The Stands

When The Stands ease their way into one of their fantastically beautiful songs, what you hear isn’t the sound of now or even the sound of then, it’s something way beyond that, something timeless. That hits you from the moment you hear their wonderful debut single - ‘When This River Rolls Over You’. The band’s first Top 40 hit, it encapsulates the magical lyricism and romanticism that makes The Stands such an exceptional group.

At their heart is a charming and irrepressible Liverpudlian songwriter called Howie Payne. If you’re wondering why he writes songs like he does, the reason is simple. When he sat down and started to write a couple of years ago, he’d only just finished wrestling with centuries of musical history. "I was playing a lot of acoustic nights on my own," he recalls with a smile, "just doing my own stuff and a lot of traditional music and early blues. I was getting into songs that were 4 or 500 years old and it got me thinking, ‘Who wrote these songs? And how did they come to last so long?’ After a while, you start to hear the same melodic structures over and over again. They’re really simple. Everything is based around the melody and the lyrics. That led me to think that I should form a band that was just about that. I mean, I’m not interested in fashion and I’m not interested in hipness. All I wanted to do was write songs from the heart. So that’s what I did..."