Nothing But Thieves On The Artists Who Inspire Them

UK rockers Nothing But Thieves are opening the doors once again to the Dead Club City realms. Returning down under in 2024 to continue their Aussie love affair, the band’s Welcome To The DCC Australian tour settles in for round two this week following the group’s entirely sold-out run in 2023.

The Essex-hailing five-piece, consisting of vocalist and guitarist Conor Mason, guitarist and keyboardist Joe Langridge-Brown, guitarist, pianist and keyboardist Dom Craik, bass guitarist Philip Blake and drummer James Price, recently released a deluxe version of their 2023 album Dead Club City, and have remained firm Aussie favourites over the years, with their single ‘Welcome to the DCC’ recently voted into triple j’s Hottest 100 of 2023, and their triple j Like A Version cover of ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus hitting the top 10 Like A Versions last year.

Nothing But Thieves – ‘Welcome to the DCC’

Coinciding with the Australian tour kicking off this week, Mason, Craik and Langridge-Brown have taken us behind the scenes into some of the key artists who’ve inspired them along the way, with a few Aussies thrown into the mix in honour of their current down under adventures…

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes

Joe Langridge-Brown: A really big inspiration for me would be Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ album Damn the Torpedoes. Looking back on it, and without even realising it, that album ultimately taught me how to write a song.

Every one of those songs has such a classic feel to it, that classic songwriting sort of skill. I think Tom Petty is probably one of the best songwriters of all time. It was nice having that, even from an early childhood, inherently ingrained in me. And later on when I started writing songs myself, I realised, “Oh right, that’s what’s actually been inspiring me this whole time!”. If I had to choose a favourite song from that album, I’d go with ‘Refugee’.

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours

Dom Craik: When we were writing a lot of Broken Machine and going into Moral Panic, I was listening a lot to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. It definitely had a massive impact on how we think of arrangements and harmonies and things like that, and focusing on the melody.

They were such an influential band, a brilliant group of songwriters. For them, the most important thing was the song. And I think that’s something that’s trickled down into us. Similarly to Joe, you might not necessarily know directly what the lessons are that these songs were teaching you at the time; but subconsciously there’s something in the DNA of those records that comes out in how you write songs. Rumours is a huge one for me, and in terms of a key song on that album, it has to be The Chain.

Nina Simone’s Live Albums

Conor Mason: Continuing the subconscious thing that Dom and Joe were talking about, the first time I was introduced to soul music when I was younger, it seeped into me and never left.

One of my first memories listening to soul music was my dad playing a Nina Simone live album when I was about 13 or 14, and it just gripped me. Something about her voice is completely “not perfect”, it’s quite messy and scrappy, she sings with such a guttural kind of emotion to the point where sometimes it can sound quite harsh and ugly. But I really admire that because it’s so much more important than the perfectionist pop singers that you see and hear. It’s just so emotive and that has stuck with me ever since.

Since hearing those songs, it’s always been about me being able to connect with my voice and “how can I react to this song and then display as much emotion as possible?”. Nina Simone’s always been my biggest influence, and I’ve been listening to a really old song of hers a lot at the moment, Seems I’m Never Tired Lovin’ You. It’s such an insane song!