Soap, as we were originally called, started sometime in 1996/7. Tim, Boob and Keith had been playing together for a while with a couple of different singers. I met up with them when I moved schools, and we were all united by our long hair, cardigans and mutual love of Nirvana. We started off, like every other band playing covers, but soon began to attempt to write our own material. By this point Kurt had died and we, although still heavily influenced by Nirvana, had started to listen to some of the bigger punk bands of the time, like Green Day, Rancid and NOFX. We recorded a couple of demos at a local youth club and arts centre and started playing a few gigs around our local area. In 1998 Tim and Keith started at Northampton College doing a course in popular music and we met quite a few other bands and stuff as a result of this. We started rehearsing at a place called Big Noise in Northampton and were finding out a lot more about punk and hardcore music, listening to bands like Operation Ivy and Gorilla Biscuits. We got together five songs and saved up enough money to record them at Premier Studios in Corby with a guy called Ian Weatherall. We pressed up about 50 or s tapes of it and sent out some to independent labels around the UK. Soon after I got a phone call from Lil at Household Name Records saying that he really liked the tape and he asked if we wanted to play a show supporting a Us band called Link 80 at The Red Eye in London. We went and played, had a great time, made some great friends in Link 80, and Lil and his partner Kafren offered to put the demo out as an EP. He also recommended that we change our name from Soap, which we quickly agreed with, so after about four months of desperately trying to think of something we became Capdown, short for Capitalist Downfall. As well as releasing the ‘Time for Change’ EP, Household Name also helped us to get some more shows and introduced us to Ian Armstrong from hidden talent Booking . after our first real tour with the Goober Patrol, we quickly got a taste for touring and said to Ian that we wanted to play as many shows as he could book us. This turned out to be a lot more than we thought. In 2000 we played over 250 shows in twelve different counties supporting bands like The Lunachicks, Madball, Imbalance, King Prawn, Pennywise, Against All Authority and No Use For A Name. We also wrote and recorded our first full-length album, ‘Civil Disobedients’, at the Lodge Studios in Northampton with a friend we met through King Prawn, called Jerry Melchors. I don’t know how we fitted it all in, but we managed to record two split singles as well, one with our friends from Link 80 and one with Hard Skin and Southport.
All this hard work really started to pay off in 2001. After a handful of head line shows we headed out as main support on Less Than Jake’s sell out UK tour. This was a really big step for us, proving to ourselves that we could play on bigger stages and hold our own alongside established international bands. Straight after we went back to the studios to record our second album, ‘Pound For The Sound’, this time with Dave Chang at Phillia Studios. During this time we received great news that we had got the opening slot if the UK leg of the massive Deconstruction Tour. This was an amazing experience, playing n huge stages with the likes of Sick Of It All, Avail and Pennywise, bands that we had admired and respected for years. This was the start of it an amazing summer as we got some support shows with Reel Big Fish and sets on the Concrete Jungle stages at the Reading and Leeds Festivals as well as a trip to Switzerland for the European Skateboard Championships. ‘Pound For The Sound’ was released in October and we celebrated this with our first radio One Evening Session for Steve Lamaq and a headline UK tour which finished in a sold-out show at The Garage in London. The next day we headed out o Europe for three dates supporting Good Riddance and Death By Stereo.
After a bit of rest over Christmas and New Year we started 2002 with the Cooperation Tour, rotating headline with the mighty Hundred Reasons and with support from Douglas and Adequate Seven. This was an amazing tour for everyone involved. It was great to play with three really different bands and put emphasis on mutual respect and good music rather than genre and other people’s concept of what an appropriate bill should consist of. Almost straight after this we started our own headline tour of the UK and Ireland including a sold-out show at Manchester’s MDH and finishing with our first headline at the Mean Fiddler in London. In July we set out for our first tour of Japan. This was one of the best experiences we’ve had as a band and left us desperate to return as soon as possible. A couple of days after we got back we went in to record our second session for Radio One, this time for the ‘Lock-Up’. This summer turned out to be even better than last year. We played a load more festival dates including Bristol’s Essential Festival, the Nottingham Distortion festival with Green Day, the NAS festival in Shepton Mallet and best of all sets on the Radio One Stages at the Reading and Leeds Festivals. In October we took Vanilla Pod, Twofold and the Anti-Maniax out for a packed UK tour, including a great sell-out show at the Mean Fiddler. Most recently we satisfied our ambition to play at the Brixton Academy supporting Hundred Reasons.
Source: http://www.capdown.net