INTERVIEWING: STONE’s Fin Power & Elliot Gill.
Written by Maisy Stewart
Photos by Maisy Stewart @interlude.imagery
Could you introduce yourselves?
Fin: I’m Fin.
El: I’m Elliot, and we are Stone.
Can you explain your sound to somebody who’s never heard it before?
El: We are one of Liverpool’s premier alternative rock merchants out of Liverpool. Post-apocalyptic scally rock, someone said that once.
What’s your favourite part of being in a band?
Fin: The party, man! Getting on stage, it’s the live. I think what’s really funny is- writing songs is like its really funny. Writing the songs is almost always my favourite part; sometimes it’s a lot darker because you’re writing sad things and then sometimes-
El: Sometimes you’ve got that song, and it’s also like it’s got that bittersweetness to it where it’s like, oh my god, this is such a banger like how long until we get to play it live?
Fin: yeah, no. I just think, yeah, live’s the payoff.
If you could be any stone, what would you be?
El: Oh, actually I should know… I’d be a quartz.
Fin: I’d be a kidney stone.
El: Hard to pass.
How did you get into making music?
Fin: Honestly, I wanted to be a chef in school, and then my school dropped food tech, so I couldn’t be a chef anymore. And then I did DT, and the teacher told me that I wasn’t a very good designer. So I did music. I went to music class because my dad taught me guitar, and obviously my dad’s a musician, so he’d taught me guitar. I did that, and then I wrote my first song when I was like fifteen. It’s pretty corny, like, then I kinda knew. I realised then that like I kind of had this moment when I was like, alright, I wanna be in a band, and I kind of had no plan B.
El': I don’t want to sound like delusions of grandeur or anything, but when I was a little kid, like a toddler, my mum asked me what I wanted to do. And I was like, rock star. I was just like-
Fin: You’re gonna get there soon, like.
El: Yeah, I’m gonna get there. I’m on my jolly way. But yeah, I was nine years old, and I waited for guitar lessons, and then I got them, and then I eventually met this- can I swear? this motherfucker.
Fin: I kinda didn’t give him- I didn’t give him a choice.
El: And we’ve been realising that dream for the last decade and I’d like to think it’s going pretty goddamn well.
What would be your dream artist to collaborate with on a song?
Fin: Action Bronson.
El: Action Bronson’s coming on stage as we go off, and we’re gonna try and speak to him.
Fin: Do you know who Action Bronson is?
no.
Fin: He’s like a rapper, hes from new york but he’s a chef as well. But we’re doing a gig in Belgium, and he’s on after us, and we’re gonna try to speak to him. We’re gonna speak to him. We’re gonna get him on a song. He’s gonna do a song with us after this show; he will.
Writer note - I attended said festival; however, Action Bronson had to drop out due to illness.
Fin: We’ve got DOPE LEMON to do a song with us; DOPE LEMON has more listeners than us on Spotify.
El: You don’t ask, you don’t get.
Fin: I always said- we played a festival season in 2023, and I was like, there’s one person I want to meet this festival season we’re playing a show with him, DOPE LEMON, and he ended up featuring on a song with us. So anything can happen.
Speaking of Belgium, how did you get so big there? Do you know?
El: I put it to the goodwill of the Belgians, and I put it to the good taste of the Belgians.
Fin: Let’s be realistic; we don’t know how it happened. We actually played- there was a festival in Rock Werchter. we played it and i peaked out, and id seen that belgium were our number two city on spotify and i thought it was an algorithm thing and then before we played rock werchter for the first time like in the middle of the day on a small stage, like outside i peaked out and it was like as far as the eye can see crowd and i said ‘i wonder who’s on after us’ i rememver saying that and then it ended up they were all there for us.
El: It was us the entire time.
Fin: No, it was surreal; we don’t even know how it happened. We just know that they play us on the radio all the time
El: The radio’s good out there; that’s conducive.
Fin: Actually, Studio Brussels is probably the reason we’re big out there.
El: Shout out to you guys.
How do you want your music to make people feel?
Fin: Upset. Angry. Disappointed.
El: angry. mad.
Fin: Like disappointed.
El: Like there’s a better song out there. no im joking
Fin: Gutted.
El: Oh fuck, that’s it? This is the best they can do? I feel like our priority when we’re like writing songs isn’t necessarily like what we can conjure up in an audience; it’s more just like we tell our story, and the best we can hope for is that people relate to it
Fin: i’m kinda at the point where, y’know i listen to like some songs and i’ve listened to a lot of songs, and I listen to the lyrics, and like though there’s a set meaning to it, and ive painted the whole picture in my head, and those lyrics i painted the story for me, and then you google what the lyrics mean and they mean a completely different thing. so i dont reallyy, i dont want to be like, because our song autonomy it has a very specific thing that it's about, and I don’t want to tell anyone what that is because then it takes away what other people think it means to them. I’m not in the business of telling people how to think. Don’t worry, I’ll do that; I’ll do the worrying.
El: I guess all I can tell people how to think is stimulated on audio, aural
Fin: you’re hanging out in the Netherlands, mate
El: a-u-r-a-l
Do you have any hobbies or interests outside of making music? What are they? I think anyone who knows Fin will know his answer to this.
Fin: I dunno, it’s just skateboarding and chess. chess. a looot of chess. I play- my phone, when I’ve checked my screen time, said like twelve hours a week. I play like two hours of chess a day. I love chess. And I skateboard because it’s like, I don’t drink anymore. I have ADHD, and I think it’s something that makes my brain go silent. I’m getting okay at it.
El: You know what, outside of music I’m such a boring bastard. I don’t really have much outside of music
Fin: booking, fucking stick that in your blog.
El: I work with young people. I work with kids, and I guess that’s the only tangible thing I give a shit about outside of music and then outside of like having a good time with my friends.
Has any non-musical media ever stuck with you?
Fin: Oh, that is such a big question. I really got into reading books by chuck palernick last year. I really like him because he was transgressive horror, which is like, just fucked up. I kinda like that; I like it when it hits your brain like messed up horror. I used to be really sensitive when I was younger; I couldn’t watch horror films, but then I kinda got into them because it’s like a roller coaster.
El: I mean I was a big book kid. I was a big English kid and honestly, I know this sounds so sad-
Fin: stop trying to score points lad.
El: Alright, I’ve got two answers: The Great Gatsby, when I was a kid and The Sopranos. Also The Wire.
Fin: You watched SpongeBob and South Park like the rest of us, c’mon.
How do you feel that the internet has impacted the music industry?
Fin: It’s one of those; I think I don’t like it. y’know, I don’t like the internet, but at the same time it’s like we very much got all of our like- we went viral on TikTok. I can swear about TikTok, and yeah, it’s annoying, but quite literally we had like 15,000 followers, and then we went viral, and it went to 30,000 in two days. Like, we were a band that went viral on TikTok. I think I prefer to see what it’s like without, but then you know everyone wants what they don’t have, don’t they?
El: It’s like a dog chasing its own tail. It’s a means to broadcast yourself and be who you want to be in theory and platform yourself, but at the same time everyone else is trying to. We don’t know what the implications of it are yet
Fin: ROBOT! … I’m very grateful; I turned 12 in 2011, and I genuinely had a freaking BlackBerry with the like buttons and that, it was awesome. I got to experience what it was like with no iPhones; there was no social media. I got to experience the proper emo culture; I’m just a millennial.
El: I’m taking stock of my life, and I was always a very online kid, right? But this was like 2010, 2011, 2012, and like being online was like a lifestyle choice and not just a given.
Fin: I used to play Roblox. It’s fucking class, OOF.
El: So now that everything is just online, I’m thinking like, oh shit, like I spent so much of my time in life looking at a screen, and now everything’s on a screen by default. Sometimes that worries me; I’m like, I should have gone on my bike more fuck sake.