“We played, when we started, a bit of everything,” says guitarist/vocalist Hugo Dean. “A bit of rock, a bit of that punky hip hop, surfy pop – we hedged our bets in that sort of sense. Then we wrote the Pirate Song. It all came very organically, a disenchanted young guy becoming a pirate. After that song, we all agreed it was our best song. A friend of ours who is an artist was doing some poster work for us, really liked the Pirate Song and came up with this pirate-y sailor style logo and it all snowballed from there.
“Our previous single was a song called Hung Over, a rock track. Our other friend who is a filmmaker came up with the concept for it – he had us dressed up, for no reason, as pirates for it. It’s as much a collaboration of all the people we’ve worked with as much as ourselves. The pirate theme came organically and we’re going with it.”
Working on an organic level is in the band’s chief aim, and this approach has had some unforeseen consequences. Dean’s songs have started to benchmark his life in the same way that flicking through old text messages does.
“We found creatively that the regularity of which fucking around and jamming, you come up with an end product which is applicable to your life in general,” he says. “It all comes around organically. You come up with a song, and three months later when the song’s done, I’ll think about the lyrics and how the songs work and think, ‘That’s totally what I was going through in those past months’. I don’t know if I interpret them in light of recent experiences but they’re definitely formed by each other consciously and subconsciously.”
Along with their honest approach to making music, Dean’s songwriting is patently influenced by hip hop. A close observation into the rise and fall of some of the hip hop greats has given him advice about how to frame his writing.
“I’m a really big hip hop fan, and I’ve got this theory that early ‘90s was the best time for it,” says Dean. “All my favourite artists, their best works were just before they made it. If you put Illmatic with Nas or Ready to Die with Biggie, it’s them rapping about their surroundings with all this cool shit happening to them and it’s really interesting. Then when they get successful it’s just them rapping about cars, money, women – it loses its interest.
“Taking inspiration from what’s directly around you can be problematic if you do it for too long. If we were to get a bit of success and start touring, I’d imagine with the kind of ethos we have songwriting-wise we’d be pushing the ways we’d be going about writing. The thing we’re trying to get in our songwriting now is pre-empting stuff we’re going to go through – what’s going to be fucking with me in ten-15 years’ time and trying to write a song about that, keeping your mind open. If you don’t do that, you can get caught in that repetitive style of just rapping about what’s around you, singing about what’s around you. Sometimes crazy shit could happen, I suppose. Maybe someone will develop a debilitating drug problem and we’ll write about that.”
BY THOMAS BRAND
