While She Sleeps: 'Life’s not about a full wallet, it’s about doing things that matter'
For a musician who has just returned to South Yorkshire after a 16-hour flight from Taiwan, Mat Welsh is looking remarkably perky as he sits chatting to The Yorkshire Post.
Over the course of the last 20 years as rhythm guitarist – and latterly manager – of Sheffield metal band While She Sleeps, Welsh has grown accustomed to international travel. The month before they played in China and Taiwan, the band were touring Australia. The jet lag, he feels, is simply part and parcel of a job that he’s “lucky” to be able to do.
As for the shows in Asia, they were “absolutely bonkers”, he says, explaining that the band has built a following there since their 2017 album You Are We, having toured and filmed one of their videos there. What really clinched things, however, was including some Mandarin characters on the album cover. “I think I’d forgotten the power of using something from someone else’s culture, it actually makes them feel a part of something” Welsh says.
“In Taiwan especially the support was just crazy. We played as part of a festival in this baseball stadium and we were having this conversation before we went on about if people know us much. There are some videos on social media, but the singalongs were huge. We came off going, OK, they know who we are. It was great.
“Going that far and anyone knowing your music is something that we dreamt of as kids but still are amazed at. So it was a really good trip and as the last international one of the year definitely left a very wholesome taste in our mouth of how lucky we are.”
At the start of 2006 when Welsh formed While She Sleeps with drummer Adam Savage, bassist Aaran McKenzie, lead guitarist Sean Long and original vocalist Jordan Widdowson (later replaced Lawrence ‘Loz’ Taylor), he says that “in practical terms” he did not think he would still be writing, recording and performing with the band 20 years later.
Nevertheless, he says: “From the aspiration point of view, I’ve been obsessed with this culture and the idea of it’s like your own business but a bit more creative and club-like – making this little club with your friends then turning it into a team.
“As I get older and I look back at my childhood, I’ve been very driven to do that from a really early age. My first band was in 2000 when I was 11 years old, and two of the members who were in that band are in our band too, so we’ve been playing together for so long. I remember a different member saying ‘I’m going to leave the band, it’s not for me’, and I was so shocked by it because I was certain that we were going to headline Leeds Festival. I was shocked that not everyone was envisioning it like I was…
“But it really does feel like you blink and we’re into late 30s, and we’ve been 20 years into doing these things, but I guess that’s the sign of a good time.”
Their gradual ascent has done the band “a lot of good”, he feels. “It’s taught us that life’s not about a full wallet. It’s about enjoying yourself and doing things that matter to you. So I feel very lucky that we’ve lasted this long.”
One memory that particularly stands out for Welsh is from 2010. “We were about four or five years into it...and it transitioned from being this thing we went and did every weekend then went back to work to where the gigs suddenly jumped in size and people started learning lyrics,” he says. “It was (no longer) I’m blagging to you to listen, then were starting to come, and it was the most magical moment.”
Hearing fans singing back the words to their songs was “so exciting”, he says. “That was almost like the beginning of really being inside the bubble because it snowballed quite drastically then and by 2012 we were starting to go around the world, as we’ve been lost in that bubble ever since.”
But all of the last 20 years has been full of moments of them pinching themselves. “It is just a bunch of us from school and suddenly we’re touching 40 and still doing it,” Welsh reflects. “I became a dad this year and the thought of when my son actually understands what I do and I can tell him that’s what I do for a living, that’s one of the moments. I thought my dad was cool and he worked in distribution. What happens when I can take (my son) to a festival and say this is what your dad does?”
As for the metal heroes that Welsh has learned most from, he cites a few who have stuck to their guns. “It’s the bands that have never become arena bands but have made a career out of it, I think that’s the most influential thing,” he says. “There’s a band from California called Thrice, they’re just true to themselves, they’ve done what they want to do, they’ve not listened to the outside very much, they’ve just gone ‘this is what we want to do, we’re a bunch of creatives, this is who we are’. I think the listener respects that.
”There’s a band from Toronto called Alexisonfire who are just incredible, and they’re the same thing. They’re big influences for us because they’ve never topped the charts but they’re 25-30 years deep as a band and have never compromised what they do to seek more success. I think that’s my favourite form of art, uncompromised by the outside world.
“The other one if a California punk band called Rancid, who I absolutely love. They were like a gateway into the culture for me as a kid. A guy in school showed me Rancid and I loved the way it looked, the looked like the coolest crew you could imagine being in, and they were such a counterculture to the rest of the world, I found it fascinating. That has influenced out whole lives, it’s against the current of normal society. If you can do your thing and it’s in that world but you can survive off it, that is the top of the charts.”
When She Sleeps play at Doncaster Dome on Thursday December 11. https://whileshesleeps.com/