“Knyght were born in 2002 when brothers Tommy and Olly, at the early age of 13, decided to start a rock n roll band, almost as a game, just to emulate their idols. After some years of gigs in small pubs and line-up changes, even though still very young, the band started performing in many famous underground clubs in Rome and Italy. They receive positive reviews for their demo “Destination Unknown” on italian and international music magazines and webzines, the demo collects more than 25.000 online plays, and good airplay on rock radio.
In the second part of 2008 German producer Heiko Hinze, who already had acquired many years of experience working with artists such as Metal Church, Tom Jones and Motley Crue asks the band to move to Munich to record their first EP....BET EVERYTHING.... The EP was released by German indie label Anko Music on January 15, 2009. Two weeks later the band went to Switzerland and Spain, with Faster Pussycat and Bang Tango.” www.knyghtband.com
In this interview Tommy and Mr Svarione more about this very promising band!
Knyght – how and when did the band come together and what’s the inspiration behind the name?
TOMMY: Actually Knyght were born 7 years ago, a year before me and my brother (Olly, the guitar player) wanted to be football players, but after that summer when IT’S MY LIFE by BonJovi was played by EVERY J-Box on EVERY beach, we changed our mines and changed dreams…..we were 12 and 13 years old and Rock n Roll was everything we were waiting for.
Unfortunately there’s no inspiration behind the name, just 3 stupid 13 years old teens with too many smoke and alcohol in the veins that day to have intelligent ideas for the name…but when we realize that KNYGHT was not a good name for what we wanted to do, it was too late to change it and by the way we attached to our name!
Can you introduce each member of your band and give us a rock "n" roll fact about each of them?
TOMMY: We got Dario on the bass, usually he is the most quiet of the band, but every guy and a girl that was in Barcelona (Spain), when we have played there with Bang Tango, remember him! We had a great show, lots of people and 5 second after the show Dario jump out the stage, run in the backstage full of adrenaline and drunk everything he could from the Bang Tango room, 3 minutes later he was completely drunk screaming in the backstage and when he met the Faster Pussycat drummer he spend 15 minutes with him telling him how they (faster pussycat) were good that night, the problem was that Faster hadn’t played yet that night….
Mr Svarione (drummer) is a sort of "alcoholic snare" guru, he thinks that hitting the drums harder as he can is the only way to play!
The Doc (keyboards)….everybody think that he’s the melody guy, the romantic one….so wrong, he’s the bad boy of the band, he’s got the old school rockstar attitude, he drinks, smokes, fucks, get caught in fight…
Olly is our guitar hero. A cute couple in Germany remember him because during the week we was recording the Ep in Munich, he came back to the Hotel pretty drunk and decided to walk naked through the Hotel until me and Doc realized what he was doing because this kind couple knocked our door and showed us Olly that didn’t know where he was and that was naked….
For the benefit of those who haven't yet heard your music, how would you describe your sound?
TOMMY: We are not one of those bands who think they can change everything or create a new kind of music, we just love music, and love to play it…so if u hear Knyght, you’ll hear a mix of every bands have influenced us served with a special Knyght sauce and a modern touch
Mr.SVARIONE: It's like hearing something you've heard before, but way better.
You have an EP out called "Bet Everything" which was produced by experienced German producer Heiko Hinze who has worked with big name bands such as Motley Crue and Metal Church. Can you describe how the recording process went for this EP and what were some of the important things you may of learnt from Heiko ?
TOMMY: We’re very grateful to Heiko and to the chance he gave us! He heard our old demo on myspace, liked the way we write songs and asked us to move to his studios in Munich (Germany) to record with him our first Ep.
It was our first experience outside Italy and it was amazing to work with a professional producer, we always had our old demos produced by us, so we didn’t know how was to work with a producer and so we learnt to listen to someone who knows more than us and hear other ideas for our songs.
The firsts times we argued a lot cuz sometimes he wanted us to record stuff we didn’t want or he didn’t want stuff we wanted….but we made compromises and the result was really good.
In terms of your songwriting, what do you consider to be more important a killer hook or a thought provoking lyric? And speaking of lyrics, with English not being your first language, how have you found having to write lyrics in English?
Mr.SVARIONE: I think both have the same importance...a lot of bands write great songs with shitty lyrics, and in Italy no one seems to care...I guess that if you want to create a great song, you can't undervalue something like lyrics...
TOMMY: Unfortunately we were born in the wrong nation of the wrong continent, English is far from being a second language here in Italy and we don’t want to play the lame Italian pop, so we have to study lots English on our own, we’d like to be an international band, play in Europe, USA, Australia, Japan, Africa….everywhere. Write lyrics in English is not really easy, but we believe lyrics are really important and we spend lot of time to have them sound the best.
What bands did you grow up listening to and how did they help create the style of music that can now be heard through Knyght?
Mr.SVARIONE: when I was a child, the music played in the hi-fi was incredibly loud and incredibly good...from Zeppelin, to The Cult, Gnr, Stones, things like these...
TOMMY: Everyone of us has his favourite bands, we grow up listening to classic rock Aerosmith, Queen, Bon Jovi, Meat Loaf, Bryan Adams, Guns n Roses and sure you can hear lots of these bands in our songs, but we’re listening now also to lots of new stuff (and you’ll hear in the new songs we are writing these days) AlterBridge, Nickelback, Buckcherry, Hinder….what we are trying to do now with new songs and next work is to mix everything, writing what we like but trying to have it sounds as modern as possible
If you could travel back in time and play your music to one of your musical hero's who would it be and why?
TOMMY: I don’t know, I think that if ever one of my heroes will ever listening to my songs and like them, I’ll have and heart attack….I really wish that someday mr.JonBonJovi or Meat Loaf will sit in a room with me and together we’ll listen to one of my work, but this is one of the 1000 dreams we have, who knows…
By the way I think that I’d like to play my music to sir Desmond Child, I believe he’d like and appreciate Knyght, we love his works and if we are good songwriters it’s because, most of the things, we’ve learnt from him.
Early this year you travelled to Spain and Switzerland to play some shows with Faster Pussycat and Bang Tango. What were some of your favourite memories from this tour?
Mr.SVARIONE: Playin' with Beautiful Creatures and Faster Pussycat was fun, when you're "on tour" you can meet a lot of people, and obviously some assholes!
TOMMY: Tour is lots of fun for a young band, but it’s also hard if you are not U2, you don’t have flights in business class to take u from one show to another, we lived in our small tour bus, usually we booked a room for 2 and slept there in 5, but in Spain they caught us and kicked our ass.
But we got also beautiful memories, in Spain we played in big places in front of lots of people, the club in Bilbao was really huge! And the people were very kind…we had lots of great after show parties, free alcohol everytime everywhere…we loved the life on the road!
The Italian/Rome rock scene is something we are not that familiar with. Is rock music like what you play, popular in Italy/Rome?
TOMMY: Popular? Ahahahaha….no, unfortunately not.
There are LOTS of bands in the underground in Italy, few bands are also really really good, but labels, booking agencies and clubs don’t give a shit about good music and have killed all the chances to have a good and alive rock scene here in Italy and people prefer to spend 50 euros in disco clubs than 10 euros to see good original bands
2009, what do you have planned for the rest of the year? Lot's of live shows, writing or recording new songs??
TOMMY: All the things you said!
Now it’s almost half an year from the Ep released, I think we’ll promote it for all the summer too, but meanwhile these days we are working on lots of new songs (we’re really proud of the new stuff) and these days, we received an offer from a famous American producer to record with him…
“I think” we’ll record a PROMO with him after the summer and then if we’ll find good deals, we’ll finish to record our first ALBUM, but we’ll tell u more soon!
Live shows…we hope to play as much as possible these months, we’d like to play again outside Italy soon, we’re also next to sign a contract with a USA booking agency to tour USA next year with an American band, but still nothing sure….
So THANK U VERY MUCH for the interview, MAY THE ROCK BE WITH U (and with us), and stay tuned: www.myspace.com/knyghtband - www.knyghtband.com










