Interview: Matt Abbott / Skint and Demoralised, part one. (Kris De Souza)
This is part one of a 3 part feature in which we get a brutally honest insight into the music industry and life in a band from Skint and Demoralised front man Matt Abbott, after signing to Mercury Records in 2008 the band were hotly tipped to be a success in 2009 and after being bankrolled to record the debut album, Love, And Other Catastrophes, between studios in London and New York they were cruelly dropped. Now the band have returned with a new album, This Sporting Life and backed by a new label (and Shamfrolic favourite) Heist Or Hit Records.
Ok lets start at the beginning, how did Skint and Demoralised come into being?
Back in May 2007, I was an eighteen-year-old performance poet in the closing stages of my A-Levels. I’d started doing the performance poetry because I loved the thrill of getting on stage in a musical environment and for me that was the closest I could ever get to being in a band. I’m not a natural singer and I don’t play any instruments. Also, performance poetry at indie gigs in West Yorkshire always took the audience by complete surprise. A long-haired lad in skinny jeans grabbing the mic and starting to rant in rhyme about ‘Barbara from Scarborough’ before fiercely protesting against the BNP was the last thing that they expected. Obviously, I’m familiar with spoken word greats such as the legendary John Cooper Clarke and Attila the Stockbroker, but to the masses it is an unknown art-form. I liked standing-out. I liked being unconventional. I’d perform when and where it was suitable; gigs, birthday parties, house parties, political rallies – anywhere that would have me. I was known on the local music scene as “poem boy” before the name “Skint & Demoralised” started to sink in.
So how did you get from standing on a stage with just a microphone and your verse to becoming the front man of an entire band?
It was after a few “support slots” with Reverend and The Makers in Wakefield and Leeds that I started to become well-known across the West Yorkshire music scene. It was at this stage that R&TM released ‘Heavyweight Champion of the World’ and left me far beneath their radar, and also at this stage that I was approached by an elusive dance producer from Sheffield going by the pseudonym ‘MiNI dOG’. I’d had a couple of offers from bands via MySpace at this stage – they were curious as to how my poetry could potentially convert to lyrics – but so far nothing had actually come to fruition. MiNI dOG started by cutting-up my poor mobile phone recordings and layering them over some dance instrumentals that had recently won him ‘Demo of the Week’ in NME Magazine. It wasn’t particularly a musical style that I’d aspired to, but our early muse was a shared love for ‘Born Slippy’ by Underworld and I of course turned to ‘Original Pirate Material’ by The Streets for inspiration as one of the groundbreaking albums in my musical youth. Lyrically, my poems were all designed to be snappy and humorous and always with a punch-line – if you’re grabbing the mic and talking in rhyme in a pub or at a gig then you need to keep the audience’s attention. So the early songs documented my ‘Seaside Shenanigans’, my tales of getting beaten-up in my hometown whilst trying to pursue a young lady, and my memories of ‘Free Shots, Fishbowls, Four-for-One’ on a recent 18-30 holiday with my college mates.
And what does that first album mean to you now, looking back?
It’s special to me because those are the first lyrics that I ever wrote, and so the whole approach towards writing them was blissfully naïve and freed from any preconceptions or ambitions. They weren’t written with the knowledge that they’d ever be properly released and at that stage I wasn’t conscious of where my lyrics should go or what kind of balance I’d need across a twelve track album. They simply form the painstakingly honest poetic diary of a teenage lad with his heart on his sleeve. Obviously now that I look back, there are one or two lines that make me cringe here and there and a few tracks that I’d much rather not listen to, but on the whole I’m still proud to have co-written ‘Love, And Other Catastrophes’.
Those earlier songs were comic on first listen, but there was instantly an underlying darkness that really excited us. In hindsight it carried similar tones to the first Happy Mondays album in that there are always two sides to Shaun Ryder’s lyrics, and the ominous undertones are always the ones that leave a lasting impression. I met up with MiNI dOG and instantly realised that a song-writing partnership – and indeed a great friendship – was born. We clicked immediately and developed a great understanding. Clearly at that stage I was naïve and inexperienced, but gradually he guided me and moulded me as our mutual side projects began to develop. I stopped writing poetry and turned my attention towards lyrics when he encouraged me to write something about my girlfriend at the time, which formed the lyrics to ‘It’s Only Been A Week’. A few months later she ended the brief relationship and the classic break-up lyric came with ‘One Way Traffic’. As I continued with my elaborate exploits throughout 2007 – taking in a three holidays in total (an 18-30 in Malia, Benicàssim Festival in Spain and then a huge Halloween Party in Derry) – the lyrics were never short of inspiration. My rule was simple: if it didn’t happen then I didn’t write about it.
When I think back, I was documenting the most exciting time of my life. At the age of 18 you have the perfect balance of adulthood without the curse of too much responsibility. I started working at the First Direct call centre in Leeds, which I absolutely fucking despised, but fortunately I still had time to write. It was in the middle of July when S&D had its first major breakthrough. A voicemail message that was left on MiNI dOG’s phone from a pub toilet in Leeds was the first ever version of ‘Red Lipstick’. The incredibly catchy chorus hook was backed by a simple Northern Soul-inspired groove, and suddenly we started to develop into something that we were both comfortable with. The clattering Motown drums on ‘The Thrill of Thirty Seconds’, the dark Amy Winehouse-esque beat on ‘Only Lust Ignores Violence Involving Ambulances’ and the soulful female backing vocals that feature prominently in almost every song were all combining to make our signature sound. MiNI dOG will be the first to admit that he didn’t know when to stop when adding things to the tracks; indeed, our debut album features brass, strings, glockenspiels, keyboards, congas and organs on top of the standard vocal, guitar, bass and drum set-up. Our shared love for The Smiths is reflected in his jangly Johnny Marr-inspired guitar parts and the Hammond organs that sit beneath a few of the tracks. My spoken word style doesn’t vary greatly but the lyrics are delivered with passion and sincerity, and told in their truest form. We had tried several times to record me singing throughout some of the early demos but it soon became apparent to MiNI dOG that I wasn’t a natural singer. I sang on the choruses to maintain their hook and help the songs stand-out, but the lyrical style and indeed the origins of our song-writing partnership were maintained in the conversational verses.
The real beauty of this album is that neither of us had any idea where we’d go or what would happen with the songs that we were writing together. For me, even just hearing my voice on a song was ridiculously exciting, but I soon began to realise that the record we were compiling was genuinely something special. Obviously I liked it and to an extent I fully expected my friends and family to like it too, but before long I emerged as a ruthlessly ambitious young man and was determined to take Skint & Demoralised further than anybody – myself and MiNI dOG included – initially expected. The whole story of being played on BBC Radio 1 by Steve Lamacq and Colin Murray after 6 months and then signing to Mercury Records after 9 months has been told a million times. I don’t need to go into that. But the excitement of how rapidly S&D was developing and the sudden realisation of the possibilities that we had will always resonate in the first album for me. Nobody would have thought that a faceless middle-aged producer from Sheffield and an entirely inexperienced Wakefield teenager doing spoken word would ever get further than first on the bill or the odd novelty play on BBC Radio Sheffield. Within thirteen months of forming we were sat in The Daptone Studios in Brooklyn, New York whilst one of the most famous soul session bands in the world began working on our debut album.
Can you go into detail about getting signed, I think for those not in the know it can easily be construed that that’s the summit, you’ve made it, but what’s it really like?
Being picked-up by a major label was the most incredibly surreal, exhilarating and ultimately terrifying experience of my life. There is simply no way that you can explain it. When you write songs as a teenager, of course you think you’re the dog’s bollocks deep down. Of course you think the songs are brilliant, and why wouldn’t anyone else? That’s only natural. It’s bound to happen. But when the most respected champion of new music since John Peel agrees by playing it on his Radio 1 show, and then the biggest record label in the entire world sticks you in a luxury hotel and tells you that they want to offer you a record deal, you suddenly sit back and think: “Shit. Maybe they are fucking brilliant.” It’s not like winning the lottery because this is something that you’ve created; these are lyrics that I’d written on our family PC at home, in a notepad on holiday in Spain, on the bus back from working in the call centre. These were our little creations that were suddenly being talked about alongside six-figure sums at Universal HQ. I’m not saying this to brag by any means; I’m merely trying to demonstrate the scale of it all. Nine months after we’d even talked. Two months after I’d turned nineteen. How can you even begin to comprehend something like that without being carried-away by it all? I soon became accustomed to, but without taking for granted, some of the VIP treatment that was on offer with a major label. Travelling in First Class on the train and then having a driver collect you from the station to take you to your flashy four-star hotel in Shepherd’s Bush. Free designer clothes and a monthly retainer that was double the amount of what I earned in my relatively well-paid job at First Direct. Rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tom Jones and Alex Turner at the Q Awards and then dancing next to Sugababes in The Met Bar afterwards, absolutely hammered on free booze. It all sounds wonderful, but the one thing that I wanted more than anything in the world was to release that album.
But what is the reality? It can’t all be popping corks and pop stars?
It soon occurred to me that everything in the music industry was a painstakingly slow process. Jobs that you’d expect to take three days are closer to three weeks, and you can often go a fortnight without anything happening at all. Sure, I was excited to have signed, but I’d gone from everything happening at lightning pace to pretty-much nothing happening at all. After three months, we finally flew to New York City to begin the sessions. Recording with The Dap-Kings was MiNI dOG’s idea – he knew that he had to think of something ridiculously elaborate in order to win the role of producer, and somehow it worked. Insanely expensive and lavish ideas are very popular at major labels. Recording the album was at times a horrendous experience and at other times a wonderful one. The initial session in New York was a disaster; the Dap-Kings were too stubborn to learn any of the tracks in advance and recording on their analogue gear whilst they worked through their first ever takes meant that a lot of post-production had to be done back in Sheffield. We had literally no choice on the matter. We spent a few weeks recording at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire which was somewhere that MiNI dOG had worked before, as well as being the place where Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs recorded their debuts. Unfortunately that session was also unsuccessful, and so the bulk of the work was completed at RAK Studios in London. During this time I was staying in the ‘apartment’ that was owned by the studio. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before in terms of its decadence and features, and when I think back it baffles me as to just how much was being spent. Nobody made us aware that we’d have to pay this money back, of course. Oh no. RAK was a wonderful place, and the icing on the cake came with our own personal chef who cooked us a wide range of beautiful meals ranging from all over the globe whenever we fancied in the evening. For a good few weeks, life was simply untouchable. And then came the hard bit.
Now the problem with being on a major label and having a manager that was very much of the major label mentality himself is that I soon absorbed the outlook, behaviour and indeed jargon that the label used. Naturally I wanted to be as heavily involved as possible with our ‘campaign’, and so release schedules, playlists, marketing strategies and ‘service cycles’ were all a part of my day-to-day conversation. I was told-off for mentioning such things in interviews because it made me sound ‘too corporate’, but ultimately I was just obsessed with my career and how it was developing. After all, I had driven the machine (with guidance from MiNI dOG, of course) from nowhere to the brink of superstardom in a very short space of time. I’d spent hours upon hours updating a makeshift website including a busy forum (which was deleted by the label in favour of a “holding page” which stayed there for three years) as well as working on social networking and self-promotion sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo and XFM Unsigned. It felt very strange and indeed very scary to think that everything I’d worked for and everything that I most cared about in the world was now in the hands of a team of strangers in West London, who were now solely responsible for either creating or destroying my chances of a successful music career. I found it incredibly frustrating that I wasn’t allowed to label meetings. Surely if anybody was qualified to make a decision on how S&D should be “sold” then it was me?! I realise that this was extremely naïve, but the frustration never quite died-down. It just didn’t make any sense to me.
What was it like having your first single released and out there for the world to buy?
I will always remember the first week that our debut single was ‘serviced’ to radio and press. We were doing a limited run of 500 7” vinyl copies of ‘The Thrill of Thirty Seconds’ and so a chart position was out of the picture. This was just intended to create buzz and gather momentum ahead of the New Year. It was during the same fortnight that we were finishing the mixes for the album, and whilst we were doing so I was staying in a small Georgian hotel near Regent’s Park. I began to put myself under immense pressure. This was it: no more speculation, no more ‘what if’ and ‘maybe’. It had to start happening now or it wasn’t going to happen at all. There was an eerie silence for most of the first week before Steve Lamacq decided to play us on the following Monday night slot on BBC Radio 1. Finally the ‘campaign’ had officially started, but rather foolishly I’d attempted to find solace in a bottle of transparent liquid. After a summer of singing lessons (the less said about which the better), I’d started rehearsing with a new band of session musicians whilst MiNI dOG and Richard Woodcraft mixed the album at RAK. I began drinking vodka as early as 10 or 11am – under the impression that it would remove the pressure and create a “comfortable haze” to “ease me through the day”. What I wasn’t aware of at the time of course is that alcohol is a depressant and only serves to exacerbate any anxiety, insecurity, fear, paranoia and worry that may be currently occupying your brain. On the last day of the week I broke down in tears in the mixing studio after I’d been drinking all day, and the rest of the room could only continue fiddling with knobs in an awkward silence as I attempted to console myself.
The single went well – culminating in a successful hometown launch on the night that Colin Murray named it as his ‘Record of the Week’ on Radio 1 – and the most encouraging of all was a ‘Ones To Watch’ feature by Dan Cairns in the Sunday Times Culture. Cairns being the Editor of said publication and therefore one of the most well-known and respected broadsheet journalists in the country. Such an accolade was extremely impressive as we approached the start of 2009 – knowing full well that the possibilities were practically endless. I discovered months later that the label were convinced that we’d be appearing on the BBC Sound Poll for 2009, to the point where they’d planned the whole ‘campaign’ around it. Of course we didn’t, and the scheduled album release was moved back from spring and into summer. I don’t want to go into any specific instances because it isn’t really fair, but let’s just say that there were a handful of blunders at the label that still baffle me to this day. The element of blind luck, stabbing in the dark and ludicrous speculation when it comes to changing people’s lives is quite horrendous.
Describe your feelings on the release of your second single and the reaction that it got?
‘This Song Is Definitely Not About You’ didn’t go as well as the label would have hoped, and at the last minute they removed the option of a download on the track so that a chart position wasn’t possible. Despite this we had a very successful headline tour of the UK in February and it was clear that we were starting to grow a nationwide fan-base. As we approached spring, everybody reached the cold realisation that ‘Red Lipstick’ would have to be the next single. This had been hailed all-along as the ‘breakthrough’ track and whilst we were all excited to ‘launch’ it, deep down we knew that we weren’t in as strong a position as we’d have hoped. We wanted a stronger platform to launch ‘Red Lipstick’ from. We’d hoped for more momentum at this point; ‘Red Lipstick’ was supposed to tip us over the edge, but instead it was going to have to do most of the leg-work as well. Before I talk about the summer ‘campaign’, I should probably delve into my personal life a bit. Give the story another angle, I suppose. I feel that this is necessary in order to paint the entire picture now that I’m sat with the comfort of hindsight in 2011.
We’ll bring you the remaining parts over the course of this week, but in the mean time check out the bands latest single which is our Song of the Day here, and you can download it for free here.
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