Czech band Airfare back with new album, dates in Slovakia
The Czech band Airfare, headed by Czech-American frontman Tomas Lichtag, first broke onto the Czech music scene some two years ago: now they’re back. The group recently released the follow up to their successful Hotel Moscow, a new album provocatively called Do You like My Shit?
The successful trio Airfare are back, with a new album as well as a series of concerts in neighbouring Slovakia. Though touring, singer/guitarist Tomas Lichtag took a short break last week and dropped by the Czech Radio building. Radio Prague's Jan Velinger asked him about the new album and some of the new material.
“We spent a lot of time together in Zlín because we have a very good rehearsal space there. We wrote this whole album – us three – even though we play as a four piece then we wrote the album in three –like one of us would always play drums and we just wrote the songs that way. We were just doing this crazy stuff, we were in that rehearsal space for like fifteen hours at a time just banging away at the drums and all the stuff and we wrote the song Collapse. We called it Collapse and a week later we had this concert and after the show we had a wild party and our base player actually collapsed. He had a physical break-down and ended up in hospital, so it is like foretelling the future.”
Airfare is strongly guitar-based – not unusual for rock music but something of an oddity on commercial Czech airwaves, where band members admit it sometimes feels like they are going against the grain.
“We play different music than what they play on the radio especially here in Europe. I mean you don’t hear a lot of that guitar rock stuff. The radio here –the main radio – plays things like Beyonce and that sort of stuff, so it is funny to hear Rihanna or Beyonce –somebody like that and then hear our band come on after that.”
As mentioned, the band is now playing a series of concerts in neighbouring Slovakia. Tomas Lichtag admits he and bandmates have registered little differences.
“For us it is something completely new, because we don’t really play there much, we’ve played there about three times, so it’s like the people there most of the time don’t know who we are. There’s a few people that recognize us but not many and the crowds are a little bit different here than in the Czech Republic. Here people like harder music, in Slovakia they like the melodies, so we sort of had to change our set – because we have this set where we just come in and play this crazy stuff - but in Slovakia we had to change it around and play more of the ballads and those sort of things.”
If you’d like to find out more about Airfare, club dates and much more visit the band’s website www.airfareband.cz
