The almost-23-year-old bassist Charlotte Cooper calls from her temporary home base in Sydney, fresh from playing a set at the Soundwave festival which her band, The Subways, have been brought out to play. It's been a strange beginning for the UK trio, also made up of Billy Lunn on vocals and Josh Morgan on drums, who have known each other for almost a decade but met with some untimely challenges that have questioned the future of their musical careers. Now, with a second album firmly in tow and a bunch of new songs prepped for a third album, The Subways' success is certainly skyrocketing for "three bored suburban kids" who decided to join a band.
yourGigs (yG): So I understand The Subways were formed at the tender age of 13?
Charlotte Cooper (CC): Yes! We all just started hanging out together. I got together with Billy initially, and we all just started learning instruments. Billy was already playing guitar but he gave me a bass guitar and showed me where the notes are, and Josh learned to play the drums. It was like three suburban kids bored because we lived in the middle of nowhere, so we just started making a lot of noise.
yG: A lot of people seem to have first heard you because you guys appeared in The O.C. one episode. How does that sort of notoriety strike you guys these days?
CC: As long as it's not going against our morals, we love having people hear our stuff in different ways. I mean the experience was fantastic. We got to be on a film set for the first time - it came out just before we came to Australia but at least a few people knew 'Rock & Roll Queen' from that.
yG: Speaking of 'Rock & Roll Queen' - that did become an introduction for you to many people in Australia. How have you enjoyed the time here so far since your last Big Day Out trip a few years ago?
CC: We're just so excited to be here. We've all got family connections over here and did spent holidays here in the past. Because we're fairly unknown here we just watched the crowd at Soundwave get more and more into the set and by the end everyone has been going crazy. We love shows like that. It's a bit of a challenge because we're used to playing our own shows - we love winning people over!
yG: Billy had to have surgery on his vocal chords soon after your first album. Was a point where you weren't sure that The Subways would even be continuing after your first album?
CC: It was quite frustrating at times. We didn't really do much for quite a few months and our future was really invested in Billy's surgery went so then when we did finally get into the studio it was such a great sense of relief.
yG: So with all that to worry about, how did you cope with the prospect of the notorious pressure associated with writing a second album?
CC: I feel like that will be the pressure that we'll feel with the third album as opposed to the second. After we wrote Young for Eternity, we were 18 years old. We knew we had a lot to learn. We were writing new material the whole time we were touring the first album, and invested a lot of emotional energy into the second album. The third will definitely be the difficult one.
yG: I hear you decided to DJ in your time off?
CC: Oh totally. I did it to fill the void of not performing. I did my own little DJ tour which was a ton of fun and it definitely kept me going. Now Billy [has] seen how much fun I had he's doing as well. It was big indie-rock stuff; I'd usually play stuff like Oasis, Blur, Nirvana, and even a bit of Kylie Minogue if I think they can handle it. [Laughs].
yG: Your live show is touted as a highly energetic experience.
CC: We're very energetic - Billy and I fly all around the stage and Josh is always hitting the drums as hard as he possibly can. Touring is what we live to do. For us it's almost like an album is a means to touring ... We want to get back on writing and get a third album out because then we get to go on tour again. It's been amazing this time round, between albums, because people are beginning to sing even our guitar riffs back at us. We were pretty taken aback by that!
yG: So what's next for The Subways? What can we expect from the new album?
CC: The new songs are quite heavy and even heavier than All or Nothing. We still have a few more melodic acoustic tracks though. We're into quite schizophrenic music I suppose. [Laughs]. We'll listen to Kylie Minogue as much as we're listening to Refused, I guess it'll be more extreme. We'll just get heavier and softer at the same time. [Laughs].
Carrie Dennes
|
|