@alpaca.presents
by Brandon van der Berg @vdb.brandon
I sat down with ‘Soup and Cigarettes’, before their headlining show on the 14th of September. They are a down-to-earth and funny bunch who are very easy to talk to and have a laugh with. They also had 60k streams last year on the release of their first album “UK DUTY PAID” and are doing some really great stuff.
Read Below.
You guys have clearly been friends for a while, can you tell me a bit about how you all met?
(Harvey) Well, most of us went to the same school apart from the Emilymer because she’s too posh-
(Emily) Thanks haha
(Tom) You are too posh.
(Hayden) We met Emily in college and became friends after that. Em came to us and proposed the band idea to me and Tom-
(Emily) I was very drunk at the same.
(Hayden) Then we dragged Harvey In and then dragged Cerys in after we realised we couldn’t do 4 people.
(Cerys) Late Bloomer haha.
So you guys are quite good friends you could say?
*Collectively laughing* No, no no.
(Tom) We are a band based on very sincere Hatred.
Are there any difficulties that come with that?
(Tom) Yeah for sure on a serious note, my ego, organisation of getting everyone in the same place and it not becoming a sesh.
(Hayden) We have jobs and you’re down at Uni-
(Emily) I’m down at Uni in Exeter
(Hayden) And you’re unemployed…
(Harvey) I’m not unemployed, I- I do freelance thank you very much.
You guys all smoke, what do you smoke?
(Emily) MARLBOROUGH REDS
(Tom) GOLDS, I LIKE A STERLING. I actually don’t smoke. No, I smoke about 10 times a day.
(Hayden) He doesn’t smoke to get out of buying, he’ll smoke as much as everyone else.
(Emily) He’s the soup of the band
(Cerys) He Juules
(Harvey) I’m the soup
(Tom) And that’s an interesting point; the name of the band. Gowan Hayden.
(Hayden) I was sat on my lunch break soup in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
(Harvey) What kind of soup?
(Hayden) Err, chicken noodle soup.
(Harvey) *Growls in envy*
You guys obviously know how and when to laugh at yourselves, how serious are you trying to come across?
(Emily) Well… We have a manager now. Obviously, that’s the dream, isn’t it?
(Hayden) See how far the band goes-
(Cerys) It’s JUST so much fun!
(Emily) Because we’ve all got jobs as well, if it happens it happens, obviously we’d like to work towards that.
(Hayden) It’s a nice little pastime.
(Tom) Very organic at the minute.
It's a year on from the release of your album “UK DUTY PAID”, Is there a reason you guys decided to go for an album instead of Singles like younger bands usually do? (Emily) We were so excited to be releasing stuff that we were like ‘Oh my god imagine if we have an album’. Looking back on it now, probably not the best play. (Hayden) It’s not up to standard and all that. (Emily) Yeah, we recorded that in my Uni room/Harvey’s little room at the time and none of us really had a clue about what we were doing and mind you Cerys wasn’t in the band at the time. This new stuff that we’re doing is more like what we want to do. Speaking of recording in bedroom studios and Uni Dorms, how does going into a professional studio compare? (Hayden) Terrifying, I see all the knobs and the switches. (Emily) It started off where we’d do everything in the studio and then we decided it was really only beneficial to do Emily's and Vocals in the studio because Harvey is really good at doing the producing as well so he does all of the Hayden and stuff. (Harvey) I’ve got a home studio, I’m a composer on the side. So we’ve got a little home studio set up for all the guitars. I was checking out your Tik Tok and there was a little bit of a joke about how Harvey is held in a higher regard for musicianship within the band, How does Harvey’s role in the band differ from the others? (Collectively laugh) (Harvey) Erm, It’s like being an overbearing mother. No, I’ve taken a step back because everyone has really grown as musicians since we started, I mean you were really good, that’s Cerys I’m talking about. (Cerys) Cerys! (Emily) I used to play the guitar but when we met Harvey I was like absolutely not he’s too good at guitar to not so I’ll do the Emily's. Hayden had never picked up a Hayden in his life and I’d only ever heard Tom do karaoke so we were kind of just pissing around to start with. What made you guys take in another member about 6 months after the release of your first Album? (Emily) Well, we’ve got so many solos in our songs so we were using Harvey’s dad as our Rhythm Guitarist because Tom doesn’t play an instrument, unfortunately. (Harvey) The problem is, when we do a track there are about 10 guitar tracks, originally it was my dad doing all the rhythm for our live stuff. (Emily) But they fight about whoever has the amp up loudest haha (Harvey) Me and Cerys get on better. (Emily) and absolutely Cerys is a really good Tomer, so she does backing vocals as well. How have you been finding it Cerys? (Cerys) It’s been good! We did our first gig together in January and that was terrifying, But since then we’ve definitely grown a lot more together and we mesh more. It's also about a year on from your first gig with us, you had it in October last year, how do you think your live set has changed since then? (Emily) Well… It’s a lot better now haha. (Hayden) It’s a stronger set. (Tom) I’ve also learnt how to actually Tom and I mean that in a serious way. I didn’t know keys? Or where the right part of my range was? Now I know it better I can play about with it more which adds depth to the music and because we’re all much more comfortable and because we gel better as a band we’re all having more fun and it makes us want to do this. (Harvey) And we have Halloween costumes. (Cerys) And we have Halloween costumes! Your first live show as a band was at Em’s student digs to about 7 people and you played “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac… (Emily) Harvey actually wasn’t there so I was on guitar. It was Isabell’s birthday. We did another one afterwards where I was on the Emily's, not the guitar. Harvey also sent us all the songs and I played them out of my laptop haha (Tom) It was genuinely awful. (Emily) And our friends bless’em they were so supportive they were all like “Woooo!”… But yeah no that was awful. So have you guys ever had a problem with performance anxiety on stage? (Harvey) Tom’s got a big problem with performance anxiety. Just not on the stage. *Tom Hysterically laughing* (Tom) I genuinely like the attention to be fair so it’s not a problem for me. (Emily) When I get nervous sometimes, I drop my sticks. But it’s got so much better because when you practice more you’re so much more comfortable up there. When we started out we didn’t really practice like at all. (Cerys) For the first gig that I did, we did two rehearsals and I cried before we went on haha. But apparently it was the best one we’ve done. Did you do much gigging before you joined the band? (Cerys) Oh, I’ve done like 2 open mics? So how did you feel about joining an already established band and jumping straight into gigging? (Cerys) I figured it would be easier because it was more people on stage and we’re friends so I thought it was a good confidence boost. In 2022 you had around 60k streams on Spotify, If you could have 60k of anything else, what would you choose? (Tom Immediately) Peanuts. (Harvey) Lego studs. (Hayden) Lego studs? (Tom) Stamps! (Cerys) Cats! (Emily) Cats! Yes, Cats! So “Lemon and Lime” compared to the other songs on the track- (General laughing and Tom going “WOH WOH woh woh.) (Tom) This is a leading question! You said you wrote it in about 10 minutes- (Emily) ON THE TOILET (Tom) I’d had a curry the night before so I was spending some time on the throne; to be honest with you. It just flowed out of me. (Emily) It was the first thing that we wrote- (Tom) Oh, not the lyrics. (Emily) I was just laughing so much it was so funny. (Tom) It was a bar in Worcester that we love who actually don’t do very good Lemon and Lime’s but it was an ode to their Lemon and Lime’s. So what kind of demographic do you see chanting that in the pub? (Emily) Drunk people! Haha (Tom) None of that Jeager, none of that gin, I need something cheaper cause my wallet is thin. Come onnnnn! LYRICAL! You released your last Single ‘Japan, 1996’ a little bit ago now, how do you feel about it now? (Hayden) We love it. (Emily) It’s good. That’s the one I thought was the best we’ve ever done. (Tom) Don’t know if Spotify quite reflects it yet but the reception when we’re doing gigs is really strong. (Cerys) Everybody seems to like that one. (Hayden) It’s the first song where we had people messaging us like “This is a really good song”. There is like a hyper-realistic newspaper in the video with the song title and the hook, how did that come about? (Emily) So we needed props for our video, I was like I’ll just make a newspaper but obviously, I only did the front page and then stuck it onto an actual newspaper. We put some of the lyrics as the headlines because we thought it would be quite a cool concept for the video like “Him looking back on his time in Japan”. (Tom) It’s like nostalgic but where the present is like an industrialised Japanese city. In the video I am covered in coal dust, I’ve got a big big coat on and the music video was recorded like two hundred metres from here. So what is the song about? (Tom) So my idea was, it’s this bloke on a bus and he sees this girl and, the scene is just awful like Birmingham back in the 1800s, it’s industrialised and he sees this girl and the song describes him imagining them in their lovey days and then we’ve got like the imagery of Kyoto in there. (Emily) Originally it was about somewhere in the south of France. (Harvey) That was one of the most tumultuous demo recordings we have done because I was recovering from having my appendix taken out and the guitar was presTom up against my scars from the surgery. (Tom) That’s how seriously we’re taking this. Do you want to promote anything or talk about anything? (Emily) We’ve got a Single coming out soon we just need to get the artwork done for it and then we can get it uploaded. (Tom) Watch. This. Space. (Emily) Yeah so we’ve got a six-track EP coming out at some point but we’re just doing Tomle releasing up until then.
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