GANS - GOOD FOR THE SOUL - STRAP ORIGINALS

GANS are a two-piece from the West Midlands.

Thomas Rhodes and Euan Woodman met whilst at college studying music. There they shared their individual passions for music, books and art. GANS was born.

Crudely they define their rolls as: Woodman drums and sings, Rhodes plays bass, guitars and sings. They both play everything else that you hear on a GANS record. They split the lyric writing to whoever has something to write about – no one’s precious. The GANS world is an open forum of ideas.

Growing up in working class areas of the Black Country to parents who worked in factories and mills has helped define how they approach GANS. As Rhodes puts it, “We both come from places where people get locked in by their surroundings – trapped by jobs and ambitions that go as far as getting married and settling down by the time you are 23. We knew we did not want that. We felt connected when we met and we had ambitions that lay beyond that world. We are fiercely proud of where we are from and we strongly believe in how we were raised. It’s just we have ambitions that are more Copacabana than Costa Del Dudley.”

A journey of trying different musical escapades began for the duo culminating in a short-lived band in their late teens before they went their separate ways for a few years. Then in September 2023, Rhodes and Woodman reconnected, “We simply wanted to get into a room, make some noise, no plan, no agenda, no fucks given – just play music that was in our hearts and make a racket that we enjoyed”, Rhodes eloquently states.

And so, GANS was born and began releasing music in December 2023 with the debut “WHAT YOU MEAN”. People started contacting the band that they liked it. GANS had their agenda lined up – keep blasting out tracks and not caring what happened.

The band then built a team around them of people that loved what they do. Part of the core philosophy of the band, “We only work with people that give a shit – we have good bullshit detectors, and we know what we want” Woodman lays out. This is further outlined by the fact that they keep every part of their output in house – they collaborate with a close friend Benji Charles on the visual output of the band via their great “janky” videos and band shots and design their own merchandise. Releases followed that ended up in their deal with Strap Originals.

Woodman sat scribbling away in his books. Not only does he write poems, but he also paints. Some of his paintings are disturbing Francis Bacon-like images of animals dressed as humans. There’s a Goose smoking a cigarette. Ironically this is where the band got their name - GANS is “Goose” in German.

Woodman says, “I have to be creating, and I will do until I die. I know people say that, but I truly don’t know any other way, I don’t know what I’d do”. He is the main lyricist in GANS – his words reflect a sense of discomfort and unease with life.

Meanwhile in the Southern hinterlands of the West Midlands, Rhodes was listening to Glenn Miller, Count Basie and his family’s old collection of rock’n’roll records and he soon lost himself in his own world of discovery.

“My first record I bought was The Libertines “Up The Bracket” – the irony is not lost on me of the cyclical nature of life and how we have ended up signed to Peter Doherty’s label. It was not by design – they simply contacted us and told us they liked us and that we could do what we wanted.”

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Rhodes’ musical odyssey began playing in Big Band jazz bands aged 14. It’s not the usual start in music, but he loved it and he learnt skills from older players that he would perform with.

“It was a good grounding. I’ve always loved all sorts of music and I’m constantly listening to different things and discovering things that are new and from the past. I think there is a lot we can learn from older records – there were real cultural movements. Something we see is sadly missing. My generation (Rhodes is 24) are lost in self-absorbed universes on their phones. When we do a GANS show we try tell the crowd to forget about their phones and get lost in the moment. People need to do that more. We want to try and bring about connection.”

When discussing GANS he says “We have a really good working balance, I leave Euan to the madness, he will come up with ideas and themes and strange things and great words that inspire me. Then I will bring in my stuff, riffs, grooves and I think a heartfelt honesty. That’s something we really try and do with GANS is be real. There’s no other way for us. We would rather fail doing this our way than succeed trying to do this the way you are meant to as a band nowadays with TikTok and all that bullshit.”

The band’s aesthetic approach is something they have defined with Benji Charles and they work on how they approach their social media output together which they accept is an important part of being a band in 2025, “So, we would rather it become an extension of GANS, rather than it define us.”

GANS went away in November 2024 to Wales to a remote cottage to write their debut album GOOD FOR THE SOUL, a direct, honest, noisy, heartfelt collection of songs to reflect the times the band find themselves in. There are songs about electronic gadgets to improve your life (‘THIS PRODUCT’), ‘OH GEORGE’ tackles mental illness head on, and stories of “Little England” mentalities and the ghosts of Reform supporters shine through on ‘A FOOL’ and ‘IN TIME’.

One year after starting the band they were signed to a label, writing an album and about to go to Sheffield in January 2025 to make the record with Ross Orton who had produced Arctic Monkeys, Amyl & The Sniffers, The Fall, M.I.A, Workingmen’s Club amongst many notable others.

As Woodman says, “We have put our soul into this and if people like it then that’s great and if they don’t then there’s nothing we can do, and we don’t really care about that.”

It’s that simple attitude that makes GANS GOOD FOR THE SOUL.