Brit group Fiction Plane is earning major raves and fans with their debut album, Everything Will Never Be OK, but people haven't always been so kind. "It's really a surprise, because we've been going for years with people saying, 'You suck. The music is boring. It's too weird,'" says frontman Joe Sumner, who plays in Fiction Plane with guitarist Seton Daunt, bassist Dan Brown and touring drummer Pete Wilhoit. "We came over [to America] a couple of years ago to try and get signed, and people said, 'You guys don't have the songs. They're not strong enough.' We've come back two years later with a lot of the same songs, and all of a sudden it's like, 'Oh, these songs are great!'"
If Joe sounds like a man who's passionate about his music - hooky, irresistible pop-rock with lyrics that tackle everything from love to war - it might have something to do with the fact that he's deeply influenced by late Nirvana founder Kurt Cobain. "Me and our bass player really got into Nirvana in 1991, so I was about 14. It made us go insane," says Joe. "Kurt - he had serious passion. That guy was destroying his voice ever night to sing the songs, just really meaning it and getting extremely upset about anything that had to do with his art."
Another thing the Joe gets passionate about - the environment, a cause also championed by his dad, Sting. Fiction Plane worked with environmental group Future Forests to figure out how many pollutants were generated by the production of their CD; to offset that damage, more than 1,500 trees will be planted on their behalf in Louisiana. "I studied Environmental Science at college, and when our manager found Future Forests, I thought it was just the best idea ever," says Joe. "Future Forests makes it really easy, because they figure out exactly how much you pollute the world, and then they try to fix it." Luckily, their music isn't polluting the airwaves - Everything Will Never Be OK is an excellent, refreshingly new album that kicks off what should be a long and prosperous career for Fiction Plane.
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