When I first saw the Bottle Boys play my favourite hip hop songs (and “Thrift Shop”) on bottles, I realised that blowing into discarded bottles of Budweiser wasn’t just for drunk people at house parties or awkward teens at an Arts’n’Crafts after-school club. Like one of those weird bands they have at Legoland, but playing rap, they tear through every classic from “Still D.R.E” and “Rappers Delight” to “Through The Wire” and “Real Slim Shady”.
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The boys are not limited to stanky-ass hip-hop either, their covers of “Call Me Maybe” and “Walking On Sunshine”, falling miles away from every other cover band out there, most of whom are GCSE students or terminally yawn-inducing All Saints shoppers. The Bottle Boys are more light-hearted about the songs they cover preferring jaunty medleys over melodramatic emotional purges. But the main thing is: they’re playing on bottles. Super-cool, obviously.The group talked to me about how to make music from things that belong in the rubbish, conspiracy theorists and how they bear no grudge against Simon Cowell.
The Bottle Boys, enjoying some bottlesNoisey: How does the bottle blowing technique work?Phillip: We use the water technique mostly. It works by filling the bottle up with water and the more water you use, the higher the note will get.Johannes: It’s like playing the flute. You do it at a 45 degree angle as if you’re blowing a candle.But how can you play songs using that technique?Johannes: It’s like an orchestra, one flute plays one note, you can’t change that. So we have to have guys playing different notes in a melody. Each bottle is one note and sometimes we’ll switch depending on the speed of the song.Why bottles though? Do you guys just drink lots and lots of drinks?Casper: Why not?Chris: We were all playing with them at a party once and decided that we should form a band to play songs in bottle form. It’s quite a challenge to play full songs with them.
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Are you all proper musicians? It seems a lot harder than a drunken idea…Austin: We’ve all studied music and can play a variety of instruments.So would you consider the bottle an instrument in itself?Phillip: Definitely. We actually make sheet music to play the music in bottle form. Bottle blowing definitely needs to be a genre in itself.You’ve really advanced bottle blowing as a genre with your own videos. What’s your favourite cover?Philip: Definitely our hip-hop mashup, we’re so proud of it because of the amount of time we put into it.Chris: When we started making all these one shot performance videos, we’d get a lot of commenters doubting whether we’d played it live.Definitely one for the conspiracy files…Phillip: A lot of other people would comment with specific explanations on how we hadn’t faked anything.Austin: Yeah, there’s the trolls and the jedis. Though I’m kind of happy when somebody thinks we’re faking because it looks too good to be real.How popular has your music been?Phillip: We’ve actually travelled the world performing now, we just came back from New York and Kuwait. LMFAO saw our cover of their song.When you went on Britain's Got Talent, Simon gave you a no. Do you still hold a grudge?Austin: No, not at all! We actually said on the program that we wanted to play the Super Bowl and a few weeks a ago we played one of their warm up parties for them, so we’ve come a long way.
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Is there any band whose music is so good, that you think it’d be an insult to play it through bottles?Phillip: When we started we made a promise to ourselves that any music can be played through bottles and that we shouldn’t limit ourselves.What covers have you got planned for the future?Phillip: Maybe a movie medley? We’ve got a cover video planned of an unexpected artist. Whatever we do it’s going to surprise a lot of people.Thanks Guys!Follow Dan on Twitter: @KeenDangRead more like this:How to Turn Anything Into an Instrument (Even Bananas and Tin Foil)How to Learn an Instrument in Your Sleep
