Having first met Craig from Poor Things a while back in The 13th Note, and then enjoyed a rancorous set from the band at T in the Park, they've swiftly moved up the scale in my 'bands I really like' list. So I thought I should get to know them better, which in turn by publishing this on my blog means you can get to know them better too. Enjoy!
Hello, how are you?
Hello, I'm Craig and we are Poor Things. We're great thank you very much. Tired though, my sleeping patterns are fair ruined at the moment, keep waking up at 3am on the dot with the urge to play Football Manager or watch Peep Show or even just indulge in a snack, or midnight feast (at 3am). I'm sitting with a coffee people watching the population of Dumbarton Road. What kind of pants always joins in? Participants. Let us begin.
It's the question everyone hates, but could you tell us a little bit about your music and your influences?
Everyone hates this question? Whit? I positively adore this question. I think we fall in to the welcoming bracket of 'alternative rock' and then file us in the guitar section of that particular cupboard. We make melodic, guitar-based alternative rock. I would say our primary influences as a unit are your Teenage Fanclubs, Lemonheads and Pavement. But don't pigeon-hole us because we're totally working on doing a kinda Bothy Ballad meets Os Mutantes meets Nine Inch Nails thing. Man I hate this question so much.
What's your song-writing / creative process like?
Richard and I both write songs for the band and then we do a big fight to see what songs get kept and what ones don't get kept. He usually wins, I am a shoddy athlete with a wimpish frame. I actually started recording my own demos this time last year and I was the best thing I could have possibly done in terms of the 'songwriting process'. Every single idea gets put down, sometimes I leave it and sometimes it becomes a song straight away. Sometimes I'll pick a riff out and place it somewhere else. This is the way I keep myself busy. We're recording an album later in the year so right now it's all systems go with the songwriting. Richard tends to write pretty immediate stuff effortlessly, and I tend to fire out a lot of crap before the keepers emerge.
I started setting myself challenges as a writer, to try and write a song about the sort of stuff I wouldn't normally touch - purely to try and break out of the whole 'romance/insecurity' routine. On one hand you get 'A Drunk Man Considers the Royal Wedding at Kelvingrove Park', which we kept, but also stuff like 'The Family Cat' (a song about celebrity cats) and 'Retirement' (a song about a retiring tennis player). None of those got kept and nobody gets to hear them.
What could we expect to see from a live show?
Fans throwing bras on stage, wearing Sir Alan Sugar masks, discussion over the member of JLS most likely to go solo. We'll blast through 8 or 9 songs in a 30 minute set, bam bam bam, and like that - we were gone. Something like that?
What would you say has been your greatest achievement?
We just got home from our maiden performance at T in the Park so hands down - that. It was an absolute riot. I think being picked for that was our biggest achievement - and then finishing the set with a much, much bigger crowd than any of us had imagined possible. It was great. I took a while to calm down and relax and then once I did I got MWI. An amazing weekend.
Your most recent EP is called 'Hurricane Poor Things'. For bonus science points, can you tell us the difference between a hurricane and a tornado?
You hear on the news about Hurricane Katrina, but never Tornado Clive, or Tornado Steve. (editors note - Nil points guys. One is a large weather system and the other is an isolated weather event. A hurricane is a huge air mass that can be more than 1000 miles across, while a tornado is seldom more than 1 mile across, and often much less. Who says we don't kick knowledge here at SF)
What have you got planned for the rest of 2013?
We're taking some time out of gigging to finish writing tunes for the album, I think we're probably about 3 quarters through the actual writing, so we're going to blitz it out over the rest of the summer. We're doing a mini-Scottish tour in October, during which we're supporting The Electric Soft Parade at King Tuts, which is bloody class and can't wait for that - I'm a big fan - hopefully we'll be back in Aberdeen and Edinburgh as well. Aberdeen is a great gig, we did Cellar 35 recently and it was hoora fun. Then we're recording the album in November, I don't know the tracklisting or title or anything like that but I guarantee it will be our finest work to date.
What other artists (Scottish or not) would you recommend to the Scottish Fiction readers?
Your readers should investigate the following artists if they already haven't:
Secret Motorbikes, Baby Strange, Pinact, Fat Goth, Reverieme, Claire McKay, Saint Max, Hector Bizerk (go see them live), The Yawns - and the Sean Armstrong Experience, Min Diesel, The Shithawks, Sparrowhawk Orkestrel, Garden of Elks, Vasa, Honeyblood, Tuff Love, Young Aviators, PAWS, Battery Face, Black International - fucking everything man.
This is such a sweet place to be if you like/love music, I'm (really) sorry if I've forgotten anyone in that exhaustive list.
I'll do two proper recommendations from that list. Fat Goth have morphed into one of my favourite bands on the planet, 4 real. It's a good sign not only when you like a band but they turn you onto a whole new area you'd previously been a bit unsure of. So basically Fat Goth opened my eyes to Metallica, in the Kill Em All way and not in the St. Anger way. I wouldn't say they sound like Metallica so much though, I don't know what they sound like - I'm going to define them as 'character metal' and they are the least boring band in the world.
Secret Motorbikes are the absolute masters of three minute garage rock tunes and they're all handsome men with great vocabularies and hair. Roll me up and smoke me, barge on/barge off.
Thanks for speaking with us, would you care to share a joke with us?
Have you heard the one by the shit comedian who moonlights as a postman?
Oh fuck, messed up the delivery.
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