A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of seeing a band called Scholars play live while I was in Sheffield. Although I had heard good things about them from a friend of mine, I wasn't really expecting much because if they were so good, surely I should have heard more about them, right? Wrong. To be quite brief, they are a force to be reckoned with;I was blown away by their performance and regretted not listening to their songs sooner. How they've remained underground so long is a mystery to me. Either way, I left with two thoughts that night. The first was that it is never a good idea to wear shorts in December, no matter how sweaty you think you're going to get at a concert. The second was that I needed to interview them. So, without further ado, I present to you my interview with Chris Aylett, the bassist in Scholars. You can view the official version here.
Why did you name yourselves Scholars?
If you had to give a pitch to an A&R person of a well known record company but could only do so in one sentence, what would you say?
I'll try something. I'll say we're one of the most exciting new bands around.What kind of genre would you put your band into?
Broadly speaking we're a rock band but we always have a bit of trouble because we don't fit into a pre-established role. There's a lot of punk in there (myself and our drummer particularly came from punk backgrounds and played in punk bands years ago) but there's also a bit of indie. We listen to some heavy stuff and we like a bit of electronic as well but I think what we're most attuned to and what we sound like are rock bands like Hundred Reasons, Hell Is For Heroes and At The Drive In. As I said, we fit into a few different things.
You have a new album coming out in April; can you reveal anything to us about the record?
It's been a long time in the making. We recorded it with Larry Hibbitt who's the guitarist in Hundred Reasons and is an idol of ours. He's done an amazing job, we're really happy with the way it's sounded. It doesn't sound like any other band; it's got its own unique edge, it's heavy but at the same time it's got a lot of melody. It's got a few new versions of older songs that people know but it's mainly brand new stuff that people won't have heard, which we're quite proud of. I think it's a real step forward for us, it's been a bit of a long time coming - we've been together as a band for about five years, we didn't want to put a line in the sand and say this is our debut album so we're really happy with the set of songs. To have finally got where that is, it's pretty exciting for us.
How has working with Larry Hibbitt, someone who has influenced your music, shaped your album?
It was really good as he's been involved in writing songs which we're big fans of as well so it was really good to get his input. He came down to pre-production sessions when we were tweaking the songs and getting them ready to record and his input was so useful. I think you can never really under estimate how good it is to have an outside ear come in and listen to one of your songs in the first half and say "That needs to be shorter, that needs a bit of tweaking, you need to bring out that hook, that's the best bit." There are certainly a few songs which would have been wildly different if we just recorded them ourselves. He's just changed them so much and obviously along the way, there are disagreements because sometimes a song is someone's baby and they don't want to change it but at the end of the day, we're really happy with how it's turned out so it was fantastic.
Other than the album, what should we look out for from Scholars next year?
We're going to have another single out quite soon; we're doing the video in the next couple of weeks and we've got the B-side ready and we're going to be putting that out. Hopefully around the time of the album there will be another single and then the real plan for us is just to tour as much as we possibly can. The thing is, the tour with Pure Love and the tour with Canterbury was really good for us in terms of new people seeing us so with more of that sort of thing, we can hopefully jump onto the bandwagon.
You earlier mentioned you've recently been on tour with Pure Love and then Canterbury and Mallory Knox; how was that?
It was fantastic; we had a really good autumn. Pure Love is basically the former front man of Gallows and he's such an amazing showman; every night we watched them and were blown away. That was a great tour as we played at a load of new places that we've not played before and we learnt a lot from them as well, such as how they performed live. That's a weird thing that you get on tour sometimes; you pick up ideas from other bands. Not that you steal their ideas but you see their approach to stuff and it makes you more interesting as a result. Then we did Canterbury and Mallory Knox which was a different affair because they have a younger crowd - Pure Love's a slightly older music band where as Canterbury and Mallory Knox are certainly the younger end of the spectrum but it was really good because I think we managed to appeal to both somehow. So they were very different tours but they were awesome and we couldn't have asked for nicer blokes to spend a few weeks with. I seriously recommend checking out all three of those bands because they're absolutely awesome.
Do you have any pre-show traditions?
We always try to put absolutely everything into the show, regardless of who's there. We played a lot of shows in the past to just a handful of people and, as you do when you're touring around, some shows are better than others. We always made it a thing of ours to give 100% in every show because it doesn't seem worth having gone somewhere to play a show and then to get on stage, stare at your shoes and give a half-hearted performance; as soon as we get on stage, we give it everything. The one very boring thing we do is that our singer and the others who do backing vocals do quite a lot of vocal warm ups because over the years of touring, we've realised that if you don't do that, your voice can't handle it. So we spend a lot of time sitting in the van, making very strange noises before the show, making sure that he's going to be good.
During concerts, the band would suddenly stop playing a song, pretend to have a fight before suddenly continuing the song; who's idea was this and what reaction were you trying to achieve?
When we recorded one of the very first songs we wrote together, which was about 6 or 7 years ago now, there was a gap in the song where it stops and starts again and I had this idea that it would be good to have the noise of people arguing in the background, an idea I sort of took from a Smith's song called " Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me". When we got around to performing that song live, we started yelling at each other to replicate what we had done on the recording. So we did that and as it developed over different shows, we started making it into an argument and it became a little thing that we did. It was always the last song of the set so we'd do a set and people would be surprised and a bit shocked and I think we just really enjoyed ticking people off a little bit. People don't expect to see that sort of thing - a lot of the time people don't know if it's real or if it's part of the set but we always hoped that the fact that we would pick up the song afterwards that people would realise it wasn't real. It worked well for us.
Why are all your music videos, such as Fractures, Blinda Data and Tornadoes, so different?
When we make videos, we always try to think of an idea that will grab people rather than just a standard storyline. We've always tried to do something that might get people talking because in a sense, it's a promotional tool for the song. The first video we did was Tornadoes; we had this idea of a fight in reverse and that actually came from the fight we did live. Blinda data was the most recent one we've done and that was an idea our manager had for an ambitious video set in a school. As soon as he had said it, we could all see it; it fit in really well and went nicely with the lyrics. Our guitarist piped up straight away "Well, my mum is an assistant head teacher of an all girl's school so we might be able to do that." We just set up a meeting with the school, explained what we wanted to do and they were completely up for it. They let us use the school for three days and it was amazing that they let us do that; we're forever grateful because not a lot of places would have let us go in there and take over an assembly. To be honest, with music videos at our level where we don't have huge budgets enabling us to do loads of things, there's an element of "What have we got available to us to make an exciting and interesting video."
EXTRA QUESTIONS
What's your favourite song on the album?
There's a song called "More Medicine" which everyone will be hearing soon, it's a new one. We wrote that as soon as we were finishing off the album actually. It's a brand new one and that would be my personal favourite. Larry's input on that was really good as well and he's done an amazing job recording it so it's an exact mix of punk and rock. That's one to look out for.
If you could do one thing in the world, no matter how difficult, what would you do?
I'd really like us to be able to do international tours. I'm a big fan of seeing other countries and visiting new places. We've only ever done the UK but I understand that in a lot of countries, the music scene is completely different and you get different levels of enthusiasm so I'd really like to get to new countries like China and Russia and South Africa and hopefully, we'll have the opportunity. That would be awesome for me.
If you were in a festival, what would be the line-up? Name 5 bands.
There's a British band that we've played with called Max Raptor. They're a really good punk band and they've got an album coming out as well so definitely them. At The Drive In; they're one of our all time favourites. There's a band called the Dismemberment Plan who are a Washington D.C. indie rock band from the late 90s; they're just incredible and are a really inventive band. Don Broco; they're friends of ours from years ago; we toured with them a couple of years back. We love them and they're a great band, definitely have them on the bill. I used to love Green Day; they were my first band I really loved although I don't really like them that much anymore, if we could say "Dookie" era Green Day, that would be good.
What is your favourite word?
What is my favourite word? That's a very good question.. I'm going to say antidisestablishmentarian. (I attempt and fail to say the word.) Which I think is the longest word. Maybe I shouldn't say that. That might make me sound like a bit of a dickhead. (Laughs)
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