SA bands in London: Meet Munkinpure

Who are the band members?
We are Travis Marc du Plooy (lead vocals and drums), Darryl Chad du Plooy (backing vocals and bass guitar) and James Mattacks (backing vocals and guitars).

Tell us a little bit about your music?
Our music is kind of like a mixture of Brit Pop/Indie and Skater Punk/Alternative. A lot of people try and pigeon hole our sound but can't as it's quite a different mix of genres. Our fans back in South Africa started actually calling it 'Munkinrock' which is kind of cool as it reminds us of how Boo used to call there genre of music 'Monkey Punk', and we were huge Boo fans.

What is the SA connection?
Both Darryl and myself are originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. We were born and raised there and are proud of our South African ties and connections.

What does the band hope to achieve?
We're hoping to take our band to the highest professional level that we can. We want to perform our music to people of all ages and cultures in as many different parts of the world as possible and hope that we can become a band that people eventually talk about in the same way that we all talk about our favourite bands. I suppose the long and short of it would be that we love playing in a band together and hope that the chemistry between us comes through to those who come to see us perform.

Why did you end up in London?
While still in South Africa we began talking about relocating to London so that we could try and take the band to that 'next level'. At the time we were still performing with a guitarist named Chad Cohen. The plan was that we would all come here together and start gigging as soon as we could. I arrived in February of 2010, Darryl arrived in October 2010 and unfortunately due to certain visa complications Chad has yet to arrive. So, I gave James a call (as we'd been friends for a few years already), and explained the situation and asked if he'd be interested in joining the band. The rest as they say is history. A lot of our favourite bands who we are still hugely influenced by, came from the U.K so locating here seemed like a great idea. So far it's working out quite nicely too as we seem to be making a fair amount of headway in quite a quick amount of time, especially considering that we only actually started gigging in February of this year.
 
What next for you and the band?
We're actually about to do some new recordings. We're going to try and take the whole 'independent' approach this time round and are doing the entire recording process completely by ourselves, apposed to going into a big studio to lay our ideas down, so it should prove rather interesting. We've also got the Surface Festival regional showcase coming up at the 'O2 Indigo' which is quite a big gig, and we're going to be performing at the finals of this years 'Live and Unsigned' finals as part of this years 'Live Fest' alongside some amazing artists such as 'The Hoosiers', 'Kids in Glass Houses', Funeral for a Friend' and 'N-Dubz'. We're really looking forward to this as we're really big 'Funeral for a Friend' fans. I've listed these gig details below.

Next few gigs/dates/venues...
 
Here are the details for our next few gigs, we hope to see you there.
 
4th June at 'The Native Tongue' in Epsom – KT198DR
25th June at 'The Good Ship' in London –NW67JR
15th July   at 'The O2 Indigo in London
23rd July   at 'The Live Fest' at the O2 in London
29th July   at 'The Shed' in Leicester - LE11UT

Website/facebook addresses
 
You can join the band on any of the following networks. Some even let you download material for free :)
www.munkinpure.com
www.twitter.com/munkinpure
www.myspace.com/munkinpure
www.youtube.com/munkinpure1  
www.facebook.com/munkinpure
www.reverbnation.com/munkinpure  

Image: Nicola Bellinfantie