Ace Bushy Striptease are a Birmingham band who have been around for a year or so now, and have recently been maturing into the cuddlecore band (warning: almost entirely made up genre) they’ve always threatened to be.
To give you a brief bio - in the last year they’ve been compared to The Beatles, had a song out on one of the best compilations we heard last year and written loads of songs with great titles some of which you can listen to.
In this time they also went through line up changes and guest vocalists but seem to have settled into a four piece now: Basith who plays the guitar, Emma who does the singing, Jeremy who plays the drums and Simon who plays bass but we’ve also seen him sneak out a recorder during gigs.
Being a fairly new band, we thought that an interview was in order, and Basith, Jeremy and Simon answered a few questions.
You formed in 2007, how did Ace Bushy Striptease come about?
S: We started started as a “twee-prog” distraction from final year university studies at Aston University, it didn’t really work out as we planned it but I think everything has happened for the best.
There is this lovely Live Music Society with a tiny little practice room in the basement of the student guild. It cost £10 a year to join and you can use the practice room as much as you like for free after that so it really is a great way and place to get started with the whole forming a band thing. Drummer (Jeremy) and bassist (Simon) knew each other previously and bonded more over Broken Social Scene and Mclusky, we found a guitarist and singer but unfortunately they weren’t to stick around. That was in late 2007 and after the obligatory few months of awful attempted covers, we found a totally brill other guitarist (Basith) whilst looking for a keyboard player, got to know each other a bit, went a bit oblong and started writing some songs of our own. We played a few shows and lost a few members, went to recorded some songs and then eventually we found a final singer (Emma) through Jeremy’s friends at home in Brighton.
It’s a needlessly convoluted story really but we’re going well now so I guess it has a happy ending.
You’ve got a hell of a long, Johnny Foreigner-esque list of influences on your myspace and (I suspect that) different members listen to different things - how do you merge all of those things into the songs?
S: I think we’re comfortable enough with each other so that when it comes to writing songs together we can take on little bits of influence from other things we love without them getting in the way of the songs.
B: Yeah we let each other do what we each want, but it works in a way that we just fall shy of stepping on each other’s toes, mostly because our approaches to writing are different enough, it sort of minimises the chances of us clashing.
S: And generally we’ve got good taste during the song writing process so no matter how much we might like to get our swerve on to some drrrty Dubstep or some tunneling Shoegaze, we won’t try to push that influence upon one of our songs because it would sound bloody awful and we know our limitations as a pop-punk band.
B: Along with that, we always seem to uniformly agree on a good song when it happens or ‘works’. I think it helps us that we have all sort of agreed on this over arching approach where musically anything goes.
J: When we go gigging away and such Simon often makes a mix cd and it’s pretty ace really and we all sing along. We all bring CDs and like them even if we wouldn’t own them. I’m sure if we went on a real long tour though that the car would be bathed in blood with broken Ride and Huggy Bear records everywhere. Emma will probably be the only one left driving along with our heads slopping around in the back bopping to Skream and such.
How difficult was it to find places to play initially?
S: Our first show was terribly easy to get as it was a battle of the bands with the aforementioned Live Music Society so that was no trouble but after that we did have a bit of a torrid time finding other shows to play. A lot of the LMS bands do find it hard to break out of the university but we were really determined and we were friendly and asked around people who we respected in Birmingham and I guess we were just lucky that they were nice as pie and willing to bend over backwards to help us find shows and places to record and everything.
So what were your early experiences with those gigs?
B: People can be ridiculously polite it seems, even when we mess up big time they still hang around and clap and stuff.
S: We’ve got a nasty habit of writing new songs on the afternoon of a show instead of rehearsing our existing ones which has come back to bite us in the ass on a couple of occasions. We’re perennially under-practiced and over confident in our abilities but it has lead to some fun (for us at least) skin-of-yr-teeth popshows.
You’ve been through a few line up changes since those early gigs too, has that effected the sound and way you write songs much?
S: I think the lineup changes have been a real help when it comes to honing our song writing techniques. This might sound awful and it is by no means meant to reflect badly on people who have been in the band but I think a lot of bands do get stuck with a lineup that is not as good as it could be. We’re not all great musicians (well one of us is but she’s doing a bloody degree in it so she’d better be) but we work really really well together at the moment. Song writing is easy at the moment whereas at certain points in the past we’ve had trouble getting our proverbial shit together.
We’ve not been ruthless with our personnel issues, people have come and go of their own accord but I think we’re grateful that we’ve had the chance to play around with different formations to find what fits us best rather than getting stuck playing total football when it really doesn’t suit us.
J: Yeah, it felt a bit at the time when *they* left that everything would spiral down horribly but instead it kind of spiraled upward into some sort of clarity. We (I?) still miss them terribly sometimes but stuff happens and people change and I never really knew what ‘band differences’ meant until when they left. It’s a bit sad on my part because I’d been playing with Arjun for years but yeah, we were going different places. What does that even mean?! I’ll stop. Sorry. Gush.
S: I think the sound has changed for the better (though I’m sure every band thinks that) and we’ve got a sound of our own now(ish) it feels. I don’t think we can really talk impartially about our own sound and we’re far too terrible at playing live for other people to be able to notice a sound in our songs but I’m pretty sure it’s there somewhere.
What’s Birmingham like as a musical city now?
S: I’ve (ego-centric) been living in Birmingham for 4 years now nearly and it took me 2 and a half to find the real musical Birmingham and I like to think I was searching pretty hard. There is a real sense of camaraderie within the city when it comes to small shows and I think small promoters (especially This Is Tomorrow) are getting to know what people want to see and really delivering these totally brill lineups.
There is a wave of bands from Birmingham at the moment (Johnny Foreigner, Sunset Cinema Club, Calories are the main three that come to mind) that are capturing the imagination of people on the other sides of the West Midlands and it’s helping people realise there ARE interesting things going on here. There’s also the whole Capsule and Chicks Dig Jerks side of the city (which we’re no way cool enough for) but they keep putting on great events and it’s a lovely thing to have happen in yr city.
Of course yr going to get some awful bands and nothing shows but I think those are both on the decline and as long as the little venues that support independent nights stick around (Island Bar, Victoria, Sunflower etc.) then I can’t see why the city can’t go from strength to strength.
J: I didn’t really notice / was a bit blind to notice anything else stirring until we started going to those Coldrice nights at the Bar Academy and gigs at the Jug and the Flapper and my friend Smigs started rabbiting on about this indie-pop club at the Sunflower. And then last year me and Simon and Bas began sticking our fingers in a bit deeper and now we’re playing with bands who are amazing and from Birminghamish and it’s pretty damn lucky really and makes us very happy.
B: It’s true, being in a band is almost the best way to experience it. There is a really good support network for brand new bands doing things a bit differently. Bands like Sunset Cinema Club have helped us and encouraged us no end and others like us. You can get a real good taste of alternative music on offer with their monthly night Tropical Hotdog, couple that with The Autumn Store and you get a hyper combo of twee folk pop indie grunge delic all for around £4 a go.
You’ve done really well getting gigs outside of Birmingham too - so what’s your secret?
S: Be really nice and genuinely friendly to people. I’m sure there is a legitimate way to get loads shows outside of Birmingham by just asking the right people but the ones we’ve managed to get seem to have come as an indirect result of the shows we’ve playing in Birmingham. We’ve played with bands when they’ve come here and made friends with them and then they ask us to play where they live and we tend to say yes.
Pre-existing relationships with friends and family from other cities have also helped us spread out and meet new people who want to put us on. We’ve become kind of the house band for the Manchester Uni weirdo alternative music club which is a bit strange and we’re not quite sure how it happened but it’s ace fun!
You’ve been plotting a gig called Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff on the 8th May which will see a welcome return to Brum for The Bumblebees and a Birmingham debut for We Aeronauts. Why did you decide to put a gig on and what have you learnt about the promoting so far.
S: I don’t think we’ve really put anything back into Birmingham so far, we go to a lot of a shows and we play when people ask us to but that’s not really helping anyone other than ourselves so we thought it’d be fun to put on a show with some bands we love that maybe other people here could come along to and have a really good time at.
Lessons we’ve learnt about promoting:
- Don’t put yr own band on to begin with. I think we know far too many bands that we want to put on so that we won’t really have space for ourselves for a good while yet and in that time we’ll have probably found new bands that are even better to put on instead of us.
- Get everything ready ultra early just in case yr headliners pull out so you have plenty of time to find a new one.
- Have fun making posters and flyers.
- Plan loads of future shows before you’ve even had the first one - we’ve got lineup ideas for the next 3 as long as this first one doesn’t go too awfully. At the second one we hope to have The Shrieking Violets, Falling & Laughing and The Seal Cub Clubbing Club if all goes to plan.
- Get a fancy hand stamp ready to show who’s paid on the door (ours is of a football and we have some red ink to go with it).
- Find a drum kit!
And finally - what are the most important things about being in a band?
S: The most important thing is to be able to write songs. There is nothing wrong with writing them on yr own but when yr in a band there are more people adding things and they come out tones better! Playing concerts is fun but they’re also really scary and they don’t really beat the excitement of having to count really hard to get to the new chorus which starts after you’ve counted 3 and then 2,3, then 3, then 3,3 (it’s a new song tentatively titled ‘ Heartbreaks In The Snow’).
Coming up with song titles and names for future albums and music video ideas are also jolly important.
J: Enjoying it? Some bands we see look tired. Or tired and bored. And if you’re tired and bored then stop! Go and scream a bit and then at least it will be fun. For me ABS has made little friends and good acquaintances into great friends and that’s also swell and awesome. That actually might be the most awesome and swell thing about it. Because even if we’re (and there is plenty of evidence that we actually are) shit, they are still there. And we can make a lot of noise that no-one else can hear and slink away smiling.
B: I like travelling with my guitar, it makes me feel special.
They also added that Emma Champion sends her regards, and it’s only right to pass them on here.
