and cheerful nature are devoid of any of the usual rock star qualities that usually come with most overly-pompous musicians. Evidenced by the fact that the members of Radford all answer their fan mail personally, one can tell that this is no ordinary band of out-of-reach idols.

Meet Johnny Mead, the accessible rock star.

Cyberteens: How long have you been in the band, Radford?

Johnny Mead: Pretty much since it started, which was about three years ago now.

C: To quote one of your lyrics, do you feel like a star now?

JM: (laughs) No, not yet. You know, we're at the start of our careers, so it's mostly just a lot of hard work at the moment, a lot of touring, a lot of travelling around getting our name out there. We're still just starting to see the benefits come in, but it's really just a lot of work at the moment.

C: Who's your favorite band to tour with?

JM: We went out with Lit, and they were definitely the most fun. We actually just played a show with Oasis, which was cool. We actually got to hang out with them, and they turned out to be really nice guys.

C: That's good. I just saw that 'Behind the Music' special on them and I was very scared.

JM: Yeah. It was a very small backstage area, and when they showed up everyone was just sitting around. Their bass player now used to be in a band called Ride, who were a big influence on me, so I got talking to him, then got talking to the rest of the band. I was kind of expecting the same thing. After what you see and read about them, you'd kind of be scared, but they actually turned out to be really nice guys, which was cool.

C: Who are some of your biggest influences, musically?

JM: Oh, man, there's quite a few of them. I would say definitely The Beatles. Any songwriter who says they weren't influenced by The Beatles is lying, just because they've influenced everybody. There are other bands: Ride, Radiohead, U2 definitely. We've always looked up to bands that've continually made great albums and taken great care in putting their albums together. When we were doing our record, we were trying to make every song stand up on its own and not have any album tracks in there, just make every song as strong as we could. That's what those bands did, and that's what we looked at. Take [U2's] The Joshua Tree. We'll listen to The Joshua Tree start to finish and never want to skip a track. Same with "The Bends" by Radiohead. The bands that always continually moved forward, they were the bands that influenced us.

C: You said that you wanted to begin this album as if you were writing your third record. What does that entail?

JM: Basically, [that's when] a lot of bands really hit their peak. The Verve really hit their peak on Urban Hymns, which was their third album, and Radiohead just really hit the mark with The Bends which is their second record. We just wanted to try really hard to have grown a bit by the time we did our first record, and not use the fact that it was our first record as an excuse to be lazy. [We wanted to] almost use it to keep ourselves in check. We just wanted to really keep on ourselves about making everything as perfect as we could.

C: The lyrics and songwriting seem particularly mature compared to that of other bands. Was that part of the whole 'writing for the third record' concept?

JM: Yeah that's exactly it. I mean, you said it even better than I could, which is that we really wanted to have matured before we got to the first record. We had [almost] two albums worth of material that we just kind of scrapped, and part of that was because we kept pushing ourselves to grow as a band, and especially me as a songwriter. I was always pushing myself to improve and get better and to write that song that was one step ahead than the last one that I wrote. Seven out of eleven tracks on the record were written in the three weeks before we started recording, and that's because we [told ourselves] that there was more in there, and we wanted to bring it out.