Oliver Toone

1000 word article – Interview

I am here today to interview Oliver Toone, one of the members of the band called Ignite for the magazine Mash Up.

Hello Oliver, would you mind telling us about the band? What’s the history?

Hello, well the a few of the band members knew each other throughout our school career and formed a band just playing and practising anywhere we could, and after about a year and a half of playing small venues we went and applied for the Hard Rock Café competition, which if we would have won, would of took us to Rome to play in front of 10,000 people which won of been the best thing for us at the time, unfortunately we didn’t win but we did come second so we still got rewards from it, we got noticed by a rock radio worker and managed to get a couple of small festival slots. That’s pretty much how the band started; we recruited a few other people along the way because the band members had their differences. We are just about to release our first album, which will be coming out this November, so that’s going to boost our popularity a lot.

Where do you see the band being in 5 years?

In the next 5 years I would like to see the band having a bigger fan base, hopefully we will be noticed by some bigger company’s so we can sign on and bring out more albums, id also like to play more abroad, we have only played in England so far and with more people listening to us we should be able to go on tour which would be good for us.

Are you playing at any big shows in the near future?

Well we have just got back from playing at Download Festival in Donington Park so hopefully we will be playing there again next year, maybe even on the main stage. But no so far we only have a few gigs going on but until we get more we will just be practising and bringing out new songs.

What genre would you say the band is?

I consider the band to be rock/metal but we have been labelled other genres for some of the songs that we have done, I just don’t want the band to be the same as everyone else in the industry who is try to form a band.

Oliver Toone

Who was your inspiration?

The bands that I grew up listening to ware mainly a lot heavier than what our genre is. As we only have a singer than can do clean vocals where the music I listened to was heavy, he couldn’t hit the notes that we were aiming for e.g. singers like Randy Blyth, Corey Taylor and Joe Duplantier. However we did find inspiration from bands like Alter Bridge, Royal Blood and other rock bands. These bands are more classical and have a wider audience so we decided to go with that style.