The Sheffield Scenester

We’d picked a good hot day in July to meet up with Matt Abbott over in The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, so wandering down a hill from the car park, trying not to tread in too many sheep droppings en route, we found a nice spot for a long chat. The idea was we’d ask a few questions about his new album ‘This Sporting Life’ and Matt would answer them.....but all we did was start with what he’d been doing since we last saw him back in 2009 and he just went with it, so here goes;

Scenester: We haven’t actually seen you since Tramlines 2009 so if you could outline what you’ve been doing since then…..

Matt: There’s been a lot of changes, basically back in 2009 we were signed to Mercury Records, quite a big record label, so we thought, big record label, they should be able to do big things but unfortunately they couldn’t. You see even though our songs are catchy and melodic we are traditionally an alternative indie act and it didn’t work out, the big single ‘Red Lipstick’ didn’t go top 40 and they dropped us straight away basically. They never released the album; they weren’t willing to try again and put a different take on things and so dropped us.
By the end of 2009, we had no label, no manager and no money so weren’t really sure what to do, so 2010 we took a break from it and re-evaluated the situation. I then started doing some stand up gigs, that’s what I started out as, doing stand up poetry before the music, you’ve probably seen Jon McClure do it, but I started out doing that and ended up working with a producer. But I went back to stand up gigs at places like Latitude Festival and Leeds Festival, but when I did the Leeds one loads of people were shouting out Skint And Demoralised, so I thought we’ve still got something going here, it seems daft to leave it so we started writing songs again.
Now we kinda thought we’re not gonna get signed again, we’re not gonna make any money...so lets just make a record that we love, something that we can be proud of. If nobody else hears it then at least we’ve had fun doing it, so we made this album and it got to the start of 2011 and thought we’ll see where we can go with it. I’m now managing it myself booking gigs in, got a new band together; basically these guys are my best mates, guys that have been playing for years so we’re all really tight and they were just hungry to gig.
Then I actually ended up getting a record deal in Germany, and then the German label said would you be up for doing some kind of third party licensing if we can find anyone else? So they got us a deal in Japan with a label that had the band Answering Machine, so they spoke to a UK label who had heard of us a few years ago but they didn’t realise we’d been dropped and they were happy to sign us!
So yeah it’s totally, totally different from what it was before, no dreaded record label with ‘big money budgets’ and ‘marketing this’, now it’s just me and one other guy from the label, there’s no money, I know it’s a cliché but…we’re just doing it for the love of music because we have nothing else! But it feels a lot better, like booking gigs myself and doing all the press, it feels like I’ve got control over my career as opposed to twelve people in London who don’t really know what they’re doing. It was a bit like a task off The Apprentice, where you have twelve different people with twelve different ideas and they’re all pulling in twelve different directions, at the time it seems brilliant......but when they watch it on ‘You’re Fired’ they realise how bad it was. It was literally like they didn’t know what they were doing and if you’re selling a product, because unfortunately that’s what you become isn’t it, and you don’t know what you’re selling then how are they supposed to know what they’re buying?
I mean I don’t want to sound too bitter over it, I’m not saying they were absolutely terrible it’s just that we didn’t work on that label! They’re very good at what they do when it is Pixie Lott, but not for us and that’s why it’s so much better this time round cos he’s never once said to me “What do you want to wear? How do you want to appear? We think we’re gonna make you the next Arctic monkeys!” ….he just said “I wanna put your albums out!” But obviously we haven’t got ambitions to be on the radio or get in the charts, it’s literally just a case of we’re back in business. A lot of people will be saying “What happened to S&D?” so the single release will hopefully let people know that we are back in business followed by the release of the double album and from there we’re just going to build it up. Me and the lads are gigging as much as we can and hoping to get a tour in autumn, we’ve got a little tour in December so fingers crossed! The album is a double release, but it’s not entirely new material because when we signed before, the album never actually got released. When ‘Red Lipstick’ didn’t go straight into the top 40 they thought ‘That’s it, they’re done’ so there was no point in releasing the album, which to be fair doesn’t make sense! I mean they spent a lot of money making the album...so even if it had only sold a few thousand copies then maybe they could of re-couped some of the costs. I think for them it’s the embarrassment of releasing an album that only goes in at number 50, but fortunately we managed to get the rights back so people can access it. So when we brought out the new album ‘This Sporting Life’ we put ‘Love, And Other Catastrophes’ as disc 2 in a bonus pack.
When we signed to Mercury, S&D, well basically there are two of us – I write the lyrics, then there’s a producer who writes the music, in fact he found me on MySpace and said I want to put music to your spoken word! So when we signed we wanted him to produce the album, but we thought the label wouldn’t be too keen because he’s never produced a hit record before...so we thought if we’re gonna produce it we’re gonna have to come up with the most bombastic idea possible and we were really big fans of Amy Whinehouse’s ‘Back To Black’ album, so we thought we should record it with the Dap-Kings. They’re this amazing soul session band from Brooklyn, New York who played on Amy’s album, they are world famous in the soul circuit and they do session work – they worked on the Mark Ronson album as well, not that we like that album – so we said we want to record with them and this guy at the label absolutely loved it!
We were flown out to New York to record with the Dap-Kings and it was absolutely ridiculous, they charged us $10,000 a track! When we turned up it was an absolutely amazing studio, this tiny little analog studio in a really rough area of Brooklyn, the most modern thing in there was a CD player. But because they were really old fashioned, hard core session musicians they’d not listened to any of the track. So when it came to recording, their idea was to hear it first and then ‘jam’ it but we were saying “No, we want the parts exactly how it is” so we had a little bit of a stand off but eventually got it out of them, we were only there for five days...but it was absolutely mental!
So we came back to London and did a bit of recording in London, and yeah there was a personal chef and all sorts of ridiculous stuff. You’d think they’d try and save money, but they were spending money like we were gonna sell five million copies. Everytime someone from the label came to see us, they’d be chauffeured about with a private driver and personal chef’s, they’d have thousands of pounds on designer clothes, but at the time when they say they’ll put you in a five star hotel and you say “Oh yeah!”, you don’t realise it’s your money they’re spending. If the guy from the current label had said “I’ll spend this….and you’ll become that…”, then I wouldn’t have been interested at all! So the first album was done in New York and London, while the second album was done in our bedroom, kind of the wrong way round really....but it’s the music that counts really.

Scenester: So are you happier with the second album then?

Matt: Well yeah....but because we did produce the first album we did have creative control, so there were no stupid ideas that we really hated. But because we’d signed the big deal and gone to New York we got a bit carried away with ourselves and tried to make it sound really big, we already had brass parts and strings, but we wanted to have a massive orchestra and really it’s almost overbearing to be honest. So with the second album we’ve taken a step back, we’ve stripped all the female backing vocals, keyboards, brass and strings, it’s just guitar, bass, drums....but it is more mature and I sing as well cos on the first album it’s just vocal words, which to be fair is how we started – we actually cut up poems, put music underneath it and we just kept it like that. A lot of people said “You sound like The Streets!” or “You’re only talking cos you can’t sing” but I recorded these poems before he cut them up. I’m not a great singer, it’s not like I’m trying to be Russell Watson or anyone like that, I mean Shane McGowan can’t really sing but……
But on this second album it’s almost like we’re not trying as hard, which we’re not because we just wanted to make an album for ourselves whereas with the first one it was more like “Look at me, look at me!” But now with this second album out we’re gonna try and get as busy as possible, we’re hoping to book a tour for September/October time, you know looking for a few support slots, I might be touring with a band called General Fiasco – a band from Northern Ireland – plus we might do our own little tour and we’ve got a small European tour in December. I’m hoping with the album out it’ll get a bit of airplay then people will be asking us to play instead of me ringing around twenty places and getting one gig! We’ve done a few good gigs though, there was one at The Forum which was a bit strange because they didn’t clear any tables away or anything...so people were sat around eating and drinking when we went on stage, it was a bit like Flight Of The Conchords really!
I think I’ve just grown up a lot really, cos when we wrote the first album I was 17/18, so the vast majority of it was about girls. You can’t write about something unless you’ve experienced it, so even though most of it is about girls, its about relationships that have gone well or not gone so well. My number one aim was just to be honest so obviously a lot of people can relate to it.
Now on the second album I’ve gone from a teenage boy to a man basically, I was twenty one when I wrote it and obviously there are one or two songs about girls still...but politically? I’ve always carried political messages in my spoken word, it’s just very hard to get it across in songs without sounding clichéd, but then you hear someone like Billy Bragg do it, he does it so well that it doesn’t sound naff at all. I have tried it a few times, but I’m not as good at writing about political stuff as I am at writing about relationships! You stick to your strengths and at the end of the day the psychological or emotional situations, that kind of human narrative, that’s were my strengths are.
But I think the second album is a lot more mature, it’s not the diary of a teenage boy anymore….well basically it’s very strongly influenced by the kitchen sink dramas from the early 60’s – ‘Taste Of Honey’, ‘Saturday Night Sunday Morning’, ‘Billy Liar’ – it’s very much influenced by them kind of films. They were the first films to come out that really reflected Northern British working class life, and to be fair Coronation Street as well, I know it’s a bit naff now but back then it was really true! Anyway one of these films was called ‘This Sporting Life’ which was filmed and set in Wakefield and with me being from there I named it after that! At the time they were so honest that they were quite shocking films, they talked about troubles in relationships. I mean in ‘Saturday Night Sunday Morning’ this guy cheats on a married woman with her sister and gets her pregnant, that kind of issue, it’s not shocking anymore but it’s just the honesty I think!
It’s that certain view on life and that tongue in cheek cynicism, that’s what I’ve tried to emulate really and I think growing up in somewhere like Wakefield you have to have your tongue in your cheek! Whereas the first one I didn’t know, I didn’t even know it was gonna be on an album, I was just talking about my girlfriends. So yeah it was as uncontrived and as unpretentious as possible, because it was never meant to be anymore than a little side project, which is good because there’s a certain innocence about the first album. Now once you get signed then it becomes hard because you start trying to hard and you end up sounding contrived, but musically This Sporting Life is a lot better……well not better, I just prefer it really!

And there you have it, an expanded history of the rise, fall and rebirth of Skint & Demoralised, straight from the horse’s mouth. In all honesty not only one of the most forthright interviews we’ve ever done, but also definitely one of the funniest from a man who is anything but afraid to voice his opinion! We’d like to thank him for an outstanding interview in a picturesque location (YSP was his idea).

Skint & Demoralised are playing this Bank Holiday at the Frog & Parrot, The Plug on September 23rd with Spiders and having seen them at SOYO during the Tramlines festival, it is definitely a gig worth seeing.

Also on September 12th Skint & Demoralised are releasing their next single 'Hogmanay Heroes' as a free download!