MEDICINE Men have had quite a year. Surfing the success of T Break in 2014, the band played Isle of Wight festival alongside the likes of Glasgow’s Tijuana Bibles in the summer and have now revealed a new video for ‘Opposite’.
Describing their year as transitional, Medicine Men’s frontman Ian Mackinnon spoke exclusively to TTV about the new track and video: “The lyrics for the track came from me thinking about how we all turn in to machines when we are using a computer, iPad, smart phone, and how in turn that allows the “machine” to get away with things. I’m probably as bad as anyone else for being on my phone so it’s self critical in a big way.”
Mackinnon is known by his friends as a pretty political figure, when we asked if we could expend these views to trickle into his music in 2016 he commented: “Politics has been a huge part of my life but I’ve always shied away from writing about it through fear of coming across bitter or turning people off the music who don’t agree with me. Plus I don’t always think it’s my place to speak for a whole band.
“That said, with this track I’ve tried to be a bit cleverer about it and just make the lyrics purely observational rather than judgemental, and I think that’s more effective a lot of the time.”
And what does 2016 have in store for the band? “Who knows! We’ve been in the studio recording five new tracks, so maybe we’ll put those out as an EP. But I think the problem with EPs is that people often treat them as a single with 3 or 4 b-sides, and as a result the other tracks can get forgotten about. We’ll maybe try and do a video for each track and stagger the releases. I honestly couldn’t pick a favourite out of them just now, they’re all so different.”
The band will play Glasgow’s Nice N Sleazy on Sunday 13th December. The video was produced by Arpad Horvath, watch it below:
