“It’s going incredible!” bursts Gene Gallagher, leaning back on a sofa with his arms behind his head. The nonchalant ease with which he presents himself certainly reminds us of a certain someone, with his rock‘n’roll air completed by some oversized fly-eyed Kurt Cobain-esque sunglasses. Joined by his bandmates, guitarist Ben Taylor and bassist Jack Schiavo, the three pals chatting to us from the basement of their label offices seem a really tight unit considering they only met through a chance encounter in the summer of 2023.
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Since then, the NME 100 stars have been building up their scuzzy sound, as showcased in the early Nirvana-indebted debut single ‘Hinge’. As you might have guessed from that song, Villanelle prefer to rock out rather than get their Britpop on. It’s an approach that’s found them a camp of fans of their own, assisted by some pretty relentless touring of late. When NME speaks to them in early April, they’ve recently come off the road with Miles Kane. “It was great, man,” Schiavo says. “We were playing the Academies and those kinds of places. It was great to be doing that and trying to collect some more fans as we hadn’t done a support slot for a while.”
Kane and a Gallagher on the road together might sound like the perfect recipe for chaos, but the trio say that wasn’t exactly the case, with their headliner “on the waters” rather than the sauce. “I was desperately trying to corrupt him, but he was unflappable,” the bassist says. “Gene was sober the whole tour because he was on antibiotics, so me and Ben were drinking for three.”
Still, that didn’t stop Gallagher from living up to his family name in some way by staying up all night. “He’d remember everything we’d been up to and we wouldn’t necessarily, so he’d always have something over us the next day,” says Schiavo, as Taylor shares: “Me and Jack were acting like all three of us were drinking, because we normally are, then the next day Gene would be like, ‘Do you remember when you did that…?’”
They compare him to the physical embodiment of a hangover, while Gallagher admits to being their “sleep paralysis demon”. His vice on the road was staying up all hours “fishing and making sushi” on his favourite game, Dave The Diver, on his Steam Deck. If his bandmates dared to stop the party and retire, he’d call them out. “You can’t be going to bed when I’m fishing, bro,” he says, shaking his head.
Still, Gallagher did at least get on it when they played the ‘Punchbag’ tour of uni venues last year – a run that meant a lot to them in a bid to “bring to light a just cause of trying to get band music back into university culture”. It was a gruelling run, they say, but one that brought them up close and personal to their late teen and early twenty-something rock fans. “You see the whites of their eyes, you can see their reaction to what you’re doing, and it really can be fulfilling,” says Taylor. “There are so many degrees of separation when you’re playing arenas. If they’re yawning, then you can’t really tell.”
Gene shares a memory of a gig in Leeds where he briefly lost his mojo when he spied someone in the crowd scrolling Instagram reels. “That is peak,” he smiles, “and fair, because I would do that.”
“You’d scroll through reels on stage if you could – even between songs,” Taylor ribs his pal. Just wait until you see someone chopping up a tuna on Dave The Diver at the next gig. “That’s just pathetic!” laughs Gallagher. “Having a Steam Deck in the crowd?” Imagine.
Not many bands of their age have played such a variety of stages, but Villanelle were given a proper baptism of fire when Liam Gallagher invited them to be the opener on his 2024 anniversary tour of Oasis’ ‘Definitely Maybe’. The gigs were their first-ever shows. “If you’re about this life and you want to do it, then fucking do it, right?” relays Gene of his dad’s offer. “We look back now, having got a little bit more experience behind us, [and] it felt insane, but we weren’t so aware of what was going on at the time,” admits Taylor. “It was slapdash, and we were doing it off our own backs. Now we’re doing smaller gigs, but we’ve got a tour manager, a guitar tech and all this. It was blissful ignorance.”
Not feeling part of The Windmill’s talky art rock crowd or like they fit into any other indie pockets, the threesome say they’ve been gigging in a bid to “carve out their own scene”. As they’ve toured, they’ve noticed a younger generation’s ever-increasing thirst for harder and heavier sounds. “There’s a hunger for a previous age of rock that’s definitely coming back,” says Taylor. “You’ve got Deftones and Oasis, but they’ve paved the way for the new wave of music, which we’re hoping to be a part of.”
Do their fans have a name yet, like ‘Swifties’? “Nah,” shrugs Gallagher, “they’re just called ‘absolute fucking legends’.”
The AFL team will have been eagerly awaiting the release of the band’s debut EP ‘Measly Means’: a gnarly dose of Smashing Pumpkins and Black Sabbath with a truck full of ‘90s colour and swagger, and probably more “grebo” than anything LG would have gone near back in the day. From the paranoid and chugging title track to the more introspective scuzzy ballad of ‘Squeeze’, it’s an EP bursting with energy and ambition, perhaps best told by Gallagher in ‘Opportunity Arising’ when he mourns days lost to “sitting facing backwards”. “That song’s just about getting your shit together,” he shares.
That seems to be the band’s MO right now, already working on their second EP, with some big ideas being held back for an eventual album. There’s no rush, mind. “I’m like a footballer, man,” he adds. “I take it game by game.”
“People know who Gene is. We’re a band that own that and appreciate everything that’s coming from that, but we also work extremely hard at the same time” – Ben Taylor
With the simple drive to keep “spunking out tunes,” as Gallagher puts it, Villanelle feel like they have little to prove, especially in the face of the inevitable “nepo baby” discussion. “We’ve never not been open,” says Taylor of the elephant in the room. “We’ve always just said what we are. People know who Gene is. We’re a band that own that and appreciate everything that’s coming from that, but we also work extremely hard at the same time. People can not like the music, but we’re making music that we really enjoy. We work really hard in the studio, and it’s something we take a great deal of pride [in].”
Gallagher agrees: “I’ve always stuck to the ethos of doing stuff that I like and that we like, because then it never gets old. If you start listening to what other people say, then you’re just going to drive yourself fucking crazy. As long as I like what we put out as a band, then I’ll never get bored of it and keep that drive forever.”
Adding that they’re “not trying to be some pop band”, Gallagher says that he has no interest in returning to the arenas from the ‘Definitely Maybe’ tour. “I was happy just to play The Lexington because I used to go there all the time,” he says, beaming. “That’s my one little box that’s been ticked now, so all this afterwards is just fine. I’ve officially made it, lads!”
Villanelle’s ‘Measly Means’ EP is out on May 6. The band play The Great Escape on May 15