The Paddingtons Interview
How do you think you’ll look back on 2008? Good year or bad year?
Well… It’s been the hardest year since we started. I had fun with Dirty Pretty Things. (Josh stepped in to the band to play guitar after Carl Barat broke his collarbone.)
To be honest, I wasn’t sure about doing it, but my girlfriend made me do it in the end. I’m glad she did; it made me a better song writer, and I came back after that and wrote like ten new songs, five of which ended up on the album. It made me a lot more confident – before I didn’t sing with The Paddingtons, but Carl made me sing. Then my management came back and said, ‘Why aren’t you singing in that band?’ We played Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Glastonbury; the last gig was on Sunday at five o’clock in the evening, so we went mental after that.
What have you got in the pipeline for 2009?
Well, promote the album. We released it at the end of last year, and it’s been pretty tough to be honest with you man, we’ve had a few trials and tribulations.
There’s been all these added pressures on the band, which I can’t believe we’ve got through, but we have. Hopefully this year will be like full on promotion of the album.
We just started a tour and it sold out in Italy, then we’re gonna have a bit of time off, cos like we’ve had a bit of shit gone on. So we’ll have like a month off, where me and Tom are gonna record some new material. March time hopefully we’re gonna release a double A-side – one off the album and a track called ‘Lady Boy’, which is a song me, Adam Green and Tom wrote. We started writing it in New York, then he came over, he played at Koko then we ended up going to a house party, and we sat at this house party and just jotted all the lyrics down…
The song is about a lady boy from Hull, we recorded it with Lord Algae and Moccasin, which are pseudonyms for Stan and Didz from Dirty Pretty Things.
I’ve kind of made one [resolution] to myself, that I would start and finish writing a solo album. I started writing an album with a girlfriend, I kind of like finished and I wanna record it on my own. I wanna record as much new material as possible. The thing is about being in a band and especially having to run your own label, you don’t have any time. I don’t want the creative side of things to dry up. My resolution for 2009 is… if I get an idea I want to record it straight away.
Are there any bands who you think are going to be big in 2009?
We took three bands out with us in October, November on tour, and all three of them were amazing. My favourite of them is called Rum Shebeen, they’re wicked. There’s a three piece called the Daisy Riots, which is a shit name and I’ve told them that. Another band that came out with us is called Lord Auch, they’re a little bit different and I’m not sure they’ve got the potential to be mainstream.
What do you think will happen musically in the next 12 months?
The way things are going, I mean we’re not doing that well, but depressing bands like Glasvegas are doing well; the musical tide has gone out for bands. They supported us when I was playing for DPT a few times. They’ve got two songs which I really think are genius songs, but the rest of them just sound the same. White Lies, they’re another band that they’ve got a couple of good songs, but they’re very samey. There’s no one now who’s got any appeal for the young, like Pete and Carl had.
