Featuring updates about Tom Clarke, Andy Hopkins and Liam Watts from Coventry band, The Enemy (UK), unofficial fan based page.
Here is a picture of Tom Clarke performing at Orange RockCorp special gig at Manchester's Apollo, as seen on the BBC website. The Enemy said they were glad to get involved with the project.
The Enemy performed in front of 3,000 volunteers in Manchester on July 13, each of whom had given at least four hours of their time to help local communities . Tom Clarke spoke about the bands involvement with the charity gig for Orange RockCorp explaining why they liked the concept, "When we first heard of it, the whole gist of it, that you have to earn your way into the gig you can't just buy a ticket. It puts everyone on a completely level playing field, regardless of how easy it is for you normally to go too gigs or how hard it is for you to go too gigs. It puts everyone right back down at the bottom and says 'right, you've got to contribute to go there', I think that's a really good way of approaching it. It's a really worthwhile thing."
Here is what NME magazine had to say about The Enemy's performance at the Orange Rockcorps event (and not even the slightest feud between Alex Zane!) :
Fresh from their support slot with Oasis and Kasabian in front of 50,000 people at Wembley, The Enemy return to Manchester today (13 July) for a charity gig in front of 3,000.
The Enemy returned to Wembley in triumph as fans soaked up the atmosphere and the flying beer. Tom told fans, "A massive fookin thanks to all of you's and a massive fookin thanks to Oasis." 
The Enemy performed at Somerset House as part of the 'Summer Series' on July 10, 2009. Tom Clarke told fans it was his favourite gig ever and here is a video below from the event as The Enemy perform 'Happy Birthday Jane'.
*top two pics by Jamie Gray (Coventry Observer)
*As seen in Coventry Telegraph / Joe Bailey
*pics taken by robmacca (above!)
As The Enemy prepare for their first homecoming gig of 2009, supporting rock 'n' roll legends Oasis, the local newspaper reports that the Jaguar Exhibition Hall at the Ricoh Arena will be transformed into the city’s biggest bar ahead of the Oasis gig on Tuesday.
THEY have already headlined the place once this year, but now The Enemy are set for a second likely sell-out show at the O2 Leeds Academy.
Interview by Dan Epstein
Following in the hallowed footsteps of the Small Faces, the Jam, the Clash and Oasis, to name just a few, the Enemy UK are the latest in a long line of British bands made up of equal parts plangent guitar rock and bloody-knuckled working class pride. We’ll Live And Die In These Towns, the trio’s debut album, is a remarkably mature rumination on life in an urban landscape of diminishing prospects; though passionate, angry songs like “It’s Not Ok,” “Fear Killed the Youth of Our Nation” and the title track were inspired by the economic travails of the trio’s hometown of Coventry, England — and though charismatic frontman Tom Clarke delivers them in a defiant West Midlands accent — they should certainly ring a bell with any American rock fan who’s felt the increasing pinch and encroaching gloom of life under the Bush administration.
There’s no question that the band’s songs have already connected deeply with with British record buyers: When it was released in the UK in the summer of 2007, We’ll Live And Die In These Towns went straight to the top of the charts, an impressive feat for any debut record, but especially for one that’s entirely devoid of candy-coated pop. When ShockHound caught up with Clarke and his rather quiet mates (bassist Andy Hopkins and drummer Liam Watts) before a recent gig at LA’s Troubadour nightclub, he gave us an earful about the genesis of that album, as well as his utter disdain for pop trends, his love for loud guitars, and his belief that working class kids make the best rock n’ roll. Though they are already major stars in their homeland, the band seemed refreshingly psyched about the prospect of returning to small clubs after a year of selling out British arenas.
“I love gigs like this,” said Clarke, gesturing excitedly towards the Troubadour stage. “You can see people and you can smell them and you can fuckin’ hear them, and they’re going as mad as you are. I always think they’re the best shows. They’re the ones that you remember.”
SHOCKHOUND: So you’re the Enemy, eh? Nice to meet you.
TOM CLARKE: We’re the Enemy. In fact, we’re not the Enemy; we’re the Enemy UK, for fear of gettin’ sued.
SHOCKHOUND: Who did you think was going to sue you?
CLARKE: Some band whose last release was in 1984 on 7” vinyl, but this is America and you can sue anyone for anything. So we thought we’d best be the Enemy UK.
SHOCKHOUND: Was that really your idea, or was it your record company’s?
CLARKE: That was the record company’s. My idea was let’s just go over and get sued, but somebody pointed out it can be quite expensive getting sued.
SHOCKHOUND: Your debut album, We’ll Live And Die In These Towns, has already been out for over a year in the UK, but only recently came out over here. What’s the story behind its creation?
CLARKE: It acts as sort of a document for the year that we wrote it. Me and Andy used to sell TVs in a shop, and Liam was doing temp work with an agency. We just found ourselves in this vicious cycle of going to work and then coming home, gettin’ changed, going to the pub, spendin’ more money in the pub than you just earned that day, waking up with a hangover, goin’ back to work, and then comin’ home, goin’ to the pub. It’s just fuckin’ rubbish; there’s more to life. So to cut a long story short, I just said to Andy, “Let’s take one night a week and play some music and just make some sounds, and we’ll have Liam play drums.” We set aside one night a week, I think it was a Thursday. I mean, that takes quite a lot when you earn five pounds an hour and a rehearsal room costs eight. It’s quite a decision. We did it, went in, wrote a few tunes, came out and said, “Yeah that’s pretty good. We should come back next week.” And that’s sort of how it all started.
SHOCKHOUND: We’ll Live And Die In These Towns went straight in at number one in the UK. Why do you think it connected with so many people?
CLARKE: It took a while to work out. “It’s Not Ok,” the second single we released, we wrote that song when Peugeot closed down a couple of factories and there were thousands of people in Coventry who were left without jobs. We were just singing about that, and shit that affected us in our everyday life and affected our mates. We thought no one else is going to fuckin’ understand that; and then you go to different towns around the UK, and the more places you go to, the more you realize it’s the same picture everywhere — it’s not just two factories in Coventry that closed down. There’s towns that used to be steel towns and used to be ship building towns and all sorts. The UK used to be rife with industry and we used to make everything ourselves — we hardly imported anything — and then you go around the whole place and it’s like a fucking ghost town. A lot of people connect to that and just got on [what we were doing] straight away. There’s a serious lack of bands in England that are actually saying anything…you look at how much shit’s going on, and the fact that no one’s singing about it is ridiculous.
WATCH: Our exclusive interview with the Enemy UK
SHOCKHOUND: It’s almost like people are looking to pop music for escape, as opposed to a reflection of their everyday reality.
CLARKE: Yeah, but I mean for us it still was about escaping. It was about venting out frustrations — and if you don’t vent your frustrations with a guitar in a rehearsal room or on a stage, that’s when things go wrong and you start venting them elsewhere. I think for us that was our form of escapism. It was also escaping the pop and this sort of shit fucking cycle we ended up in. I think a lot of people are just in bands so they can wear trendy fucking clothes and try and pull shit girls. It’s fucking bollocks. That’s not why you start a band. You start a band because you want it to mean something and you want to say something… you want to go somewhere. Those fucking trendy bands, they’re going in and out of fashion as fast as their fucking jeans. They’re the best thing since sliced bread one week, and then the next week no one gives a shit about them. They’re forgotten. We’re not one of those bands. We’re here to leave a lasting footprint and actually fucking say something.
SHOCKHOUND: So where do you guys see yourselves 10 years from now?
CLARKE: I don’t know I mean, where did we see ourselves two years ago? [Laughs] Didn’t see myself sitting in LA talking to a guy with a camera! No, I saw myself playing in a pub in Coventry. I think it’s always very foolish to speculate where you may or may not be in ten years. I could play a gig tonight and walk out and get hit by a truck. Who knows?
SHOCKHOUND: Where would you like to be, then?
CLARKE: I would like to be in a position where more people are listening to what we’ve got to say. The more successful you are as a band, the more people you can reach and hopefully the more people you can have a bit of an influence on and a bit of an impact and change some minds as you go. I think we’re very lucky to be where we are now. I think any band is, and that’s why I fucking hate bands. You’ll meet a band in LA and they’ll complain about something and you’ll think, “What the fuck are you on? You’re halfway across the world getting paid to play music to people that love music, don’t fucking complain to me there.” I think if we’re in exactly the same place we are now in ten years, we’re still in a good fucking place. But, I would like to think with ten years’ hard work we could have made a pretty big difference and have met a lot of people and hopefully changed a lot of minds.
SHOCKHOUND: What’s a record that totally changed your lives, and made you want to do what you’re doing now?
CLARKE: I can tell you a song that, the first time I heard it, just instantly made me want to pick up a guitar and make some very loud fucking noise — “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who. I think when most people hear that song, it’s a pretty inspirational moment. The scream in the middle of it…even if you don’t care what he’s singing about, even if you’re not a fucking musician and you can’t appreciate the genius musicianship and the fact that Moon is just the most mental drummer ever, you can appreciate the scream in the middle. It’s just one of them songs that makes you want to get up and fuckin’ shout, and just fuckin’ destroy everything around you and just go absolutely mental. It’s one of the most inspiring pieces of music that I’ve heard. I don’t play guitar because I want to be the best fucking guitarist in the world; I’ll leave that to a series of ’80s throwbacks. I play guitar because it’s fucking loud. That’s why I like guitar. If you’re saying something, you’ve got a point to make, there’s no better way to get people’s attention than with a rig of fucking Hiwatt amps and a Telecaster with it turned up full. It’s a pretty big attention grabber.
SHOCKHOUND: Do working-class bands make the best rock 'n’ roll?
CLARKE: Probably, yeah. Posh boys in bands don’t really float, do they? If you grow up in middle class England, and your mom buys you a car when you get to 17 and you go to a great school, and you come out and you can afford to go to college, you probably haven’t got much to be frustrated about. I think all the best music’s born out of frustration. Certainly all our best songs are born out of frustrated moments when there’s no other outlet but turning the guitar up and going fucking mad. Punk was an entire genre that was born out of frustration. Posh bands, I just don’t think it really works. Unless their goal is to be technically fucking brilliant and the best in the world, then that can work, fair enough. You know, you can be a great musician, but there’s only so far that will actually take you in my record collection.
The Enemy's Tom Clarke has revealed that his well-publicised spat with Oasis is well and truly over after the band joined the Mancunian legends on tour. Last month, the singer was quoted as saying the Gallaghers were "past it", prompting Liam to call Clarke a "little fucker", but Tom has told Xfm it's all been smoothed over. Speaking to Xfm's Steve Harris, Tom explained that the current Oasis/Kasabian/Enemy tour featured "probably the best line-up that's ever existed."
"Liam came up straight away," he explained. "As soon as I got there and got over my little illness, he made sure I knew the score. He's a proper gent and Noel is the most normal bloke in the world, who happens to have written some of the best songs ever."
Tom also told Steve that being onstage while Oasis did their thing wasn't necessarily the best vantage point. "I've watched them from the side of the stage, but to be honest it's better watching them out the front. The fans have the best seats. You've got to be out there, steaming, singing the songs."
Listen to the full XFM interview here
Play Steve Harris meets Tom Clarke Part 1
Here is an article from live4ever where The Enemy's Tom Clarke speaks to XFM radio about the supposed 'feud' between himself and Oasis...........
Oasisteria are giving you the chance to get your hands on some very nice prizes courtesy of The Enemy and Warner Music.
One lucky winner will receive an exclusive limited edition CD & Vinyl boxset of “Music For The People,” the latest album from The Enemy and an Intempo iPod docking station (see image below). Five Runners up will receive a copy of the album.
For a chance at winning all you have to do is leave a comment below telling us what The Enemy mean to you. Please make sure when leaving your comment you include your full name and email address you would like to be emailed on in the required fields. The competition will close on Monday 29th June. We will draw winners randomly and will notify by email within 48 hours after the closing date.
To download a free Enemy track exclusive to Oasis fans click HERE
To view the video for the new single ‘Sing When Your In Love’ OUT NOW click HERE
The Enemy continue their Oasis support shows at Ricoh Arena, Coventry on 7th July and Wembley Stadium on 9th, 11th and 12th July. The band will also embark on their own headline tour in November. You can buy tickets from www.theenemy.com/gigs.htm
To read Oasisteria’s exclusive interview with Tom Clarke please click HERE
