The Youth|Pleasure team caught up with upcoming Berkshire band Lucky Punks ahead of their support slot for the Amazons at the Reading date on their Spring tour.
- Hey guys thought we’d start with just introducing yourselves.
Cameron: My names Cameron and I play synth and guitar and backing vocals
Ross: I’m Ross, I sing lead and play guitar.
Pizey: I’m Pizey, I play drums and I sing.
Tom: I’m Tom and I just play bass.
- Where did you get your name from?
Ross: We watched Dirty Harry together.
Pizey: Yes, classic.
Ross: Yeah we watched it at Pizey’s house in Newcastle and yeah there’s that really good quote about feeling lucky and we really ran out of ideas at this point.
Pizey: We were struggling at this point, I can’t remember the names we had in mind.
Cameron: I know one.
Ross: That speaks volumes they were not memorable.
Pizey: Or they were taken.
Ross: Yeah that was horrific finding out the name that you chosen was taken by a classical string quartet.
- Out of all the singles you’ve put out, which is your favourite?
Pizey: Sleeping Dogs.
Tom: It’s got a fun bit for me to play so I enjoy that one. I think it sounds best personally.
Pizey: It gets the best reaction I think, and it’s the most fun to play for us and people tend to enjoy it the most when we play it live. What were you gonna say Ross?
Ross: Hmmm I like them all?
Tom: They’re like children you can’t choose them all.
Cameron; They’re all fantastic, definitely all bangers.
Tom: Each one is better than the last.
Ross: Fucking Gallagher on my right here. No but yeah I like them all, they’re all alright.
Cameron: That was a joke, I like Sleeping Dogs too.
Pizey: We do like them all.
Ross: We continue to play them so they can’t be that bad.
Pizey: But we prefer Sleeping Dogs as a collective.
- If someone had no idea who you were, how would you describe your sound, like which bands would you say you sound like?
Ross: We used to say Duran Duran but probably not anymore.
Cameron: Our friend Ben was chatting to me in the car and he said it was just a Rock N Roll band.
Ross: Yeah, we just do Rock N Roll.
Pizey: I think the recordings don’t really reflect what it is live, live is a bit heavier.
Ross: The recordings were done in a relaxed and chilled environment.
Pizey: And the way we’re going it’s getting heavier as well I think the stuff we’re writing is reflecting this
Ross: Yeah its progressing, it’s developing so I guess I’d say rock, we’re a rock band.
- Who would be your dream band to tour with? Living or dead.
Pizey: The Amazons. But umm I think Foals would be pretty sick.
Cameron: I’d thoroughly enjoy Foals.
Ross: I think we’d last about two days with Foals then we’d all die, their tour diet is obscene.
Pizey: Yeah but we had a pretty bad diet at points in our career.
Ross: When we were earning no money and only living off coffee and cigarettes in Newcastle, yeah that was bad.
Cameron: Pain au Chocolat too don’t forget about that.
Ross: Back on topic, obviously in a kinda utopian world, Beatles would be pretty mad.
Tom: Yeah I wouldn’t mind the Beatles, or The Stones.
Ross: We have fairly vintage taste I’d say.
Pizey: If you can’t keep up with Foals then you can’t keep up with The Stones.
Cameron: If Everything Everything were on the tour too I’d quite like that, the Foals-Everything Everything tour they always do, if we could be opening for that that’d be nice.
Ross: Shame we don’t really suit that sound.
Cameron: Yeah we don’t suit the sound but I’d like to watch the shows and enjoy the music.
Ross: In terms of the sound we suit I’d say The Amazons would be really cool to tour with.
- Out of all of you, who is most likely to forget about a gig and not turn up?
Everyone: Tom.
Ross: Tom what time were we supposed to be meeting today?
Pizey: This is a sore topic let’s move on. We’re all here so that’s good.
Ross: Yeah Tom is probably the most forgetful.
Cameron: Actually me and Pizey did forget Tom’s bass once but I did fix it within 20 minutes so it’s fine. His face was hilarious, but Tom was so happy because Ross was annoyed.
Tom: I didn’t mind it was still a bass.
Cameron: It was very amusing though.
- What are you looking forward to about tonight’s show?
Tom: It’s probably our biggest gig to date.
Ross: Yeah it’s the biggest crowd we’ve played to so that should be good. Depends if they’re all there on time but 600 capacity is the biggest crowd we’ve played for.
Cameron: Actually seeing The Amazons, because Ross has seen them before but the rest of us haven’t.
Ross: They’re really good live. They’re so tight, like really tight.
Cameron: Yeah Estrons and The Amazons have been playing on a few nights together so it’s gonna be interesting to watch that.
- Some of you went to University, how did you balance being at uni and being in a band?
Ross: Badly
Pizey: We were all based in the North expect for Ross who didn’t go to uni so it was quite hard, Ross had a subscription to Virgin Trains commuting back and forth.
Cameron: Ross actually lived with me for a while and I barely knew him at the time so that was quite intense but we got to know each other really well.
Ross: Everyone got the grades they wanted so it didn’t go that badly.
Did you not already all know each other?
Ross: I knew Pizey and Tom from school.
Pizey: I met Cameron through family friends so I brought him in because I knew him. Then we made some magic.
- Have you got any exciting releases coming up?
Ross: Potentially
Cameron: We are playing a new song tonight.
Ross: We’re playing a lot of new stuff at the moment, we are broadening our horizons, we’ve got a couple things in the pipeline but it’s when to release with other commitments and stuff going on.
Pizey: We’re planning on doing some recording soon. We’ve started writing some new stuff but we wanna write a bit more then go into a studio and record.
- Would it be more singles or an EP or an album?
Cameron: We’d like an EP.
Ross: I was gonna say single to be honest. The sounds progressing so we weary, we have a lot of stuff recorded.
Cameron; Yeah it’s like we’re getting a nice little sound going and it could just slot into an EP really nicely but we don’t know what we’re gonna write in a while.
- What’s your favourite thing about the Reading music scene?
Ross: We’re pretty new to it really.
Cameron: I do like the all run to Purple Turtle afterwards, we’ve done that once or twice and that seems very fun.
Ross: It was really cool, post the Palm Honey gig we all went in and everyone was there, you walk in and you see Oscar from Sundara Karma.
Pizey: It’s a very tight knit scene.
Ross: Yeah it’s really cool, you walk in and you see different bands, you see bands that used to be going, like we got chatting to Haize, really nice guys. Chatting to Valeras and all these different bands that are coming up and stuff, you can reliably turn up to Turtle and see some of your mates.
- Who’s your favourite band or artist of the moment?
Tom: I’d say Gorillaz.
Cameron: Bonobo and The XX both released albums and I listen to Bonobo all the time.
Pizey: I like Mac Demarco’s new stuff.
- Final Question, what’s the weirdest show you’ve played?
Ross: This one trans-genre night we did, so the promoter prided themselves on saying they’d pick someone from any genre.
Cameron: We were slap bang in the middle of the line-up.
Ross: The band before were some like heroin addict and his wife.
Cameron: People that looked like they’d go to Glastonbury.
Ross: They looked like they lived in the Stone Circle. And they played some weird kind of acoustic gypsy folk kinda thing.
Cameron: There was a lot of death and skull n bones.
Ross: They finish up and there’s like one man and a dog in there but they were both plastered so we walk in and get heckled by the only ones in the room.
Cameron: And he was stood right at the back behind the bar.
Ross: We played an hour long set and it was horrific.
Tom: We were followed by a Latin Band.
Cameron: To top it all off we parked our car in an overnight car park but it turns out it closed between 7pm and 7am, so all the money we got paid we had to pay back on that.
Photo courtesy of jackkography.
See what the band are currently listening to on their new Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/luckypunksband/playlist/6MyzxArt7XctC7U5NUzqmw
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/luckypunksband
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luckypunksband/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LUCKYPUNKSBAND
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