Summer Camp talk to us! We love them, we love them even more!

Summer Camp

After coming across the superbly excellent Summer Camp (Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley) back in December last year with an ‘introducing Summer Camp‘ feature – back when we didn’t even know their identities – and giving them a glowing live review supporting The Drums, the time has now finally come for a one-on-one with the band. It’s taken a long time!

When you first started, everything was quite secretive – how long did you think or hope that was going to last?

Jeremy Walmsley: We wanted to stop it being a secret much sooner than it eventually emerged. We were just doing the project for fun, and we were doing it anonymously as we didn’t want our friends to know it was us. And then it turned into this big “oh, they’re anonymous” thing.

Someone at Platform (where Elizabeth is Editor) reviewed your first song didn’t they?

Elizabeth Sankey: Yes, but they had no idea it was me though.

JW: It was really funny. Elizabeth came home from work that day and told me that one of Platform‘s writers had said they were doing a piece on Summer Camp.

You should have done it yourselves! Like last year, when Stewart Lee reviewed his own BBC show for Time Out. It was a really scathing review, where he described himself as “just a man going on and on about nothing”…

ES: That’s’ brilliant! I did get asked to do a Radar piece for NME on Summer Camp, though – they didn’t know it was us but I just couldn’t do that.

Did anyone actually think that you were seven school kids from Sweden?

ES: People did. Even now there are some left still saying we are keeping our identities hidden.

There was a piece in The Independent only the other week saying just as much. Just after the night I saw you play, taking note of the fact that you weren’t wearing masks.

ES: There does seem to be a spate of bands doing the whole anonymous thing, and it’s a really good idea but just not something we set out to do intentionally.

JW: It’s true, even though in a way it worked out really well for us. The whole anonymous “idea” simply wasn’t an idea. We just wanted to make some music.

ES: We weren’t sure how we would do the whole reveal thing – we thought we’d end up probably just playing live, with people seeing it was us and writing about it. Luckily, we were outed by The Stool Pigeon and we just had to deal with it.

Did you ever even consider playing live with masks?

ES: By the time we were playing, a lot of people knew who we were anyway. We didn’t want to hold on to it, so we kind of just let go.

JW: I think it’s blown up into a bigger deal than it ever was meant to be. No-one sent us an e-mail saying “Hey, who are you?” I’m not sure anyone actually cared about it at the time. Now it’s just an interesting thing for journalists to talk about. I wish we had a better answer to the question.

ES: Yeah, I wish we’d planned it because we would have enjoyed it a lot more rather than being stressed out by it.

JW: But then again, Max Clifford is my father.

ES: No he isn’t!

The first thing you did was a cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ as made famous by The Flamingos. How did you come about that?

ES: I made Jeremy a mixtape with it on there. We decided then to do a cover of it one afternoon.

JW: I’d never heard Elizabeth sing.

ES: I hadn’t really sung before!

It’s odd because another band that are playing here this weekend, North Atlantic Oscillation [Ed - at The Great Escape], covered it too last year. A recent-ish one I really like though is Mercury Rev’s cover, which was a b-side to one of the single releases of ‘Goddess on a Hi-Way’, and also in a John Peel session.

JW: They were doing some Neil Young covers around that period too, acoustic ones.

Yes, ‘Vampire Blues’ is on that single as well. Their ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ has a load of saxophones on it. It’s on their Peel Sessions boxset.

JW: Some of my favourite versions of that are the really cheesy, big-band jazz versions before the Flamingos did it, which was a massive reinvention of the song – they really re-wrote it.

The original is from the early/mid ’30s, isn’t it. Flamingos late Fifties but I guess a lot of people found it through its use in GoodFellas. I know I did…

JW: And American Graffiti.

A lot of people talk about Summer Camp in the same terms as glo-fi bands like Washed Out, Memory Tapes and so on. Do you feel an affinity with that, and them? Or a UK reaction to it?

JW: I can see why people compare us. We are similar, but it’s not like we ever sat down and said “Let’s be a glo-fi band!”

ES: I think it’s natural to have comparisons to them and it’s especially nice, as they are doing great stuff. Likewise most bands in that position will say they’re not set in a scene. We like that stuff but we never really sat down and self-consciously went for that. We can see why the comparison is made but obviously we personally think that what we do is different.

I think it’s interesting as the Wikipedia page for Chillwave…

Both: There’s a Wikipedia page on it!

Yep, and you aren’t on it actually.

JW: Well there you go, that’s the proof. If we aren’t on the Wikipedia entry we can’t be chillwave!

It does mention acts mistakenly labelled by iTunes as chillwave, like The XX, jj and Best Coast.

ES: Really? What I really like is that chillwave was invented by Carles at Hipster Runoff, as a joke. It’s amazing that it’s now a genre, with a Wikipedia page based on how he labelled those bands.

I think that does become a self-perpetuating thing; a lot of these bands self-release stuff on tapes instead of digitally or on CD.

ES: They are into the whole lo-fi aesthetic.

Yes, that seemed to be a happy coincidence at first, but now people are running with it and it’s a key characteristic.

JW: A few years ago it was the likes of Times New Viking doing their releases like that, and a few years ago you had Fennesz’s Endless Summer, which if it came out this year…

It would be included as chillwave, yeah, definitely.

JW: Really though, if somebody wants so label something as being ‘X’, it doesn’t have any effect on the way we think about our music when we’re doing it – but maybe it does when we listen to it.

ES: I think it’s really good to be compared to other bands in such a way as to make you not want to be seen as being as poppy as them say – it gives you an opportunity to move in a different direction.

I think that’s an interesting quirk of what you might want to call ‘The Digital Age’; unlike say Merseybeat, punk, shoegaze or even Britpop, you won’t have met any of these bands. You aren’t working out of one small record label or a club in London, LA or Paris.

ES: That is quite sad though in a way. Now with blogs you can be a Drowned in Sound band or Muso’s Guide or Pitchfork or whatever.

Those are your tribes more than any individual band.

ES: Yeah, that’s how you get classified which in a way is better because we did a remix for  James Yuill, who we only met yesterday -  it was amazing to work with him.

I think it’s really good that there’ve been bands forming from forums in the same way that bands used to from NME adverts.

JW:Yep, Kasier Chiefs found their drummer that way.

It’s good that people can respond to things in that way. It’s like the call-and-response thing between The Beatles and The Beach Boys or punk on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s on a micro-level but it’s more frequent.

JW: Like when ‘No Scrubs’ came out and that other group did ‘No Pigeons’.

While now, a pastiche like that would be on YouTube within days.

ES: The only problem with the era is longevity… everything moves at a much faster pace.

These things have to be place in context, Sporty Thievz’s ‘No Pigeons’ makes no sense if you haven’t heard ‘No Scrubs’

ES: When you are a band and you’ve been playing for years and years at the Hacienda and you finally get there with the internet, there’s a very short time to make an impact.

JW: When I look at it, most of the music I listen to know, it’s music I hear about and buy through the internet.

Oh totally. When I was 16-17, I used to read NME, Mojo, Q, Uncut, Select and Melody Maker, look at the reviews and say “that sounds good, I might buy that.” Now, when I read the ones that are still with us I may have heard a lot of the records already and I’m thinking “I don’t agree with that” or “Yeah, that’s what I thought”.

ES: In a way that’s good and brings everyone to a level – you can tell when someone gives a bad review to say “Ahh! not everyone agrees.”

With the video for ‘Ghost Train’ and the package of the group, the artwork, the MySpace and so on, was there a real aim to have a motif running through in a way that a band like The Smiths did?

ES: I think we’ve just been lucky enough to find a visual image that matches what we do.

JW: The Smiths and Belle and Sebastian are great examples of that.

With their artwork, you could take the name away and tell it was one of their sleeves.

JW: I think for us with the artwork and the blog, which Elizabeth adds to most days, it’s quite easy to look at a photo and say whether it’s a Summer Camp photo or not. The music that we’ve made does seem to have a strong kind of visual sense – or I like to imagine so anyway. It’s not why we’ve done it but I hope that aesthetic is distinct enough for people to know it’s Summer Camp in the same way as you mention with The Smiths.

ES: I haven’t really thought about it like that again, as it’s a happy accident more than anything. I really like having something where the image fits in with the story of the song, and it reflects on each other. To be honest I just really love all those photos and I may have done a blog on them anyway!

JW: I’m sure it’s the same with The Smiths; those were just images that Morrissey liked and connected to something in the music.

In some cases literally, with the lines from Billy Liar and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning being incorporated into the songs and images used on the sleeve.

ES: I think it’s an idea that offsets the music and adds to it. Maybe your own sense of what the songs are about. Not something as literal as “here’s a song that’s about smack and here’s the sleeve of someone doing smack”, though…

Is Summer Camp now the primary focus for both of you or is it an off and on project?

JW: It’s been our primary focus for four months now and I imagine that it’s going to be that for the indefinite future.

ES: We both do other stuff as well, but this is what we are committed to and passionate about. It would be great to do it for as long as possible.

Is this a good way to break up the normal cycle of touring and recording?

JW: Oh yeah, already I mean going back to the chillwave comparisons, the songs that we wrote in our first few months of existence are  nothing like the songs we’ve written since then. They are more all over the place vocally; if you had heard the three most recent songs we have recorded, I don’t think anyone would say we’re a chillwave band.

ES: Then again, to us they sound so different but to anyone else, who knows?

Are you finding your way around in terms of getting the sounds you make in the studio live? Is it a difficult thing, the mix between playing, singing, loops and samples?

ES: It’s tricky. We don’t want to have too much that isn’t live but we have some amazing people that help us out – we are really lucky to have them. It has been difficult though, and each time we play we are getting better and better.

JW: The most important thing is choosing which songs to play, as we’ve got nearly thirty to choose from now.

So has it affected your writing over the past few months, knowing you’ve got to perform the songs live?

ES: A little. We have been having conversations in the middle of writing about how hard it might be to recreate. But we don’t let it put us off.

When you take the famous example of The Beatles just before they stopped touring, there are shows from Japan in 1966 where between the screams and the small PA systems, they can’t get quite get across songs like ‘Nowhere Man’. Aside from all of the other issues they had with touring, they reached a point where they must’ve just thought themselves, “fuck it”.

JW: I dunno. I’ve seen some versions of ‘Nowhere Man’ which are still awesome. We do really enjoying playing live.

ES: It’s just a bit of a challenge that needs to be overcome every now and again.

I’m sure The Beatles would have liked some loops or a laptop to help them out, not that either are some kind of panacea.

JW: I do think that some people see a laptop, and think everything is coming from it. For us, it’s usually only one keyboard sound coming from the laptop; we don’t have any backing track, and all the vocal samples are being triggered by Elizabeth.

ES: We want it to be real; we don’t want it to be seen as fake.

JW: I saw a band who had an orchestra on a laptop. Can you imagine!

ES: Urrggh!

JW: A lot of people probably aren’t that bothered anyway, if it makes the show better, whatever. For us, we just want to be excited about our show.

ES: For us, it’s because we are really anal about controlling all the music coming from the stage.

JW: There are ways of including it that are really good. I’ve done gigs like that before and I don’t think it’s as much fun for the musicians. We want it to be a good show, and we want to be able to get into it.

ES: Plus it kind of restricts you. I’ve only been singing for a little while so it’s good to know that if something went wrong, the band would still be there behind me.

How have you found singing live in general?

ES: Yeah, it’s been amazing. Before we started doing it I said to the band, “I don’t know what I’m going to do! What if I go mad?” It was really odd not knowing what was going to happen, and I was really stressed out. Then as soon as I did the first gig, it was just fine. I wouldn’t say by any stretch I’m a seasoned pro, though. I still have a long way to go as a performer but when you get up there and you start, the adrenaline flows – it keeps you going. Hopefully with more shows we’ll get better and better and better.

After Jeremy mentioned Fennesz, my brain started thinking… even though the vocal samples are twenty years further down the line and not from nature documentaries, your earlier stuff really reminds me of Boards of Canada. And they’re another group who retained an air of mystery for years, until it was revealed that they were brothers. I would almost go as far as describing them as they are prog-chillwave™ (no Google hits for this so I’m claiming it). Thoughts?

ES: I don’t think either of us have ever actually listened to much Boards of Canada, so that wasn’t an influence or reference point for us.  ’90s hip hop like Wu-Tang, Organized Konfusion and Pharcyde were where I first experienced bands using sampling, so I’d state bands like that as more of an influence.

JW: Yeah, I’ve never really listened to much Boards of Canada I’m afraid, but I do see where you’re coming from. I would point to Eno/Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts as a pretty essential bit of sample tomfoolery.

Also back to our conversation about the nature of reviews and the changing shit that the internet has had on closing that three-month gap between a record going to reviewers and the public. A 15-year-old can download every Rolling Stones album in a little over an hour, and become an ‘expert’ in no time at all.

Do you think that reviewers no longer act as gatekeepers? Do you think that this has made the music press more insular not less, due to a conformation bias between internet music fans, bloggers and the publications? The more democratic nature of the internet has seen a centalisation of taste, with people listening to more music, but end-of-year lists still seem to coalesce around the same 100 or so albums each year. I often find that come December, the more interesting lists come from places like Scandinavia or Poland.

JW: I don’t think there’s such a thing about being an expert when it comes to music. That same teenager could just read up about the band on Wikipedia and be able to win a pub quiz on the Stones without ever having heard a note of their music. I think the idea of a reviewer being a “gatekeeper” to music is a bit unfair on listeners, too. Everyone has the right to get into anything – there’s no rule saying “you can’t listen to our band unless you understand our influences”. That would be very weird. So in that respect I think the internet opening up new avenues of discovering music is a good thing. I think.

ES: I love the idea of music journalists being gatekeepers.  I think it did used to be that one of the main roles of the reviewer was to explain how the music sounded, since they’d heard it and the reader hadn’t.  And now, the readers probably have heard it, and already made up their minds.  I quite like the new way, and I think the growth of small blogs are fantastic.  It means big music publications have to up their game and change how they discuss music, which is great.  And it can also mean there’s sometimes a fixation on finding new bands, as everyone wants to be the first to write about something.  That means older and more established bands sometimes get pushed to one side when they release their second or third album, because everyone’s excited about some new act.  But, as you pointed out yourself, it also means people are digging around to find stuff where they wouldn’t normally look, rather than just taking those lists you mentioned as the be all and end all.

How has it been putting out records with Moshi Moshi, and touring with some of their roster like The Drums and Slow Club? There doesn’t seem to be a definitive Moshi Moshi sound even after four years of the singles club. How did you come about joining their gang?

ES:  Moshi Moshi are amazing.  As a band who never expected to be a band, our priority has always been to work with people who we trust and who value the same things we do.  We were both fans of the label already, and felt really lucky to be invited into their gang.  And working with them, we’ve found that they’re lovely, wise, and hilarious people who tell it like it is.  Touring with Slow Club was brilliant.  We were all mates already, so it was great to tour with them and see how they do it.  Their fanbase is insanely dedicated, and you can totally see why – they’re a band who’ve grown gradually in an old-school way, they’ve done it ‘right’ (whatever that means).  It was amazing to see them at Koko, having a huge crowd singing along.  It was the culmination of all the hard-work and talent those two have put in.  Plus their bassist kicked ass [Ed - that was Jeremy].

Thank you, Summer Camp!

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