Nicely Does it

They’ve Fought Off Personal Demons and Industry Indifference, but With Third Album ‘wired’, Mallory Knox Mean Business.

- Tomas Doyle

Mallory Knox’s Sam Douglas is angry. Seething, actually. Cutting to the point like a scalpel through butter, his sentences are peppered with expletives as he holds court on the state of the British rock scene – and how the band he’s spent the last seven years of his life in fit into proceedings.

“We’ve had some breaks,” he concedes, “but I don’t feel like we’ve ever had that fucking one which gives us the chance to be where we should be. We’ve done all the stuff that people in the industry have told us to do, not creatively but in other ways, and now it’s like, ‘Nah, you’re talking fucking shit.’ There’s a frustration at always being the underdogs, and that’s oozing out of us now.”

Indeed, Mallory Knox’s new album ‘Wired’ does mark a significant milestone for the bassist / vocalist and his bandmates – vocalist Mikey Chapman, drummer Dave Rawling, and guitarists James Gillett and Joe Savins – being, as it is, a record characterised by a clarity, energy and pissed-off spirit that the Cambridgeshire quintet have never quite tapped into before. But much, much more importantly than that, it signals a huge shift in attitude for the perennial Nicest Band In Rock Music.