THE recently postponed Cardiff Globe show for Star Wars inspired Rock Bond Galactic Empire has now been rescheduled for February 7, 2017, to tie in with the release of their debut album.

Discarding lightsabers and blasters in favour of guitars, bass and drums, the band will perform rock renditions of classic pieces from the iconic soundtrack of the Star Wars films, written by John Williams.

ANDY HOWELLS recently caught up with the band to find out about their forthcoming UK tour:

How did the idea for Galactic Empire come about?

A few years ago I made a YouTube video of myself playing drums along with the original London Symphony Orchestra recording of "The Imperial March". It was a lot of fun, and I always envisioned one day re-imagining the orchestra in a heavy metal guitar arrangement with the drums I had recorded. In early 2015 I followed through with the idea. It was a lot of work. John WIlliams creates some incredibly dense and unique instrumentation and harmony, which provided quite a challenge when it came time to arrange the guitar parts. I wanted to try as best as I could to accurately recreate every note in my version. The end result was so much fun, I quickly found myself arranging more songs with Carson Slovak. Before we knew it, we had demoed out an entire 11 song full length record. At this point, I brought in my good friend Chris Kelly to take on the lead guitar duty in the band. We spent over a year making the record whenever we had free time from our day jobs. Before we knew it, we had created a unexpectedly successful music video, and generated enough attention to warrant putting in a lot more time and effort into actually turning this thing into a real live band. Its been super fun, and a lot of hard work.

Your Star Wars Theme video on YouTube is great fun to watch - did you all have fun making it?

This project is hands down, super fun to work on. We all wouldn't be here if it weren't our love for Star Wars. It's just been something we all have grown up with and been passionate about, and I hope that we are able to translate that with the dedication we've put into this project. The first music video we made was an incredible experience from start to finish. From conceptualizing it, to shooting it, we were blown away with the final result. I remember walking into the film studio for the first time and seeing the giant, 30 foot tall green screen and realising "I can't believe we're actually doing this.”

What can fans expect from your forthcoming Cardiff show?

Because we love this project so much, we want to translate our dedication to it with our live show. Star Wars has always been an incredible experience on screen, and we want to deliver something that people will walk away from and remember. We are trying to make our live show more than just a concert or a band's live show. We want to create an experience that people can be a part of.

Will you all be performing when Rogue One is released or has that been a designated day off for the band?

We've already bought our tickets. Of course we're going to see the movie on day one. But you can expect some big plans for the future. We plan on bringing our live show around as much as we can. With dates already scheduled in the US, UK, and more announcements forthcoming, we're very excited about it.

Finally will you be working on more Star Wars projects beyond the tour?

Galactic Empire has no plans of stopping any time soon. We intend to rule the Galaxy.

Visit seetickets.com for details