Who's House?

Hello everyone, are you well?  Welcome to the Where We Lay Our Heads blog takeover for Scottish Fiction.  Neil has entrusted us with his site for the next week so we thought we'd start as we mean to go on, by posting our first blog very late at night, but you can enjoy this when you get up too.

For those who don't know us we're Alice, Ali, Danny, Stuart and Wull.  We're an awkward pop quintet who currently live in the metropolis that is Glasgow but we've also got our home town links to Gourock, Inverness and the heart breakingly beautiful Dumfries.  We've been around in a few different forms over the past few years but the line up solidified in March last year when we brought out our debut single 'Bury You'.  In fact our first appearance with the last addition to the band was on Scottish Fiction on Pulse 98.4 FM.

This week we'll no doubt be talking about our friends bands, bands who we should be friends with, the fabulous Common Records and whatever comes to us while we're doing our posts, we'll be doing little features called '5 Songs' for people to highlight influences and give a little background on music we like too.

We've all individually done our answers for '5 Songs' (or are working on them), so we'll start off with the longest serving members (the people who've actually answered so far).

Danny Young (Bass / Backing Vocals)

1. The song that got you into music? - 'Welcome to the Jungle' - Guns N Roses. My dad would play Appetite For Destruction really loud in the living room and I would come running in playing air guitar and singing along to my version of the lyrics. My dad never did tell me what the lyrics "feel my serpentine" meant.

2. Song that made you want to write? - 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' - The Darkness. This song didn't so much make me want to write as it did make me want to be in a band. The first guitar I ever bought was a knock-off white Les Paul. School of Rock came out when I was beginning to really take an interest in music - my friends and I missed school (we were in second year) to see that film, it was the perfect film to see as we were each discovering classic rock, swapping mix cd's and pretending we were bandmates.

3. Song that changed your musical direction? - 'Take Me Out' - Franz Ferdinand. Third year I started taking more of an interest in indie music and it was this album which expanded my horizons. I also remember my friend Stephen introducing me to the Arctic Monkeys first demos when we were supposed to be practising guitar.

4.First song you ever learned? - 'Desire' - U2. First song I learned on guitar. Let's not talk about that. On bass the first song I learned was 'Dreaming Of You' by The Coral, and it's still pretty much the only non-band song I know the whole way through.

5.Song that makes you happy to be alive? - 'Flirted With You All My Life' (Vic Chesnutt cover) - There Will Be Fireworks. Beautiful cover of a beautiful song by a wonderful songwriter. I don't really know what else to say.

Wull Swales (Singer / Guitarist)

1. Song that got you into music? - Nirvana - 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' or Green Day - 'Basket Case'. I think it was through watching Kerrang and MTV2 that got me into the first set of bands I really listened to. I think guess Spice Girls or the Smash Hits compilations was the first tapes I ever got, but yeah let's stick with my first two answers!

2. Song that made you want to write? - Biffy Cylro - 'Justboy'. It took me a while to kind of realise there was a Scottish music scene or whatever when I started out, as I mainly listened to 90's American punk and grunge stuff. Biffy and a local band called Technicolour Roots showed me that bands next door could produce great material.

3. Song that changed your musical direction? - Malcolm Middleton - 'Loneliness Shines'. Malcolm Middleton kind of showed me how honesty is really important to music, that songs can be dark but also be uplifting. 'Into The Woods' is one of the albums I keep on going back to and also is the album I suggest to anyone going through a songwriting dry spell.

4. First song you ever learned? - Blink 182 - 'Dammit' that was the first thing I learned on bass, which I still consider to be my first instrument, I think the first thing I probably played on guitar was Blink again but the first song I remember learning was 'Ticket To Ride' by The Beatles (who Stuart hates by the way).

5. Song that makes you happy to be alive? - WAVVES - 'King Of The Beach' / Lit - 'My Own Worst Enemy'. I struggled to choose a song for this I love WAVVES because of their great energy but the music also sounds really pure, the King Of The Beach record does kind of have that Beach Boys surf vibe about it but also some kick ass punk rock. I also chose Lit because it straight up rocks, it reminds me of playing punk as a teenager wearing Sex Pistols t-shirts and jumping around like an idiot, suppose I still enjoy doing that.

Anyway I better get to bed, we'll be featuring some of our friends tomorrow so keep your eyes open for that.

WWLOH x