Interview With The Scribes! (@TheScribes)

Q. What are the most import­ant val­ues as a group you hold that have helped you grow togeth­er?

Shaun: On stage we always say we’ve got to give our all, every time. If the crowd’s 10 people or 10,000 people, it still means someone’s inves­ted their time and money in our music, and we try to make sure that it’s always worth their while doing so. It’s a philo­sophy that we’ve stuck to through­out the years and it’s turned count­less gigs that may oth­er­wise have just been aver­age into mem­or­able nights for us and, hope­fuly, for the crowd as well. In the stu­dio, we tend to say that nothing’s wrong unless we don’t like it. No mat­ter what the style of track is, no mat­ter what the sub­ject is, all that’s import­ant is that we enjoy it ourselves, and with any luck that shines through on record and on stage!

Jonny: It’s always been great that we’ve been brought up listen­ing to dif­fer­ent styles of music and can bring them all togeth­er and see what hap­pens. Not wor­ry­ing about what oth­er groups are mak­ing but just mak­ing whatever the fuck we feel like!

Q. Tell us about the concept and idea behind the video of The Death of Loki?

Shaun: “The Death Of Loki” track, video and LP are all the geni­us of Jonny, so I think it’s best he answer that!

Jonny:The concept came about dur­ing the cre­ation of the latest LP, where I was excav­at­ing my unused lyr­ics so I could move on to cre­at­ing new mater­i­al. So the writ­ing about myself grow­ing up was in a sim­il­ar vein to me denoun­cing my ali­as as Loki, and mov­ing for­ward with new con­tent as the new and improved Jonny Steele.

Q. Dates for your 2014 per­form­ances have already been added what things will be dif­fer­ent from past shows?

Jonny:We’ll be incor­por­at­ing some of the new mater­i­al from The Death of Loki and Ill Lit­er­at­ure LP’s as well as the the latest album we’ve been work­ing on. Branch­ing out and and col­lab­or­at­ing with oth­er artists has giv­en us a lot of dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions we can take the show, we’re con­stantly tweak­ing our sets so it’s good to keep things fresh!

Shaun: We’re def­in­itely per­form­ing a fair few new tracks on the live show this year, but it’s still going to have our usu­al com­bin­a­tion of far too much energy on stage, a lot of crowd par­ti­cip­a­tion and, hope­fully, good times and fun frol­ics had by all!

Q. Do you have any rituals whilst you’re on tour?

Jonny: They all gen­er­ally involve wait­ing until Lacey passes out, can­’t say much more than that. It involves may­on­naise.

Shaun: Ha! I think we all have dif­fer­ent rituals without even real­iz­ing it! Like Jonny said, our beat­box­er Lacey tends to drink and party all night, both before and after the show, whilst main­tain­ing a level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism on stage of course! Our DJ Kenny is the grown up of the group, he’ll spend his time before shows mak­ing sure the set up is as per­fect as it can be. I tend to go a bit quiet and have a rolly and a pint some­where away from it all before we go on stage, and Jonny gets all social with every­one! It’s a beau­ti­ful and del­ic­ate bal­ance!

Q. How is your music cur­rently being released now dif­fer­ent from your debut The Evol­u­tion EP?

Shaun: Man, that was some time ago now! Our debut was very much sample based, I think we were still fig­ur­ing out our own sound at that time to be hon­est. Our music now involves entirely live instru­ment­a­tion, so it’s a lot more com­plex and pro­gress­ive than when we first star­ted, and we’re all a lot more con­fid­ent in our own abil­it­ies and less wor­ried about what’s expec­ted of a hip hop group in the UK, mean­ing we’ve got total free­dom to make the music that we love and talk about any sub­ject that we want I think everything about it is a lot more mature and cov­ers a wider range, both in terms of con­tent and style.

Jonny: The sound of the ‘Evol­u­tion’ EP was def­in­itely us find­ing our feet in hip hop. Our latest releases find us more com­fort­able lyr­ic­ally and music­ally, now focus­ing our atten­tion on how we can chal­lenge ourselves on cre­at­ing a sound­scape.

Q. What are the best ways for you to be inspired as a group?

Jonny: Influ­ences come about so sporad­ic­ally it’s hard to keep track. The most import­ant aspect becomes secur­ing the idea or spark of cre­ativ­ity that pops in to your head whilst your walk­ing down the street or watch­ing news snip­pets before it dis­ap­pears.

Shaun: I agree, I’ve found inspir­a­tion for song writ­ing in everything from objects, like an empty lar­ger bottle with a paper rose in it, to books, to TV, to my per­son­al feel­ings, to stor­ies I hear about others…everything really! We bring all our ideas togeth­er in the stu­dio and really spark off each oth­er, like Jonny said, I think main chal­lenge is mak­ing sure you remem­ber the things that have piqued your interest long enough to write about them!

Q. Which are the most influ­en­tial political/historical move­ments that you think have inspired your music?

Jonny: The Hip Hop move­ment itself was inspir­a­tion­al enough to encour­age ourselves to cre­ate some­thing from noth­ing. Embra­cing the hun­ger for know­ledge and the free­dom of expres­sion through the use of it, is why hip hop is more of a cul­ture than just a music plat­form.

Shaun: I think Jonny’s said it all there! Hip hop should be a genre of free­dom, not of lim­it­a­tions, you shouldn’t have to write about par­tic­u­lar sub­jects or make music of a par­tic­u­lar sound or BPM, and I think that’s the thing we try to embrace most of all!

For more inform­a­tion vis­it http://www.kamikaziairlines.com/scribes

 

Geor­gina Wal­ters