So we’re back from tour. The last week as been amazing – it feels like a bit of a turning point for us in many ways. We’ve been a bit rough round the edges, but we know what we’re doing and where we’re going for the next year now at least. There’ll be a proper announcement in the next few days about what you can expect, but for now we’ve got something to get off our chests.

This weekend was the White Noise Festival that we curate with our friends in the (now defunct) Death Of London. If you’re not familiar, it’s three days of awesome bands from our city playing together to raise awareness of the scene we’ve got going on, and as a by product, raise money for local charities.

On Friday, just as we were bracing ourselves for three days of little to no sleep and excessive drinking, we were sent THIS article – an interview with our friends in Minnaars, in which specific members of the band take it upon themselves to dismantle and admonish our cities musical community and directly attack the festival that we (and the majority of bands in the city that we respect) work hard to put together.

We want it on record that we refute every last word of that article.

You can define a scene any way you want, whether it be a collection of bands that are grouped together through friendship, style, mindset or level of success. Whichever way you want to look at it, our city has a scene. Maybe it is cliquey – we’re protective of each other, but we’re also supportive of as many bands as we can – if they’re fully fledged touring bands or promising teenagers doing something exciting. We certainly wouldn’t turn our backs on a band because they became ‘successful’, or because they couldn’t participate in an event we’d put together – it’s not our place, and it doesn’t benefit anyone.

We’re not going to go in to the reasons behind any mutual bad blood there may be – we’re not here to air dirty laundry – but we want to be the ones to say that although our city has it’s faults, we’re genuinely proud to say we’re from Leicester, and proud to be counted alongside any of the bands we share our cities rehearsal spaces, venues and pubs with. Minnaars Included.

We don’t do White Noise because we think it somehow makes us better than anyone else, or because we think it allows us to command some trivial respect from anyone. To be frank with you, we don’t even do it through any moral obligation – Although we’re proud to have made over £1000 over the last three days, we’ve never wanted the charity element to be at the forefront because it’s not what we consider to be most important. We know White Noise doesn’t matter to anyone outside of the 500 or so people that come out to enjoy it, and that no one in the wider music industry gives two fucks about it. We do White Noise because it’s an awesome excuse to watch some fucking incredible bands, get pissed with some of the best people in the world, and enjoy ourselves for three days.

You might not think much of our cities music scene, but it is our cities fucking music scene.

Anyone is welcome to consider themselves part of it.

We’ve (for the most part) held off posting anything relating to the UK election until now for a couple of reasons. The first being that for anyone from outside the country it’s probably immensely boring, but also because at the end of the day it’s YOUR decision who you vote for, and we shouldn’t be trying to influance your decision. Polls have now closed, so we can tell you what we think.

It’s a very strange time for Maybeshewill at the moment – we seem to be doing absolutely loads and nothing at all at the same time. When we came back from Europe we promised ourselves we’d have a few months off to recover (physically and financially) from being on the road for two months, but I think we’ve all come to realise that that was a misstake. Going back to real jobs after the insanity of the Russian shows has been hard work, and writing without the prospect of being able to play the new stuff at shows any time soon is frustrating.