Hiya Sweet Unrest, thanks for joining us in the virtual RGM lounge today, grab a brew and take a seat.
What made you decide that music is a thing for you?
We’re all similar in that we’re all just manic creators to be honest. For whatever reason we’ve all mainly gravitated towards music, though we share other artistic interests. Probably this creative impulse comes as a way of making better sense of the world around us. If we don’t create, we start to feel on edge, tetchy and scrambled. So we do it because it we have to, like draining one of the humours or some shit. If people are interested then that’s brilliant and touching, but it’s only a small part of why we do it.
Introduce us to you all and your musical history.
The band formed when I (Jack) met Marlo and Dan in Spring of 2022. I’d just got sober, moved to London and didn’t really know anyone on the music scene, but I knew I needed a band because I had a lot of tunes and needed something worthwhile to focus on. I tried everything, I visited bars and gigs, and googled apps to find musicians. After weeks of uninspiring jams with kids who mainly wanted to smoke weed, I found Dan and Marlo on this app called Vampr. We jammed and wrote a tune together in about 10 minutes. The chemistry was instant and undeniable.
Thankfully, we were all unemployed at the time so we had about two months of just incessantly recording and producing demos (which you can still find on our Soundcloud). We spent the first few months playing acoustic gigs to three people in a restaurant in West London called L’Amour, fighting against the manager who’d always tell us to “keep it down”. Six months or so later, we met Tom, who we got to play second guitar, as I had an increasingly dodgy thumb and an increasing urge to writhe around while I sang, unencumbered by a guitar.
After a couple of years, lots of random gigs, and a slew of bassists to rival spinal tap’s history of drummers, we found Leon through my girlfriend Scarlett, and the lineup of 5 was complete. We signed a management contract a couple of months ago, and are now just all working our arses off, juggling the band with our day jobs, to make the tunes better, the production top tier, and make engaging music videos to go with them (I’m also a filmmaker so this appeals to me a lot). We’re getting to grips with social media slowly and somewhat begrudgingly.
What’s the live music scene like in London right now? Anyone we should be looking out for (Bar you of course)
The longer we’ve been in it, the better it has got, it seems. I’m not sure if that’s because the bands have had more time to practise, or because we’ve had the time to be exposed to more of them. Probably both. I also feel like there are some exceptional acts on the rise right now. We’re all remarkably supportive of one another, too. Recently, we’ve been really enjoying Dead Freights, Black Bordello, Luvcat, Howling Fiends, Soaked, Safe at Any Speed, Another Day, Laurie Wright and the Molotovs. We actually poached Luvcat’s mastering engineer for this latest single. All of the above and probably a lot more we’ve forgotten deserve soaring success, and I just sincerely hope the infrastructure of the industry today allows that to happen.
I’ve seen a lot of people struggling for support recently online. What’s your view on the industry?
If you’d asked us this a year ago, we would have said it seems fine to us. But the harder we work, the more we realise how broken the industry actually is.
The truth is, 20 years ago, a good band could get a record deal almost without a lifting a finger, because the industry was healthy enough for labels to take that risk with them. Now it seems like labels are basically playing it extremely safe and just going for people who already have massive followings. A hard working and diligent band will struggle to see the same success their drug-addled and chaotic equivalents were seeing a generation before them.
But you could see this as a blessing as much as it’s a curse. The truth is, it’s brilliant how easy it is to produce and release a tune these days. It’s allowed almost everyone to express themselves and contribute to an ever-growing and ever more inspiring global catalogue. Our feeling, though, is that it shouldn’t be as hard as it is. We need some kind of economic or political revolution that allows artists to contribute what they contribute best.
Right now, musicians are underperforming in job roles that would be better filled by someone far more zealous and better suited, while their instruments gather dust in the corner, and the world is deprived of what the artist can do best. It seems right that everyone should be have the opportunity to contribute what they can do the best. The world would be all the richer for it.
Where do you feel you currently sit within the music industry?
I feel like we offer a lot of value, and certainly work very hard on it. Thankfully, we do it for its own sake because if we were doing for any other reason we would have given up months ago. For this reason, we feel like we’re poised and ready to distribute what we do make to a much larger audience, and make it into our careers. God knows we’re not making any money out of it now, but I know that will change. The important thing is that we’re offering the most value we can, and I believe that will eventually be recognised and monetised. We take care with everything we release, not just in terms of the song’s production, the grade on the music video, or the audio quality on the live recordings, but that the music comes from an honest place. If it doesn’t, it’s not real art, and we’re not interested.
Tell us Two truths and a lie about you.
Marlo had never drunk a coffee until a couple of months ago. He hasn’t drunk one since.
Jack once sat in a paddling pool with Fat Boy Slim in his villa in Ibiza, and remarked at his pretty painted toenails.
Dan has eaten a Morley’s Chicken three times a week for the last 6 years.
Do you ever worry about people taking things the wrong way or cancel culture? Discuss….
I suppose the simple answer is yes. We’re confident we will be ok because we’re all very decent human beings.
We do worry about people abusing cancel culture for dishonest reasons, though. When people weaponise accusations or threaten to get someone cancelled over something quite inconsequential, it’s actually an insult to people who have really been affected in some horrible way, and that’s wrong.
Of course, however, anyone in any kind of position of power should treat that with the utmost respect. Everyone has a responsibility to treat others with love and compassion, especially those who (to whatever degree) are in the public eye. In terms of whether you can separate the art from the cancelled artist, that’s up the individual, though it’s hard to completely ignore the context sometimes.
Do you sign up to any conspiracy theories? If not why not?
Not really, got better things to do.
What was your best experience on stage?
Probably Shacklewell Arms this Spring for the Years Ago release party. It was a Thursday night and was unexpectedly packed. Half the crowd just stormed the stage during Come Alive, tambourines were flying everywhere, bodies were up and down, we could barely play but it made us come alive alright. I still maintain it was my addition of the acoustic guitar that tipped the crowd over the edge.
What was your worst experience on stage?
Probably 93 Feet East. We got ripped off by this promoter called Time To Shine (beware) who didn’t pay us, didn’t promote the gig and didn’t give us a soundcheck. Everything went wrong that could have. Strings broke, Amps didn’t work, monitors were shite. You had to wait for the band before you to finish playing before you went to the green room because you could only access it by going onto the stage. The bouncer turned away our photographer Lou Smith, who is about 60, because he didn’t have ID. And once you left, you couldn’t come back in. Absolute shambles.
Tell us something about you / each member that you think people would be surprised about.
Leon is always clean shaven from the eyebrows down.
Marlo still doesn’t know what a scotch egg is.
Dan has vehement and controversial musical preferences. He refuses to play Wild Thing, I Wanna Be Your Dog and Another Girl Another Planet.
Tom is prestige 10 on Modern Warfare 2.
Jack is a borderline pyromaniac. If there are sticks nearby, it won’t be long before he suggests we make a fire. Lock up your marshmallows.
What are the next steps you plan to take as a band to reach the next level?
Depends what you mean by level I suppose. The wanky and spiritual answer is that we want to start jamming together more, to read each other’s musical minds so that we can each better offer our own character and sensibilities to the sound. We want to get more experimental, break production rules and create something people have never heard before. We refuse to be considered ‘nostalgia rock’. We want to continue to get more in touch with ourselves and our writing process, so that we can make brilliantly timeless songs that come from a place of truth and the heart, and that resonate on a deep level with people, all the while trying wacky production techniques to freak em out a bit.
On a more practical level, we need to get better at social media, we need to learn the trends and shit and basically get good gaming the algorithm because that’ll give us the best chance of having a big enough audience to make this our careers, comfortably do what we were put on this earth to do, and keep our souls happy and not winging all the time. We need more merch on an online shop, some good DJs to get behind us, good support slots, and a lifetime supply of penguins (we mean the chocolate bars but the animal will do).
I hear you have a new tune, what can you tell us about it?
Yeah, Rob Me Blind. The basis of it was written quite quickly, when I was pissed off at my ex and my housemate simultaneously, and it’s oddly about both to some extent. Like some rare conjoined twins of a song. Anyway, as usual, I took it to the band and Marlo came up with the brilliant chromatic breakdown bit and the lead riff.
The oohs I had were quickly replaced by Alice’s far superior ooh-ing ability. Something about the chromatic breakdown and listening to a lot of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (yes I looked up the spelling) made us think it sounded a bit Hawaiian, so Marlo played with this more and added ukulele and slide guitar to the intro.
Our friend Harry mixed it, and together we made some cool arrangement decisions like isolating the oohs at the start because they sounded so beautiful when we played them alone. Finally, we got in touch with our friend Luvcat’s mastering engineer, and he was keen to get involved. He said it sounded like Babyshambles meets Housemartins.
What was the recording process like?
As with all our tunes, we recorded it in a bedroom, except the drums which we did at Camden Records. We put a tea towel over the snare drum for the first half of the song to give it a softer feel and I had to whip it off at just the right moment for the more ‘unrest’ part of the song. We had to re-record all the guitars towards the end to give it more of a live feel and I insisted on my more jangly acoustic guitar playing than Marlo’s far better playing to give it more chaos and bounce.
What was the biggest learning curve in writing the new tunes?
That we need to record live. Now we have a full lineup of 5 members there’s no excuse not to. Sometimes, in the process of trying to get a song perfect, it can lose that mad and brilliant essence which is the 5 of us playing together. We can still get it sounding modern and add effects or whatever, it just needs that heart that’s hard to get when you’re staring down the barrel of logic redoing takes til your fingers fall off.
Would you change anything now it’s finished?
Nah, onto the next thing now (though maybe we could have gone a bit faster at the end, another reason to record live).
Is there anything else you would like to share with the world?
Look man, we’re doing this because we bloody love it more than life itself. Nothing comes close to how making music makes us feel. It’s an all encompassing, sleep depriving, stress inducing and brilliantly enchanting lifetime project for us. It’s a relatively new and exciting idea that other people can also enjoy the things we make, and that’s a rather beautiful feeling.
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