Interview with the Cherrywaves guitar
On August 23rd of 2025, I was granted an exclusive chance to interview the guitarist of Cherrywaves. After close to 3 weeks of deliberating and soul searching, I've finally decided to publish this interview. For the first time in my life, I am wrought with the crushing weight of fierce dissapointment and resentment upon meeting a 'hero'.
The following interview has damaged my opinion of what is a budding flower in the wasteland that is the Southampton music scene.
I have opted not to include the first name of the man involved. All you ought to know is he plays guitar. I believe all people should be treated as human, but this 'man' should be seen as nothing more than the guitar parts he plays for he is no more human than the Prion addled corpse of Ronald Reagan.
I'm sorry for what you're about to read, please get home safe...
Q: How do you feel about the Cherry Waves (CW) blog?
A: The analyst Otto Rank - the Igor to Freud's Frankenstein - called the act of birth our first experience of anxiety. Birth, just like all beginnings, is anxious, violent, and sticky. Our mind pushes that bullshit away into the guts of the unconscious. The birth of this blog is very fresh in my mind, given that it happened, like, yesterday. Our drummer extraordinaire, resident typewriter-monkey, and in-house elder (B-man), relinquished an unmanageable workload (a dozen emails) to yours truly. For his incompetence and deceit*, the wondrous CEOk of CW (sometimes Mr Wild Eyes, henceforth AJ OK) mauled him like the pitbull that caught the baby.
From this anxiety (...and violence and stickiness...), the CW blog was torn from B-man's fertile psychic ovaries and tossed into the cyberspace dumpster where all, but probably very few, will point and laugh in disgust. Ever the iconoclasts, we are fashionably late to this blogging trend by a few decades. In another world I'd be ashamed of this, but when nostalgia is currency and a future is unimaginable, there are worse things to be then sickeningly retro.
*This is hotly contested by B-man himself, it really is a matter of semantics though.
Q: So how was Cherry Waves originally formed?
A: If you want to inaugurate our blog with some historical housekeeping, then you’ll have to tolerate some context about our milleww, if you excuse my French. The beginning of the band is slowly fading from consciousness, but it's fresh enough where I can smell it rotting in my brain-soup. It was early-mid '23, April, I think.
Me and AJ OK were close friends and musically homeless. We'd both been 'in the scene' for a decent few years at that point... whatever that means. AJ OK's musical vision saw some success*, but little acclaim, and littler artistic satisfaction. In the midst of a growing disillusionment, we sought LOUD FUCKING NOISES as an outlet to fend off that particular depressive nihilism that lingers like a bad smell. You know the one, it emanates from the great big question mark where tomorrow should be.
Mr OK made the first move. He and the fantastic (!) Maj were based in Salisbury at the time. My only interaction with Maj up to this point was when AJ, after a night of heavy drinking, cornered the three of us in his tiny bedroom and made me noodle on guitar, loudly proclaiming his love for me - one of my fonder memories of being intoxicated, cornered, and pressured to perform acts of service at 3 am. It was surprising, then, about a week later, when I was added to a group chat called 'Twinkseat Laprest'. I was in bed on my phone. The lovely K, who I was hooking up with at the time, asked what a 'laprest' was, and what it had to do with twinks (his husband explained the reference to him later that day).
From this point onwards, we alternated between jam sessions live at waterside and at an industrial lot parading as a practice space. What started as a short-term dream-pop studio- project quickly descended into something much, much, much worse (but like...in a good way). Over time we lost and gained members (miss you Maj!), changed our roles and responsibilities, experienced mass personal development, and grew more and more dissonant. All of that led to whatever this nonsense is.
*As successful as a local band (of teens (playing rock'n'roll (in a global pandemic))) can be
Q: How long have you been playing music with Alfie?
A: Since you’re being thorough then I’m going to be self-indulgent. The beginning of mine and AJ OK's psycho/musical love affair is the most distorted memory described yet. Sometimes it feels more like a dream or fantasy than an actual memory, but maybe that's because I'm stupid. Boom, we're in sixth form again... What a fucking nightmare! Me and AJ OK were in similar circles, had some shared friends, you know the deal. This made us defacto-acquitances, but not actual-friends.
He was 2D set dressing to me at that time, his life was a myth relayed by our irl moots. I'm sure he thought the same of me but is less likely to admit it (by nature of being a better person than me). Some (2) of these mutual friends invited me to play guitar in a band. We invited AJ OK to join the band and play drums. He was not a good drummer. This did not matter, as we were not a good band.
The short-lived experiment with our two mutual friends ended in pseudo- animosity after a particularly bad practice session, though teenage-emotional-bullshit and the lingering pandemic didn't help the matter. * Me and AJ went off to university, and it was here our musical love affair flourished. We spent many hours making horrible noises in my 50ft^2 of Charlotte Anne Moberly (CAM), over in Winchester.
Our friendship really bloomed one night where, after a great noize sesh, we went to one of those parties you hear about happening all the time but rarely actually see. Alas, whilst I was doing coke off toilet seats and goading strangers to make-out for my own perverse enjoyment, AJ OK was fighting every urge to not throw-up after eating bad shrimp. He has been vegetarian since.
*Fun aside: one of these friends disappeared off the map, only to reappear recently as an engineer working on lasers that clean things. The other 'friend' had a failed career as a film- maker, followed by a successful career as a rapist **, followed by an okay career in burger flipping.
** Safe to say we don't associate anymore.
Q: How does CW today differ from its original lineup?
A: There are five (5) configurations of CW in my dementated mind. Firstly, there’s me and AJ OK, in my CAM Capsule, enacting our failed vision of “landfill indie gone noise”. This is proto-CW. Think sort of…Warsaw to Joy Division, except much less good or important. CW v1.0 was AJ, Maj, and me. We were just a very loud dream-pop band playing in front-rooms and bedrooms.
CW v2.0 saw us recruit T on drums, basically it was just 1.0 with bones (for better and worse). After the brief v2.0 we had v2.5, where Maj left and, by extension, the musical talent (and sense of melody) left with her. Then v3.0 hit, the current iteration; AJ went bald and got cool, the Bassplayer arrived, who in turn invoked B- man, and I got free-reign to hit my guitar as hard as I wanted. It's unlikely I'd have guessed we'd be exactly here. Yet, retrospective analysis shows that it was, frankly, inevitable.
My poor understanding of Marxism, and much worse understanding of Hegel, leads me to believe that Cherry Waves, as it exists now, could've been predicted dialectically, by looking at the anxious (and violent and sticky) tensions within each of us. ***
From the anxious (and violent and...), confusing and messy beginnings that explode into being, there comes tension and opposition. This is both within us, and within the material world around us. When the time, and the conditions, are right, new and exciting things emerge in a sudden, violent (...sticky), yet focused frenzy. There is only one end after all, but countless beginnings. Even the death of something, which may be an end to some change, is often a beginning (or at the very least an inciting incident) for others around it.
Ultimately, though, more important than any bastardisation of Marx and Hegel, is the innate drive within all people to match their freak. We act so that our perverted and freakish kinks (personal and sexual) become a productive, shared, and material joy. Case in point: the CW blog. The four of us are, despite occasional protesting, absolute freaks (even the Bassplayer).
*** Made you look.
Q: Who’s the worst member of the band?
A: Like…as a person or a musician? Either way I’d probably say: me.
Q: What genre are you?
A: Well, I’m very sleepydoomercyberfuckcore coded. Genre is semiotic(artography) serving a communicative function. We call ourselves shoegaze to communicate the presence of a layered, dreamy, wall-of-noise (often a product of bad mixing on my end).
We call ourselves noise rock but we’re noisy and we rock. We call ourselves post-rock because rock died before we started. We call ourselves shit because we suck. Call us whatever you want, as long as it gets the point across.
Q: What’s the best CW song, including unreleased tracks?
A: Most of the ones I wrote.
Q: What’s the worst CW song?
A: The other ones I wrote.
Q: Will we ever see another Weezer cover?
A: Definitely, but not by us!