Genre: Indie/Alternative
Hometown: Leeds, UK
Members:
Andy Morgan: Vocals/Guitar/Samples/Programming
Jamie Macneal: Guitar/Vocals/Samples
Adam Fenwick: Bass/Vocals
Daniel Harvey: Drums/Samples
Interview with Andy Morgan:
How are you guys? Have you done anything special today?
I’m pretty shaken up at home in Leeds watching the UK riots escalate to be honest. I am in the middle of writing lyrics for our new album too so that’s pretty special to me at least.
How did the band form?
We started around a year ago. We were working under a different name with a different line-up but new members and a new outlook encouraged us to change our name and lead us towards being the band we are today.
Who are your musical/non-musical influences? why?
You know this is such a hard question to answer. I don’t want to sound like one of those bands that goes on about all the different bands they listen to but we really listen to as many different thing as we can. I blame the internet. What of that filters into this band I couldn’t say.
What inspires you to do what you do?
What’s really important to us is honesty. We recorded our album live, we think it’s pretty fucking important for bands to be able to play their own songs. We also try to make sure there’s a point in everything we do by keeping things simple and trimming the fat from our songs.
What are your dreams and goals for the future?
At the moment we’re deep into the writing process for our next album, tying-up loose ends. We¹re about to go and record it in Hamburg in September. Our goal is to take everything that was good about our last album and improve on it with more focus on what works best. After the album was recorded, a lot of the songs evolved and changed based on people’s reactions to them when we played them live, which changed a lot of things. The new songs are just really, really fun to play and we couldn’t ask for much more than that.
Who generally writes the songs, what are they about?
It’s mostly me (Andy) and Jamie but really we just write the bare bones of each song individually before arranging it as a group. A lot of thought is put into my lyrics but I set myself a hard rule of never writing anything too preachy or patronising, as who am I to be telling people what to do? Mostly I just write stories or use allegory from elsewhere; none of that matters if the songs can’t be sung though. More often than not things are never completely serious either; for example one song on our album sounds pretty deep and meaningful but it’s just about how annoying it is that there are constantly wires all over the floor in my room.
Describe your live shows, visually and musically.
Again it’s all about honesty in performance to us. As well as the obvious four guys playing their instruments’ we have some innovative ways of using live samples. We’ve noticed a lot of bands recently playing along to backing tracks and while yes it will lead to a great live sound with the right live engineer, there’s no stepping away from that click track. We like to catch the audience off guard, and we get a lot of our dynamics by pulling everything back instead of just stepping everything up.
While we’re here do you have any material/live events you would like to promote?
Of course! Our latest single Helicopter Parents is out on Aug 22nd. The video for it will be released very soon. Everyone should check out our two previous videos on the media page on our website We’ve a couple of dates too, more will be added soon but our main priority at the moment is recording this new album!
Do you social network?
Yes
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/pages/SCAMS/104315960587?sk=info
TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/wearescams
One last question: tomato – fruit or veg?
Well, it’s a fruit but I wouldn’t want a tomato smoothie anytime soon.
Interviewed by Daniel Thomas
THE END
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