Apollo Junction: 'We’ll see if the stars align and the sun shines on us'

However, he is cautious of getting too carried away by excited talk that the quintet might finally be about to breach the national top 40. As the boxes around him show, Apollo Junction are still very much a do-it-yourself concern, masterminded by the band themselves and a small group of helpers that includes Mick Carter, the founder of Guiseley-based Shed Load of Vinyl and their “fab” manager Neil Hargreaves.

“The important bit is that people like this album,” he says of the new record, Here We Are, “but you can’t help but be carried along by this thought of getting into the charts. People say the top 40, but we’d be happy with top 75 or top 100.

“It’s going well. Personally, I think it will come down to the week that we come out in, we’ll see if the stars align and the sun shines on us that week – bearing in mind, we are quintessentially the most DIY band.

“I was saying to the band the other day, what we’ve got to remember is these bands who go ‘independent – no label’, actually when you dig a little deeper, as we’ve done (asking) ‘How did that band get to number nine? How did that band get to number 26?’ – they’ve got teams of people. When we say we are independent, we have a really good manager called Neil, we have Mick who runs the Shed and a guy over in America who helps us a little bit with our radio stuff, but helping us put the album out, it is the smallest team possible.”

He’s grateful for the support of Wax and Beans, the indie record store in Bury, who have helped bump up pre-orders with an exclusive gold vinyl edition and CDs. Ultimately, though, as Williamson is well aware, a chart placing is hard to predict.

Nevertheless the strength of the new material augurs well. The band spent two years writing and recording after their previous album All In garnered some attention. “We did the recording process in between tours and festivals,” Williamson says. “Then we also set a thing where we had to write together as much as possible, which slowed us down. Quite often (in the past) we’d contribute separately. We’ve still done that, but we tried to sit down in collectives a lot more. Still things would come in individually, but we tried to make it be complete by us. Then we went into the studio and that took a while.”

Williamson feels the band have grown into their own skin more with this record. “We sound exactly like us now, so if people hear us they can go instantly ‘That’s Apollo Junction’. That’s good because there’s a lot of bands out there that are still pulling themselves along on the back of a certain sound. There are lots of bands who sound like Oasis, lots of bands who sound like Arctic Monkeys, and that’s fine if that’s what they want to do, but we want to sound like us, and we’ve worked a lot to get that.

“Which is why three albums in we’ve gone for the most simple of all titles that we could have gone for: Here We Are. We mean it in every sense of we feel we are who we are, we’ve found where we needed to be, we’re in a place where we didn’t particularly at first feel we’d find: to have a core fanbase and be selling out gigs and selling a fair few albums. It sounds daft but we didn’t always envisage that as our journey.

“The most important thing is we enjoy being in this band, and we enjoy being together doing what we do. As soon as we got that thought in our heads, we probably then started to find our feet anyway. Once you stop focusing on what so many bands are chasing – ‘We want a record deal, we want to play Glastonbury, we want to do these things’, if you just stopped and went ‘We want to write some good songs’ then funnily enough those other things start to find you.”

Here We Are is out on Friday October 20. Apollo Junction play at Siidney & Matilda in Sheffield on December 1 and Brudenell Social Club on December 2. https://www.apollojunction.com/