UGHH Interviews The Scribes

Me and Jonny (Loki Steele) met at the tender age of 5 and soon realised that no one else liked us very much, so we sort of got stuck with each other and have been best friends ever since. We started the group when we turned 18 and could start performing in clubs properly, we'd been making music/rapping for a few years by then so it was sort of inevitable, and Lacey joined a year later as beatboxer/drunken mess extraordinaire. DJ Kenny Hectyc joined about a year ago as our official DJ and general tech wizard, and we've been rocking the block ever since!

I think I was 14 and I got hold of a copy of hip hop Ejay, a terribly limited program for making beats. I loved it, couldn't put it down and bodged together a recording set up with an old karaoke machine to make some tracks. I had to make the beat on Ejay, then record from the microphone output of the pc directly onto tape cassette, and then using the karaoke machine, record the vocals in one take through a plastic microphone from tape to tape. On relfection, the results may not have been the masterpiece I felt they were at the time, but nonetheless it did give my first steps in beatmaking/song writing. Nowadays I make all the music for The Scribes with live instruments in our studio set up, though the latest release "The Scribes Present Ill Literature", is a group project with myself, bass boss/multi-instrumentalist/occasional singer Jake Galvin, and singer/songwriter/guitar master Jack Joyce.

Cypress Hill I think, probably more Eminem than I'd like to admit (Still one of the best ever in my view), and early Rawkus records stuff, Pharaohe, Talib, RA etc. We used to play Soundbombing and Quasimoto a lot when i was growing up in Bristol, wasn't until a bit later that I found the UK stuff, Aspects, Foreign Beggars etc.

Like anything it's got it's good points and bad points, I think people underestimate how small a scene it really is compared to most other genres, and how much that means acts rely on their fan base to make things happen, so it's got more of a family kind of feel to it, like for better or worse, we're all in this together! In all honesty I don't listen to a great deal of music outside of being in the studio, so I'm probably not the best person to ask! I think hip hop as a whole is stronger than ever, certainly in terms of general awareness, we did a festival this year with a pretty much entirely hip hop line up headlined by De La Soul to a couple of thousand people, so it's great that events like that can happen entirely off hip hop.

I'm not sure if they're still classed as hip hop these days, but I've always admired Foreign Beggars, they've consistently made music that they like, without feeling the need to stay in a mold, and I think that's something the UK scene could do with a bit more of, people experimenting outside of traditional sampling/drum patterns and making their own sound and style.

My Dad was bang into The Kinks, so I got somewhat barraged with them growing up, and I think the story telling aspect of their song writing has definitely rubbed off on me in terms of what I like to write about. I really liked Blur as well which just further re-inforced that style of writing as I think they're quite heavily influenced by The Kinks too. In terms of the actual music I make, it's really hard to say as I don't think it sounds like a lot of other stuff to be honest! Personally I'd say maybe somewhere between Blur, SFA and real hip hop. With "The Scribes Present Ill Literature" it's even harder to say again, as between me, Jake, Jack, Josiah, Jamie, Jonny and Lacey who all contributed, the range of influences is ridiculously wide, but I think that's why the end result is so fresh and genuinely unique. I admire a lot of artists, but I don't think I ever seek to emulate them.

Well, as I just said, it's a bit of a mish mash of different styles, but somehow throughout it all I like to think we've maintained a sort of signature sound to an extent. There's a few funk driven numbers in "Buried" and "Burning Bridges" that are very much the dancier end of the album, and some that veer more towards traditional hip hop like the single "Monsters", "Heavy Wait" and "Dragon Breath", but even they sound like very little else out there. Personally I like the more narrative songs like "Pipe Dreams" and "Jonny Wayne", that's about a kid who's Dad run out when he's too young to remember, so his Mum tells him his Dad was John Wayne so he doesn't find out his Dad did a runner. He grows up believing it and ends up being a bit odd because of it, and it's just about how he's treated by people for standing out from the crowd and being a bit socially awkward. I've tried to write it as an analogy for all the people who mean well, but you just know are never really going to fit in, and how we treat them as people. Then there's "Not A Dancer" and "Nothing To Lose", which much as I've thought about it somewhat defy description in terms of genre or style, so I'll probably just go with "Hopefully quite good". In conclusion, I really would say your best bet's to get yourself a copy and make up your own mind.

It's got it's ups and downs, we've had offers from smaller labels before but as we've been doing ok with gigs and record sales off our own backs for a fair few years now it's hard for anything other than a major label to offer us something that would be worth sacrificing any control over. We're currently in talks with an American independent over this new release so we'll see what happens, but at the moment it really would have to be something quite special for us to consider giving up the full control we have now! I believe the current #1 album on iTunes is an American rapper called Macklemore who's made it there entirely independently off the back of the support of his fans, I think ideally we'd love to do something like that if the following keeps on growing!

You can check out The Scribes live headlining Oxjam Festival in Plymouth on Oct 21st, supporting The Herbaliser in Bristol at Trinity Centre on Oct 26th, at the PCASU/Loki Ink Halloween party on October 31st (I believe Lacey will be going as Rosa Parks, so that should be interesting) and supporting Ugly Duckling in Bristol on Nov 17th, plus many more dates coming up!

Get us online at www.facebook.com/scribesmusic, that's the best place to keep up to date with our releases and tour dates, so add us there, or if you're too cool for school and you're more of a Twitter-er, we're there @thescribes, plus all the normal YouTube, iTunes, Spotify etc.