Scouting For Girls interview: "We never expected this"

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Ten years is a long time for anyone, but for a musician, a decade can mean being completely forgotten about in such a competitive industry. Luckily this isn't the case for Scouting For Girls, who, ten years on from the release of their self-titled debut are back to celebrate its success, with a re-release of the record and an extensive UK tour playing the album in full.

With a string of ridiculously catchy singles that the majority of the nation undeniably knows every word to, the story of Scouting For Girls is a somewhat romantic and idealistic example of a group of friends just wanting to play music together, ending up breaking through to the mainstream.   

Having never expected a record deal - let alone over 1.5 million sales worldwide - we caught up with frontman Roy Stride to discuss the unexpected whirlwind success of the album, the current indie music scene and how his life has changed ten years on.  

Hey Roy, how's it going?

Pretty good, I'm just in bed at the moment - I have been out of the house, I went to drop the kids off at school but then I got home and just sort of got straight back into bed.

No need to rub it in, some of us are at work.

Well, I was going to get in the bath, that was my plan!

A dangerous game that though, don't want to drop your phone in the bath.

No, exactly, the bed is safer! 

So, Scouting For Girls have been sort of pigeonholed as a pop band while others view you as an indie outfit, what do you view yourself as? 

I definitely see us as a 'proper band' band. Sort of in the same ballpark as the bands we grew up loving, the Britpop sort of stuff. We're a group of friends from school and to begin with, it was much more about being friends than the music. It was just about being in a band, you know? It was all about getting together after school and rehearsing in garages and that. There aren't many bands like that around now, a lot of bands now get together from music college, so we're really proud of that old school credential. 

When you started out were there any bands in particular that you looked up to and aimed to be where they were?

I don't think we ever thought we'd even get a record deal! When we were young we did - when we were at school there were loads of Britpop bands who I loved, like Blur and Oasis. I also loved R.E.M and the Stone Roses.

I don't think we ever particularly looked up to them in a career way, we honestly just wanted to be in a band. We just wanted to play shows and travel the world, that was the plan. We never expected this, we never expected to be doing a ten year anniversary. It's absolutely crazy.  

I imagine when you started out you never expected to be selling over 1.5 million albums and selling out Wembley, how did you all respond to that? Was it taken within your strides or was it a difficult transition at all? 

Oh, we absolutely loved it. I'm not going to lie, it was a lot of fun. We were in our mid-twenties, we'd all been to university and had proper jobs for about four or five years. Trying to make it as a musician, working part time and scrimping and saving to put anything towards the band - we did think that it was never going to happen.

But then it did happen. It was literally like all of our dreams had come true and I think we just did our best to enjoy it as much as possible. We really appreciated it and I think we still do. It was amazing. 

It's been ten years since your self-titled debut, what's changed for you personally over that decade? 

My whole life has changed! It's funny because that album was so big, and when a record is so big it does impact other people's lives. So people can remember where they were and because it's been around for so long now, it still pops up now and again. People have shared important landmarks with our music and so it's amazing to have that connection with people.

That's why this tour - it's only just gone on sale and it's selling really well. People feel connected to the music, it's pretty special for me, an escaped, second hand and desperate musician. Now I've got a family and a house, and I take the kids to school, that's my life now.  

Where there any specific visions for this album? Did they come off? 

This is the thing, there was no massive thought process behind writing the songs. They were just songs that made people happy, we'd play our local pub and everybody had a great time! There was no thought process at all about selling records, we just wrote the music we loved. It was a bit cheeky and a bit silly and it entertained our mates every Saturday night of the month. That was as far as it went.

Then we went and recorded it, the main thing I wanted was to keep it very stripped back and very indie - so it was just piano and all about the vocals and harmonies. Lyrically it was a little bit silly, it was nostalgic in that it looked back at childhood, quite light-hearted really. 

You've mentioned that now you have a family, how do your children react to your music? Some kids revel in their parents being in a band and others are really embarrassed by it. 

Oh, they love it. My son Freddy is seven, and his school are actually doing a festival today and he woke up at 4am this morning. He plays the drums. He's completely in love with it, he'll come to soundcheck and he'll come and watch us play and he's obsessed. He's not too interested in practising music but he just loves getting on stage and playing. It's more about being in a band and doing his hair - he loves doing his hair at the moment.

Well, you've got to have the full package, maybe in ten years time, he'll be in a successful band.

I think he will, I mean he's in a band already. He's in the Heart Terrors - he came up with that name himself, by the way. He's just completely obsessed with it even though it's not something I encourage at all! 

To come up with that band name at that age is something else.

I know! They've got a couple of songs and honestly, the song titles are just incredible - I can't remember what they are but they're so good. At the moment I work from home, I have a studio in the barn next to the house, I have a lot of artists that come to work with me and they stay over. So he comes home from school and there's his dad working with some cool people and he loves it! 

As far as the singles on this album go, I read that your label didn't want you to put 'This Ain't a Love Song' out as a single, why was this? 

They just didn't think it was a hit. I gave them a CD of all the demos of all the songs, that single was our follow up. We'd just been to the BRIT Awards, we'd been nominated for three awards, we'd just sold a million records and so I came with a CD and spoke to the guys from the label - who are actually amazing - I gave them the record so sure of it.

I went home thinking I was going to get a phone call that night but it had been about a week before I ended up ringing them and asking if they'd heard it and he replied, "Er yeah, but I don't think you've got any hits." They did want it as a single, they just didn't think it would be a hit is all. It came out and obviously ended up being massive for us.

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I bet you were pretty smug? 

I am now, but I think they'd deny any knowledge of it, they'll say the demo wasn't very good... maybe I was a little bit smug.

You're one hundred percent allowed to be!

No, seriously, people don't know how lucky I feel to have been in this position.

You're so modest, most musicians are and there's no shame in being proud of your achievements. 

There aren't that many arrogant bands around, are there? 

No, not really anymore - maybe that's what this new brand of lad rock has sort of stemmed from. 

That's the sort of music I grew up on, and I'm quite gutted that there isn't more of it currently. I love a sweaty indie band. My theory on this though is that streaming is killing off guitar music. People just have streaming platforms on in the background, and it's usually something easy to listen to while you're cooking dinner or something.

Then when something a bit more aggressive comes on then you automatically skip it - and because that registers as a skip on Spotify or whatever, then gets taken off the big, popular playlists. 

That's quite a refined way of looking at it. All of that genre is a bit safe these days, nobody is overtly offensive. 

Yeah, but it takes a huge amount of balls to be that band though. We came out as a band and I was very anti slagging any band off. I was all, "Oh I love every band, they're all amazing!" I remember hearing Noel Gallagher slagging us off us on Radio One and it literally made my week. There's no one like that anymore.

The thing is with Noel Gallagher is that he can get away with it because he's one of the best songwriters of all time, coupled with the fact he's one of the funniest fucking guys in the world - if it wasn't for that he wouldn't be able to say half the stuff he does. 

His Twitter is one of my favourite accounts to follow. This sort of arrogant humour is what's missing.

Definitely! There's a real gap right now but you've got to have the songs to go with the arrogance. There are a couple of sub-Oasis bands out there, who'll give out all the banter but haven't got the music to go along with it. 

The girl you're singing about in 'She's So Lovely', is she still a part of your life ten years on? 

No.

That's a shame.

'She's so Lovely' was written over about two years actually, it was gradually refined - so it was sort of about three girls. It completely changed. Management loved it when they first heard the demo but they came back and said that the lyrics needed to be a bit spicier - they thought it was a bit too sweet. So I went back and changed some lines. so yeah, it's kind of written about three women. 

Do these women know that this song is potentially about them? 

No, not at all... I don't think! 

Like this? Read our Twin Atlantic interview 

Tell me a bit about this reissue?

We've got a live album, which we recorded during our tour - we took the best recordings from the songs from the first album, so we've basically got that entire album live. We're really proud of that, the recordings are really good and it gives a real sense of what we do live. Then there are four brand new, unreleased tracks which were recorded around the same time as the album. For different reasons they didn't make it to the album, they didn't quite fit on there.

Also, we were in a real rush, we went in and recording about twelve songs for the album and only about two were decent and then we had to go on tour - so that was all we had! There's still something good about those songs - they're not hits but if you liked that first album then I thin you'll really love these songs. You can almost see the genesis of them. One of them was written just before I wrote 'She's So Lovely' and there are some lyrics that I've stolen from that song and you can almost see how the band developed.

So that's the four new songs - it'll be coming out on cassette, I'm really not sure why. 

Erm, I guess it's cheap?

That idea completely got past me, I've no idea why that is happening. Literally, cassettes just seem an odd format to put this on, who uses cassettes? 

To be fair, I have a cassette player in my car and I make mixtapes.

Do you? Are you a hipster?     

I don't think so, I just have a really old car! 

That's just what someone had said to me, that there are all these hipsters making mixtapes and buying cassettes, can you actually still buy cassettes?

Yeah, there's a Cassette Store Day now, like Record Store Day.

Oh, God!

It's quite funny that this entire conversation has revolved around a nostalgic trip to a decade ago but you're really against a nostalgic trip back to the days of cassettes. 

No, I do love nostalgia and I did actually find my old Walkman the other day - which I loved. I love nostalgia and I love the past but a lot of the time when you go back to it, it's pretty crap. I got my cassette player the other day and for a start, it lasted about two hours, the sound quality was still rubbish - you press play and it goes "ccccssshhhhhh". That was quite an expensive one as well! 

Then there's always the issue of the actual tape getting mixed up and you have to twiddle it with a pencil to wind it back up. 

Oh God you just reminded me of something really funny! Our bass player had this old Walkman when we were at school and literally all he would do - you'd just see him with his cassette, rewinding it with a pencil because he wanted to save the battery because rewinding it used to use up loads of the battery.

He'd be using the pencil and rubbing the batteries with the other hand because there's that thing where you think if you heat them up they get more charge.  

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On this upcoming anniversary tour, will you be playing the album in full? 

We will, but the thing its, that album is only thirty-seven minutes long so we'll be playing other songs as well! So we are going to play all of the album, and some of the other hits from the other albums - maybe a Christmas song or something because it's close to Christmas. I think someone described us recently as the band equivalent of a bouncy castle, so with that and Christmas time, it'll be a lot of fun.

It sounds it, especially for those who can remember where they were when that album came out - ten years ago I was thirteen, I can remember the songs being played at school discos, so it is nostalgic for a lot of people.

Yeah?! I've seen people on Twitter saying "oh, time to get my teen on" - it's going to be a lot of fun.

What're you most looking forward to with this tour? 

(Laughs) For some reason, out manager thought it'd be funny to get the drummer to do some of these interviews, and we were driving to the gig last week and someone asked him this question and he goes, "the days off". But I just love everything about touring. We're so lucky because we're not worldwide successful, mega-rich rock stars, we don't have to do like eighteen-month tours.

Which honestly, I'm sure is fun but the fact we do one massive tour about every two years, for a month - it's just like a long holiday with your mates. You get free beer, and you get to go on the stage and have a great time and literally everybody tells you that you're amazing. It is really fun!

I imagine so with that nice little ego trip as well. 

Well, yeah! Life isn't like that usually. You know, there's picking up the children from school, trying to write a song for someone new and being told that one of the kids has shit in the bed. Generally, you don't get told you're amazing on a daily basis. So, going on tour for a month is incredible, it's just really fun. I'm looking forward to being away with my friends.