Interview: Frightened Rabbit

Few Scottish bands these days can say they’ve sold out huge venues in the states, garnered a celebrity following and written an article for a British national newspaper. Especially while retaining a level of relative anonymity on home soil that makes it possible for them to gig in tiny pubs in their neighbourhood without so much as turning a few heads. Yet Selkirk natives Frightened Rabbit find themselves in this unusual predicament.

Their latest album, The Midnight Organ Fight, released back in April, is already big news stateside. Early blog support saw it spread like wildfire and has propelled the band to the prestigious ranks of Pitchfork darlings – an enviable if not impossible feat for most British rock bands. This side of the pond, they fill huge venues with ambitiously instrumented layers of sound, if not always people. On top of intricately woven guitars and keys, lead vocalist and songwriter Scott Hutchison, who was the first, lone Frightened Rabbit back in 2003, splutters a cracked and plaintive brogue, by turns desperate, bitter and brave, about a break up that happened some years ago, to him at least.

These days, he’s found someone new, someone who calls over to him to hurry up as we squeeze onto an open table for our interview in the frozen winter night. His brother, Frightened Rabbit drummer Grant Hutchison, comes too, and it is striking how tired they both look this evening. Grant’s drumming is part of what makes Frightened Rabbit one of the singular most exciting British rock acts of the moment. On stage he is transformed into a deranged yeti, teeth bared, shoulders squared, fists clenching drumsticks that he has been known to snap in seconds.

“We haven’t been off the road for months and months,” Scott offers by way of excuse for their exhaustion, “but why would you be in a band and not do all the gigs you can?” Plenty of bands have bemoaned life on the road – few have been invited by The Guardian to write about it. I ask Scott about this recent journalistic triumph. “I’ve actually had loads of e-mails requesting I do more!” he exclaims, clearly delighted. “It’s hard to write about life on the road without coming across as if we’re moaning, because it is great. We’re lucky: I know hundreds of thousands of other people would want to be doing what we’re doing, but sometimes it is just like, fuck this, this is ridiculous! I’m taking years off my life living like this.”

It must be exhausting, too, to relive the trauma of losing someone every night in front of a whole load of new people, I suggest of The Midnight Organ Fight and its barefaced, wounded account of a breakup. “There’s no rawness anymore,” Scott says. “It was two and a half years ago, and I wrote it six months after it all happened, so I could tie a knot over everything, as closure. If you hammer out a song over a hundred times, a lot of the emotion is going to fade away.”

Nonetheless, Scott still manages to recreate the confusion and hurt of that time live. He explains: “We still love playing live. A lot of the audiences, especially on this tour [they are currently supporting Death Cab For Cutie], are new to our songs, and that makes us feel new to them as well, in a way. And maybe our new audiences have just had their big ‘thing’ that happened to them recently, and that’s great, that people can walk into our songs and become the person that I’m singing about.”

Maybe its Scott’s lyrical frankness when dealing with the private universalisms of love, loss and sex that explains Frightened Rabbit’s disproportionate success stateside. “It’s different the way that music spreads in the US. They’re really big on blogs over there – I know we have blogs here as well – but in the US that’s kind of how you find out about new music, whereas over here it tends to be the NME and the music press,” he tells me. It was those faceless, secretive creatures – bloggers – who caught wind of Frightened Rabbit early on in the states and propelled them to the front of their ones to watch. “The Americans have this romantic view of the Scottish,” Scott tries to explain, meekly. Or, just maybe, Frightened Rabbit are really very, very good.

Frightened Rabbit seem perfectly happy with the way things are going, anyway, even if a lot of people ‘over here’ have never heard of them. (“It’s weird to say ‘over here’ as if we’re not from the UK!” they laugh.) But all that could change with their current and upcoming tours with Death Cab For Cutie, of which Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer are huge fans, and fellow Scot, Biffy Clyro. They’re re-releasing a Christmas single, ‘It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop’, which stings with the broken humour of putting grudges aside ‘just for one day’, and they hope to start working on new material in the new year, if they ever stop touring. I tell Scott that I hope we don’t have to wait for him to go through another messy breakup before he can write a new album. “Speaking of which,” he smiles, motioning behind me where his girlfriend waits, “I’d probably better go.”

DOWNLOAD (that's right kids, my first ever download) Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop

Blood Red Shoes Interview

Blood Red Shoes are a notoriously noisy coupling. Their reputation for ear-splitting punk laden pop has grown by gradual increments from its beginnings in small town Brighton, garnering an impressive fanbase and earning them opportunities to tour Europe and Japan, from where they recently returned to home shores. Though constantly critically lauded as the boy-girl two piece with more promise that the rest, the commercial big-time has so far eluded them, and it seems this year could be make or break. With their debut album ‘Box Of Secrets’, of which long-awaited is a definite understatement, released this week, there is still everything to play for. Gigwise caught up with the pretty punk twosome in Cambridge on their current tour to see how Steven and Laura-Mary are bearing up under the pressure…

Curled in a dressing room in Cambridge, dressed in black, Laura-Mary Carter smiles shyly behind a mass of tangled dark hair. She is all sleepy-eyed from touring, still pretty without her make-up, and it’s hard to imagine her red-lipped and screaming furious vocals over her trademark distortion saturated guitarwork. “Um, I don’t know, I feel a bit out of it,” she murmurs when I ask her how it is to be back in the UK after so long touring. “We were away so long that at one point when we got back I was getting on the bus and I forgot what to call a bus ticket, the saver return, in London, and I was really confused, people were pushing past me and I thought I was going to get run over, I was like, “What is going on, I don’t understand!” So yeah it is weird being back, I just feel a bit out of it and I don’t know what’s going on. I definitely miss friends and family because we pretty much never see them. My sister’s having a baby very soon and I’m not going to be there to see my nephew or niece for at least a few months after it’s been born…”

For a moment the exhaustion of constant touring seems to get the better of Laura-Mary. Her partner in crime, the handsome Steven Ansell, sits listening, propped up on the sideboard in the dressing room. There is a steely confidence about Steven, he is almost reluctant to answer questions but eloquent and smart when he chooses to be. Laura tells me she’s exhausted, but Steve says he’d rather be doing this than staying at home: “I get bored at home,” he says, typically direct. I ask them if their schedule ever gets them down and Laura-Mary is disarmingly frank with her response. “Pretty much, yeah. For me it’s like 90% feeling shit after a show,” she musters. Steven interjects, explaining: “It’s because you’re really like, hyped, anyway, so everything’s ten times more intense than real life, you’ve got so much adrenaline in your body and stuff and everything becomes really magnified.” I ask them how they deal with it, and Laura-Mary answers, “The only thing I think that helps is knowing that you have to play the next day, so you just keep looking forward.”

They certainly have a lot to look forward to. Right now they’re in the middle of a headline tour, with a stint in Europe to follow, returning to England just in time to hit the festival circuit again. It was last year’s festival appearances that first introduced many to Blood Red Shoes, though the charismatic duo have been playing together for several years now. There’s a lot of chemistry between the two of them in person, and they seem to fit remarkably well together, with Steve always thinking of the big picture and Laura-Mary getting involved with intricacies. It’s the same with their favourite tracks on ‘Box Of Secrets’. Steven picks ‘This Is Not For You’, while Laura Mary muses, “there is one thing I really love. I wouldn’t say I’m proud of it because it wasn’t my idea but on ‘Say something say anything’, it’s that little tremolo thing, sounds a bit like Nirvana, no one will probably hear it except me, but I like it, it’s quite difficult.”

It’s Steve that is better at keeping up with his e-mails, and Steve again that wrote the band’s myspace page, with its last minute admission, ‘oh yeh, and we don’t like being called an indie band’. I ask them about this. Steve exclaims, suddenly agitated, “Because indie bands suck!” Meanwhile Laura smiles again, this time almost apologetically, saying, “that’s bullshit, Steve wrote that. We don’t like being called an indie band because we’re not.” Steven looks at her as she continues, “I mean, indie, if it was what it was years ago then yeah, we’d be an indie band, but now, if you’re talking about the Pigeon Detectives, Wombats, The View, The Enemy, then that’s what we’re talking about, we’re not…”

“We’d hate to be considered as on the same time of level as those bands.” Steven finishes. I ask what they’d like to be considered as, and Laura says, “I think more people have realised that now, that we’re more kind of rock, and punk.” Steven adds, “We’re not a jingle-jangle band,” and Laura offers by way of technical justification, “I use the distortion peddle in pretty much every song.”

So they never listen to indie music? “I wouldn’t say that we hate indie music because actually there are a couple of bands that I do like,” Laura says. But Steven disagrees: “I don’t like indie music.” For a two-piece, Blood Red Shoes are clearly unafraid to contradict one-another, though there is an almost magnetic attraction between them that comes off well on-stage and on record. They share vocal responsibilities whilst Steven’s cacophonous drumming fills out Laura’s filthy sawn-off guitar riffs in a sound that is hugely satisfying on the new album, if not sometimes a little limited live.

Still, an enormous amount of time has passed since their 2005 EP ‘Victory For The Magpie’ introduced them as one of the most promising acts of the decade, and while they’ve obviously been working hard in the meantime, there’s a definite sense of frustration that it took so long for their album to be released. It was finished in September, but due to record company bureaucracy only made the shelves on Monday, suffering leakages on file-sharing sites in the interim. Of the leak, Laura-Mary says, “I went from not minding at all to actually being like, hang on a minute, everyone I’ve met so far at every show has said to me, “Great album!” and I’m like, “It’s not even out yet!” I understand people wanting to get it early and that’s really cool, that people are excited about it, but we haven’t even played it to our families. It’s just not how we intended it to be.”

“Personally it’s that issue of control,” Steven adds, “we’re not controlling it. And then when people get it not necessarily in the order that you want, with not necessarily the songs that you want, or with the artwork that you want, and it’s not come out at the same time that you wanted it to it’s a bit like someone’s taking control over our first ever record, someone’s taken that away from us, and that’s pretty frustrating. I couldn’t give two shits whether people pay for it or not. If every single person who wanted our record went out and shoplifted it I wouldn’t care.”

Though frustrated, Steven and Laura-Mary are determined to look on the bright side. Steven tells me that “some good things have come out of it as well, like, now things are moving really quickly. Traditionally people would record a record, and they wouldn’t even put it out for a year, especially on big labels. Now you can’t do that because people get it on the internet, which means you have to move faster. Which we’re actually quite into because we want our record to come out quicker anyway. It’s just proved to us that we can move things way faster; we’re actually going to do an EP of new material within a few months of the album coming out.”

This is good news coming from a band that have been skirting the edges of success for a good year now. The cards are on the table for Blood Red Shoes, with a lot riding on ‘Box Of Secrets’. But if they manage to maintain their hectic schedules in the wake of the album release, Steven and Laura-Mary could well be jostling shoulders with those controversially popular indie bands on music lovers’ must-see lists for a good while yet.

Radiohead Interview

See published article here: http://www.gigwise.com/features/42120/radiohead-exposed



For a band that have proved themselves capable of reinventing the music industry, Radiohead are remarkably humble. The release of In Rainbows cemented their position as one of the greatest bands of the modern age, not only because of its musical invention, seamless production, and utter aural completeness, but because Radiohead shunned convention in their method of distribution. In a world where commercialism stunts creativity and muddies the simplest of transactions – the one between the musician and his audience – with endless hype and unnecessary top-down time delays, Radiohead proved that it doesn’t have to be that way, that it’s better to discard the hot air and the vanity and get obsessed about what really matters: the music.

A cheerful Phil Selway, the forty-year-old Oxfordshire father-of-two better known as Radiohead’s drummer, was thankfully amused when I suggested that the video for Nude indicates that the band aren’t too concerned about appearances these days. “I hope from a vanity point of view that we’ve got beyond that now,” he chuckled. “We’re more concerned about how we present the music. Then how it all works together. We’ve never sold ourselves on our looks!”

With seven albums behind them, Radiohead have got a lot of music to fit together for their forthcoming tour. Phil explained: “We started working on 70 tracks for the tour - that’s from the whole back-catalogue. There are a couple of new tracks that we might sort of get together in time to play on this tour, but we’re kind of whittling down the amount of songs that we’re going to work on… from In Rainbows back into the mists of Radiohead time.”

And they’re not too sick of going back over the old stuff? “Well, because we haven’t toured for two years, you take a break from it and in two years’ time the way that you play quite dramatically changes. You come back and you find a new way into the songs. Some songs you return to and they just don’t work, they just don’t seem relevant at that point, but then you return to other songs… we’ve been playing Optimistic in rehearsal and that song’s just come to life for us again, and you do find something new in old material. If that doesn’t sound too glib!”

So despite Thom Yorke famously declaring that Glastonbury 1997 was the high point of Radiohead’s career and everything was downhill from there, it seems In Rainbows have given them the chance to revive their early glory days. Phil seems to think that they are in better shape than ever. “I think we’re playing well at the moment,” he declared, “I think we’re playing the best we’ve ever played, so yes, all those things add up to it being a good time to be in Radiohead.”

With their sights firmly fixed on the future, Phil was quick to discard the idea of Radiohead breaking up, saying “I think for all of us, as long as it’s still moving forward and it sits with all our lives then yes, I’m sure we will carry on making music, as there’s loads of impetus there to do it.”

Which begs the question, when you’ve warped and morphed and twisted convention and expectation as many times as Radiohead have over the years, where is there left to go in music? “Well, it’s a cycle isn’t it? There’s a whole breadth to what you can do as so many things are valid at the moment aren’t they. You see bands with very traditional line-ups actually producing very vital music. I think from our point of view, we’re just trying to bring in all those elements that excite us about music, be that stuff that’s been programmed, or live performances, we try and meld those together.” In Rainbows is testament to this theory, with its elegant sparseness that explodes into the choppy fury of ‘Bodysnatchers’ or the ethereal nastiness of ‘15 Steps’. Phil found it difficult to pick his favourite personal performance on the album, stuck between ‘All I Need’, ‘Bodysnatchers’ and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’, perhaps another indication of just how polished the finished product is.

Aside from the utter brilliant of their music, Radiohead are also in the news because of a certain frontman’s political and environmental beliefs. They are increasingly considered a single consciousness in the shadow of Thom Yorke’s outspoken actions against climate change. True, Yorke’s no headline grabbing Bono, but with his increasing public profile as an environmentalist and Radiohead’s subsequent yen for ‘green-gigs’ supported solely by public transport, there is a danger that Yorke comes off as the shepherd of the band. Phil struggled to disagree, saying “with all the things we discuss, be it music or other issues, there’s always going to be quite a range of views that come out of the five of us. I don’t think any of us would have any truck with what Thom’s been saying with Friends Of The Earth, I think we fully support everything he says there. But, also, I think Thom is very much at pains to say, “these are my own personal views, these aren’t the views of the other members of the band.””

For anyone that got carried away envisioning all five band members chatting environmental issues over a barbeque every Sunday, with their wives in tow and a gaggle of Radiohead offspring playing together sunshine, the truth is not quite so: “well, we do get together occasionally but I think, for us, as we do spend so much time together, our home time and work time are fairly separate. We do all get on extremely well outside work, but you do need some time away from it!”

Phil’s time out from the band has involved him changing his sticks for a guitar in ongoing solo projects with producer John McCosker, as well as keeping up with the fickly music industry. Radiohead have been working solidly on their tour set in the studio for a month now, but Phil still has plenty of time for new music. “Well, I like going on last.fm and seeing what other people’s recommendations are, that’s good fun. I’ve been listening to the new Portishead album, which is very good. The new Four Tet EP, that’s great…”

Though the Radiohead will go down in history for the way they utilised the internet for distribution purposes, I wondered if Phil didn’t ever yearn for a simpler time where music came from records, and such things as leakages and illegal downloads were sci-fi impossibilities. “I like the fact that you can have more direct access to music, it just means you end up listening to an awful lot more music, as well. I suppose you get through music a lot faster these days. I don’t know if your attention span for it is quite the same, speaking personally, as it used to be. There’s that whole thing where as a teenager you’d buy a record and you’d really get into it and listen to it over and over again. I don’t think I’d necessarily do that now, although that might just something to do with the age I’m at. But you do have that breadth of music to choose from.”



Breadth maybe, but there is also the added frustration for new bands trying to break into the mainstream that potential fans just buy one or two tracks, never delving into the rest of their material. Phil, who by this time is showing his true colours as keen new music enthusiast, is much more positive, saying “I think if you’re a music obsessive, there are bands that come along that you will obsess about, and I think probably that is something that is still there within people.” He goes on to enthuse about Lou Reed and Velvet Underground, citing a more recent obsession with Will Oldham, until it is transparent that it is no accident Radiohead have managed to crawl under so many people’s skin and send shivers down so many spines, and cause overexcited bloggers to brand them ‘so far ahead they’re out of sight’. It’s their obsession with music that makes environmental ranting and weird slow motion videos not just passable, but somehow endearing. I tentatively suggest to Phil that he’s obsessed by music, but I realise he’s known that for quite some time when he replies, “I hope so, I hope so.” And suddenly it’s clear that even if the future of the music industry is potentially grim, as long as bands like Radiohead are about with their contagious musical obsessions and refusal to conform, there’s hope for us all just yet.

Death Cab For Cutie Interview

There’s been a rumour about town of late that Death Cab for Cutie have gone mad. It all started when guitarist Chris Walla told MTV back in October that the new album would be “a crazy, weird, heavy-rock record.” Then, last month the first single was released; called ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’, it clocks it at a mammoth eight and a half minutes – hardly radio friendly! Even odder, for a band whose teenage fanbase has grown largely around Ben Gibbard’s ability to translate the soppy into song, the first single sports a five-minute instrumental introduction before getting into any kind of lyrical lament. Now, with their sixth album, ‘Narrow Stairs’, due for release this coming May, Gigwise decided to give Ben himself the chance to explain all this sudden musical insanity…

Ben Gibbard, Death Cab’s moonfaced frontman, is almost breathless with anticipation as he starts to talk about ‘Narrow Stairs’. “Well, we’re all incredibly proud of this record,” he begins. “It’s pound for pound a lot more rock tunes, and I think far less glossy than the last record as far the production sense. It’s got a kind of abrasive element to it that’s more akin to how our live show is, and some of the quietest, minimal moments that we’ve had.”

Quiet and minimal at times, maybe, but when did we ever associate Death Cab with “rock tunes”? It was the gliding emo-electronica of Transatlanticism, back in 2003, which first had kids gazing sorrowfully at bedroom ceilings after the girl from maths turned them down in the playground. There’s always been something charming in the floating piano loops and frank-but-emotionally-connected lyrics that allowed Death Cab to progress from obscurity into mainstream cool, a position that was cemented with their appearance on America’s cult series, the O.C., in 2005. So all this talk of “rock tunes” seems pretty out of character for a band that have made a name for themselves with glacial, synth-led pop-songs.

But Ben doesn’t seem to think the leap is too great for Death Cab. “I think that if someone has been a fan of the band for the last handful of years they’ll definitely find things in this record to really enjoy.” His relaxed attitude seems to be derived from a sense that the progression towards guitar-led rock music is a natural one for Death Cab, and one that they’re hopeful their fans will embrace, too. “Our primary goal has always been to make music that we feel is inspired, and that we feel has a quality that we feel putting out in the world, and we feel fortunate at this point that that has translated into some modicum of commercial success. So if there is commercial success to be had with a record like we’ve just made then of course we would like to revel in that, but if that’s not on the cards I don’t think any of us would feel as if we had failed in any capacity.

“Our song are songs, you know, they’re hummable, they’re pop songs, I don’t think there’s anything about this record or any record that we’ve made that the world is not ready for. If we don’t get played on the radio as much as we did last time that will be of course a little disappointing, but not the end of the world. It has never been a motivation for why we’ve made records.”

The emphasis on the music is one that obviously shines through on records like ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’, with its delayed vocal entry. Ben seemed conscious that this is a very different style of writing than what fans might be used to as he explained, “as Nick put the bass line in we started kind of playing with the song. The idea was that we just kind of played it and let the themes kind of build and when it feels right really dive into the lyrics… and it just so happened that that was five minutes into the song. As it was going down on tape we realised that we had never presented a song this way before, but I hope people accept it from us, I don’t think it’s such a wild departure that we’ll lose people.”

Death Cab adopted a different approach to the recording of ‘Narrow Lines’, too, one that is very much at odds with the heavily produced gloss of earlier work, such as 2005’s ‘Plans’. Ben described it simply as “the sound of four people playing in a room”. They also decided to record the album on to two-inch tape rather than computers, giving them very little space for overdubbing, and producing a very real, live sound. This was a return to their early recording technique according to Ben. “We recorded our first four albums on tape so we decided to go back to that format with us all playing together live. Clearly there were some overdubs here or there but the organic element that you hear in ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’ is in a direct relation to the fact that that song was played from start to finish with all four of us playing at the same time.”

In an age where computers are used to create, market and distribute music, this back to basics approach certainly seems at odds with where the majority of the industry is heading. But Ben didn’t seem to think it was a particularly innovative approach, just one that is perhaps necessary to maintain a visceral authenticity about music. “People have been making records like that since the first fifty years of recorded sound, but it’s becoming more rare with every day that people rely on computers to fix our problems,” he explained. “I think it’s the imperfections that give things personality. It’s that mole on your neck, it’s the weird little glitch in the guitar, it’s those little elements that give everything in this world personality and I think the further we move into the digital world the more likely we are to lose more of those elements and therefore a lot of the personality that we have.”

Recording things live also produced some happily unexpected results for Death Cab. Ben cited ‘Talking Birds’ as his favourite track on the new album, one that “just turned out really beautifully” on the first recording. He explains that the album explores, as a theme, the notion “when you watch a movie and at the end of the movie people embrace and people are happy and the credits roll. I think a lot of the songs are a case of what might happen if the credits stopped rolling and you were back with these characters that you’ve just watched for an hour and a half, and now you have to really see them enter the world.”

After over a decade writing and performing as Death Cab For Cutie, Gigwise wonders whether this might not be how Ben is feeling too. As grown-up popstars, has the gloss finally worn off being an internationally acclaimed musician? But Ben just laughs: “I think we’re the only band in the states to sell a million records and not be famous!” He then quickly adds: “I’m quite happy with that. Our music is clearly the most interesting thing about the four of us as a collective. We’re not the most iconic of individuals. Whenever I go back to Seattle after being on the road for a long time I feel very fortunate that I can slip back into walking around the city I live in and eating in restaurants, going to shows and not really having to be any kind of big deal when I’m there. We wouldn’t make very good pop stars either, even if we tried!”

Maybe Death Cab for Cutie have gone a bit mad, to suddenly shun the elements of their music that have always brought them the most success, and swap their mixer for a cassette-player. Equally, though, their newfound love of the imperfect is a breath of fresh air in a musical era that seems convinced that only the spotless is satisfactory. This Seattle four-piece might not feel they’ve quite attained pop stardom yet, but there’s every indication that ‘Narrow Stairs’ might just change all that, whether Ben likes it or not.

Be Your Own Pet Interview

It’s been two years since Be Your Own Pet unleashed themselves on the world with the furious punk-angst of their eponymous debut album. Now back in the UK to announce its sequel, ‘Get Awkward’, it still seems impossible to imagine these state-side kids as fully grown. With an average age of barely twenty and more energy than an ADHD kid on blue smarties, the Nashville foursome show little signs of slowing things down. Gigwise caught up with guitarist Jonas Stein to find out about being a teenager on the road, coping with the British rain, and the future for a band whose music seems more rampantly teenage than ever…

Despite the name of their new album, there was nothing awkward about Jonas Stein last week. You could almost see him slumped in a hotel room chair from the laid-back drawl emanating from the phone, playing the introverted skater kid behind his long rocker-boy hair. Be Your Own Pet had landed in Glasgow just a few hours beforehand, Jonas explained, and he’d managed to escape to the hotel room to get some shut-eye before their Scottish debut that night, elaborating of life on the road: “there isn’t too much middle ground, it’s like really fucking fun or really shitty.”

In keeping with the adolescent theme on ‘Get Awkward’, that addresses everything pubescent from playground feuds to high-school heartbreak, Jonas seemed to have plenty to moan about, particularly “lack of sleep, and waiting around. We had to catch a ferry to get over here, and it was really tiring, just trying to find a comfortable position to get some sleep. Another big problem is jet-lag. It usually takes the first two weeks to adjust to that, so the first two weeks are tiring because of jet-lag.”

The troubles don’t end with the jet-lag, either. “One thing I have trouble with is the weather, I’m very weather-sensitive. It’s just pretty grey and wet and cold, so I have to deal with that.” And then, just as Jonas began to risk descending into proper teenage paroxysms, he rescued his rant with: “Aside from that I like it.”

Be Your Own Pet have a special brand of nu-punk, one that blends the heavy guitar riffs of eighties Buzzcocks with the musical fun of Blondie. Like Karen O stripped of her maturity, but still smarting from the fight, vocalist Jemina Pearl is capable of terrifying lyrical rage, transforming the juvenile in “I don’t wanna do what you tell me to/I don’t have to listen to you,” into to the genuinely fearsome. When asked about the different reception the band get here, the birthplace of punk, compared to stateside, Jonas began to sound a bit more cheerful: “I feel like everyone’s a lot more up for it over here. There are always a lot more fans over here. I wouldn’t call us mainstream, but I think we’re more mainstream here than in the states.”

Pressed to say why that might be the case, he elaborated, “I think the UK is exposed to better music, the radio’s a lot more diverse. There’s a bigger population in a smaller square number of miles. Half of the people in America never hear anything other than rap songs and pop songs.” But being so young, there are a few perks to still being pretty unknown in the states, as Jonas explained, “Home’s kind of tame. It’s the one thing that’s stayed the same for us, which I like. Everything stays normal back home, and I hope that it stays that way.”

Be Your Own Pet’s success is accumulative rather than explosive, but they’ve still managed to grab an impressive amount of attention over the last couple of years. Playing in a band seems to come naturally to Jonas, who explains that he started his first at the age of twelve and has been playing ever since, even though he never expected things to take off quite as they have, saying, “My original plan was to take some time off from school and travel. I wanted to travel and check out Costa Rica. That was the plan in my early days of high-school. But in the middle of high-school we started the band and started surprisingly quickly getting love for it.”

So there’s nothing he feels he’s missed out on?

“I used to wish I could go to college, but I think I got enough of that going to visit friends and hanging out for a couple of weeks. I think I just like the idea of getting to meet a group of people. People always say in the long-run that college is the best part of your life, and the reason for that is because it means moving away from your parents, partying, meeting new people, having a good time, and learning things, and we’re kind of getting that same thing, just in a whole other unique sort of way. So I feel just as satisfied.”

It’s striking that ‘Get Awkward’ seems more self-consciously angst-ridden than ever. Where the first album managed all-out rage, this time around there’s a playfulness to Be Your Own Pet. It’s still feisty, but there’s a now a slightly tongue-in-cheek edge to the song writing. Jonas explained that the fun side of their second album “just kind of happened. We’re all just a little bit older and have a little bit more experience, our musical tastes have broadened. We were just ready to make a record that still had a humourous side but at the same time had some depth to it. Some of the songs are a bit more poppy and accessible, but still maintaining the energetic side.”

Where the music has matured, the lyrics have only grown more defiantly teenage. Of song-writing, each of them has a different part to play in the process, but ultimately, Jonas says, “We all sort of do it together, it’s all kind of random, you know, me, John and Nathan will knock up some riffs, we’ll put it together. For this album Jemina did pretty much most of the lyrics compared to the last record when we all contributed a little. But I think it’s almost better this way.”

So Jemina is the one still suffering from teenage tantrums? “Jemina’s good at doing the whole teenage angst thing. She genuinely has a lot of teenage angst from when she was younger. So it’s very genuine.” The peroxide vocalist certainly packs a few punches in ‘Get Awkward’. Jonas’ favourite track from the album, ‘Becky’, sees Jemina in full high-school feud mode, promising to “wait with knives after class” for an ex-best friend.

But Gigwise wonders how they long they can keep it up. Surely one day this impressively aggressive punk act will have to grow up and move on from the frenzied fury of their teenage years? Jonas doesn’t see it happening anytime soon:
“I guess right now we want to hang on to that temporarily because we will, eventually, grow up. But Steve McDonald [their producer] is forty years old and still acts like a teenager. A lot of the people we worked with are like fifty years old and they still act like teenagers so who knows? Maybe we’ll be like teenagers for the rest of our lives. I think we’ll just take it as it comes for now and see what happens.”