James Killgallon, the 16-year-old lead singer and guitar player from No Circus, has taken the Orlando music scene by storm this year. Showing off his vocal chops with No Circus’s swaggering 70’s-influenced rock, Killgallon and band members Joe Bindshadler and Josh Coulombe (none of whom are old enough to vote yet) seem destined to rule Orlando’s rock scene for years to come.
Orlando Metromix caught up with Killgallon after school let out to talk about No Circus’s musical habits, what it’s like to have your parents drive you to shows, and how the young guys keep their growing popularity from going to their heads.
- No Circus plays the Florida Music Festival on May 16 at 8 p.m. at Wall St. Plaza in downtown Orlando
When did No Circus form?
Me and the drummer have been playing together for about three years. And then Josh has been in it for about two years now.
Does that mean that there was once a time when your parents had to drive you to your own shows?
Yeah, definitely man, definitely. I’ve been playing shows since I was 13. I used to be a bass player, too. I was bass player for a couple years, and I played jazz and stuff. And all I would find in town was like emo bands and stuff. Then one day me and the drummer jammed, we were in this crappy hardcore band and then we decided to try to play some rock, like classic rock. And it worked out. But then we couldn’t find any guitar players so I switched to that, and then Josh had to play bass and then it worked out pretty well.
What was behind the decision to move to the style of rock that you do?
A lot the songs I hear just don’t have the spirit the older music does. You know the bam-bam-bam approach to writing songs as opposed to “We’re writing a song… what’s its meaning?”
Do you take a lot of time thinking about what you’re trying to do with a song?
Yeah, sometimes the song… the music and the lyrics just come to me. But sometimes, it’s been like we’ve spent a year on one of our songs, changing it up and stuff. But sometimes it’ll come right out and in an hour we’ve got a song. And then we’ll get stuck, because we’ll find this riff we like that we won’t be able to [get it] to fit into it to make it have the sound.
A lot of bands with young members seem to start out doing covers most of the time. What’s your opinion on doing covers?
When we play a cover it’s because we have a bar gig and it’s a chance to make some extra money. I play covers for when I want to learn the music, and then you can learn from that style and just take from it. Because every little piece of music is learned from somebody else. You can be original in what you’re writing and what you’re doing, but you’re still taking everything you’ve learned from someone else.
You guys are still in high school?
Yeah, we’re set to graduate at the end of this year. We graduate in January, well next year. They’re [the other band members] graduating a half a year early, and I’m graduating a year and a half early.
Wait a minute! A lot of bands have trouble just getting together to do stuff. Where do you guys get the ambition to go to school, finish it early, and write and perform all these songs?
I don’t know, man. School has been really, really easy for me. But we’ll go to school in the morning and then if between four and five if they [the band member] want to they come to my house and practice and write some music. We try to play four times a week. We’ll spend half of it writing and half the time practicing.
No offense but your last names, Killgallon, Coulombe, and Bindshadler sound kind of fake. Are those your real names?
Yeah they’re our real names. Joe’s German, my whole family is sort of Irish, and Coulombe I guess is French-Canadian or something. I don’t know how we all ended up with weird last names, and all our first names begin with J, but it just worked out that way.
Your popularity has really exploded this year. How do you give yourself a reality check for that?
We have our own brand of reality check. We’re more than a band, we’re best friends too, so if any one of us looks like we’re arrogant we’ll all kind of make fun of him. If you get around and you listen to other things you realize that you’re not the coolest thing ever.
In the future what other kinds of music ventures would you like to try?
After we graduate from high school we’re going to try to cut a decent record. It’s very important to us to get a record label right now… but I can’t even sign a contract right now. But then we’ll take three or four months and try and get everything down, and then we’ll try to tour as much as we can.
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