Our interview with Giannis and Giorgos from 1000 Mods.
Giannis: Hello, I am Giannis and I’m the guitar player from 1000 Mods.
Giorgos: I am Giorgos, I play for 1000 Mods and the reason I started playing guitar is because of Black Sabbath.
Giannis: The reason why I started playing guitar is because some of the first bands I ever listened to were MC5 and Motorhead.
Giorgos: We knew each other from a very young age. With Lampros, the drummer, we knew each other since we were three years old. After meeting Giannis later on, we started a few bands and we had a few music groups. Under the name 1000 Mods in 2006 we started recording albums.
After a few shows in the Corinthia region and a few festivals, we moved into the Athens music scene, as we wanted to play there and meet different bands. There was a really good music scene there which we became a part of, which as you know there is now a lot of recognition about this scene in Europe. I think all bands either from Greece or coming to play in Greece have only good things to say about it.
Giannis: The first band that I ever saw in a music video playing Orange, were MC5 and then in more modern times, Slipknot. The first Orange amp I ever played with, was an OR-120 and sometime in the middle of 2005, I bought a second one, an Orange 50 Watt Rockerverb.
Giorgos: The first experiences I had, was the Black Sabbath music videos, Paranoid and Iron Man. I remember a very good story when I bought Holy Mountain by Sleep they had written οn the back cover, if I am not mistaken that they were looking for Orange amps and wanted to buy them etc and this made a great impression on me.
I remember a funny story was when we went to Athens to various guitar stores and music stores and we went to a shop that was selling Orange at the time to try a Rockerverb 50 or 100. I remember when we put it on, we turned up the amp
too much inside the store causing some strings from an acoustic guitar to break!
Anyway, when we listened to Orange we realised that this is where the sound is. As the store employee told us, it has a very good “honest” mids and a great headroom and that’s how we started being involved with Orange and buying Orange. I remember buying a Rockerverb 50 then Giannis got an old Orange OR-120 which we used live and from then on we continued experimenting with our sound and with Orange in general, because we loved it. Soon after, Orange started to become more popular, where we were playing, there were Orange and generally we all started playing on stage with Orange and many other music bands, were using Orange amps.
Giannis: From Orange, that is a very fundamental part of my sound I am using an Orange OR-120 1970 and an Orange Rockerverb 100 which are the very base of my sound and I consider them as a part that I can’t replace.
Generally I do a blend of sounds from the two Oranges, where the low and mid frequencies are coming from the old one and from the modern I get the high frequencies that I desperately need.
Giorgos: As we moved forward, we tried different sounds with other amps as well and blended them and about a year ago, it was a great honour for us, to have Charlie coming to Desertfest in London and suggesting us to collaborate and be a part of the Orange roster and become Orange ambassadors.
This period we are on our second round of promotion of our album “Repeated Exposure to…” and in the future we hope to start working on some new material hopefully in the middle of 2019.
Good call on pulling 1000mods in. I’ve been loving Repeated Exposure to for a couple years now. Saw them in Orlando, FL and they are as tight as the album. Really great show and yes Orange was the backline for them and Telekinetic Yeti as well.
Saw these guys in Cleveland last year and you’re correct, they are that tight live. Fantastic live band. Hope they come back to the US again soon.