Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week Jack and Joe chatted to Tom Ward and Sam Clark of The Throwaway Scene.
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Jack: How does it feel now that the EP is out – were you expecting the strong reception it received?
Sam: I guess it’s always a weird one, the tracks to us are old but to everyone else they are new. You’ve got to kind of manage that. It’s nice that and it gets a new lease of life when it’s actually out in public, which allows you to start to appreciate all the work that we’ve done again. It’s been nice, the reception has been really good. So yeah, no complaints from me, really.
Tom: I think there’s always a bit of anxiety when you’ve been working on something for such a long time. Everything we’ve had so far has been awesome, so I’m pretty happy.
Jack: What were the sort of inspirations during the writing process that have been hinted it in the merch and the videos?
Sam: Our vocalist, Ollie, lead the story and narrative through this release. He went through some loss in his family and then he started looking into different sort of psychological aspects of dealing with grief and that kind of thing. We came across some study work from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, she she wrote this document that that sort of illustrates and tells you about each stage of grief that you go through. We sort of lifted that and turned into sort of a concept EP, really, that was kind of how it started. We had the small ideas that just kept evolving into something bigger and bigger, as we expanded out both visually and the music itself.
Tom: I think that loss is also something that is not very often publicly spoken about to a degree. With that happening with Ollie, there was an element of interest there to explore that. Delving into a concept like that was how it began, that also played its way into the songwriting and the way the EP was structured. You’ve got the five stages of grief, as the second track highlights anger, and that comes across quite well in the instrumentation and everything that’s going on with that. It’s a heavier track, it’s it’s feistier and it’s hard hitting, with some pretty heavy elements in there as well.
Sam: It’s been nice as well, because I think it’s the first time for all of us that we’ve done a concert EP where all the tracks are meant to belong together. We’re very used to writing in isolation and it being just a single after single on a topic, but this time, the whole thing is meant to be consumed as one thing. Everything is tied to everything else and it’s been a lot of fun to do it that way.
Jack: Is this something that you could see continuing for future releases?
Sam: We’re quite keen to sort of keep it fresh, not just for the listener but for ourselves as well. Something I always latch on to with other bands is when they’re an eras type band. You always think of the Hollow Crown era of Architects or the Prey for Plagues era of Bring Me The Horizon. Even through to mainstream with The 1975, you think all the eras on different albums. I quite like the idea of The Throwaway Scene being like that. We’ve got ideas but we’d want to move into something visually, aesthetically, as well as the music itself.
Tom: Another thing that we’re very conscious of as a band is kind of offering up more than just like, “Oh, here’s a song that’s out, you know, people consume it for two minutes“, then onto the next thing. Whereas, especially with this EP and anything we do moving forward, we’re very conscious of creating something that people can come back to time and time again. You can listen to it as a product for that two minutes, hypothetically, but if you want to delve deeper as a viewer and the listener than the option for that in there as well. So you can just keep coming back and pick up more details, more nuggets, more pieces of the story and things that we’ve developed around the kind of themes that we’re creating. That’s one thing that we’re very sort of focused on as well.
Jack: You’ve just touched on something that was gonna bring up later but it seems very fitting to bring it up now. The visual elements of it and having that artwork all tied together, it feels very much that that was a key thing going into this, looking at everything that’s come out, starting with the videos, the branding, on your social media, things like that. Is that something that whilst you were putting this together was also a consideration? Or was that something that you’ve done after the fact to try and fit the themes of the release?
Sam: We create the videos ourselves and I do pretty much all of the artwork. In some respects, I actually had a lot of the art direction and stuff down before we even finished writing the music, which has been interesting. It’s just been a real opportunity for me to flex on the design creative side, as well as the music videos to try and try and bring it all together as a bit of a kind of like story from start to finish. Through having the minimal budget, we had to kind of take the idea and sort of explain the story more through the subtitles, and the way we framed and styled everything. In an ideal world, I’d love to have shot a blockbuster for this whole thing. The art started coming from the concept as soon as Ollie came across with what this was going to be about as an EP, then the ideas are just flowing. We had a lot of the art style down for this whole thing.
Joe: You mentioned a moment ago, this is old material to you, does that mean there’s new bits and pieces in the pipeline already?
Tom: Without giving too much away, we’ve got a few things in motion.
Sam: Wasn’t there a song you had a demo for from like, I don’t know, five years ago or something?
Tom: When it comes to the songwriting process, I tend to just have a folder full of stuff. And that was a song that was written, probably back in 2017, that I wrote off of my own back and just kind of parked it there. Didn’t really show it to anybody, then it was Ollie that was sort of going through old demos and things and brought it back, he was just like, “I think we’ve got something in this“. For me personally, I tend to write the best stuff when I’m going through different experiences in life, and probably not necessarily in the best place. That translates through to music because I think one thing with our music in particular is that it’s capturing that throwback 2000s element while also having relatable themes to this day and age. There is also having that feeling of something needs to connect with me and give me that feeling in my chest and evoke emotion from it. When that demo was pulled back, Ollie put some vocals on it and then that that feeling came straight back. We were constantly have different bits and pieces that are going on all the time. Then also things are then later developed to become more of a fully cohesive product after the fact.
Sam: I’m sure a lot of bands have the same sort of thing, but I really struggled to understand where a demo is going when it’s just like guitar and drums. We really struggled to actually think is this going to be anything, but Tom was saying he wrote that song before we were even in the band. We never knew that’s where that song would go, but then as soon as Ollie put his stuff over the top, it then became really clear that this is actually something. The amount of voice notes we’ll have from Ollie and stuff like that, I almost find that way more useful than an instrumental track that’s fully polished, because at least I can understand what the idea is of the song. We pin so much on vocals, I think which is a part of our kind of sound.
Joe: How was your run with Your Misery and LIN?
Sam: It was great, the first time we got to go out and have a run it shows really. We had the first show teething issues which bands have. It was a good, good experience.
Tom: That was Tom’s (Green-Morgan) first outing with as well. That was sort of like throwing him into the deep end and how he could cope and survive. We kind of poached him from another local Sheffield band and that was almost his initiation. All in all, it went relatively well. From everyone who was at those shows it was all well received.
Jack: You’ve played with some of these fantastic up and coming bands already. And you’ve got the upcoming show with Blanket as well, how does it feel to already be on these lineups, and to be getting these opportunities?
Tom: For me personally, it’s just to be forever grateful. I know that, in particular, musicians can be guilty of always looking at the next thing. I’ve been guilty of that, in previous bands that I’ve been in, but just appreciating the opportunities that do come your way, while also trying to make the most of those opportunities as well. And that’s always something that we’ve done, a lot of the opportunities that have come our way have been through friends and connections and people that we’ve met along the way and throughout the whole time doing music, not necessarily just in The Throwaway Scene. Enjoying it is is a huge element of it, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, why do it.
Sam: One of the bits of advice I got in one of our old bands – we had a manager who was in a fairly decent sized band played some arena shows and stuff, and he said to us that one of his biggest regrets was just not actually appreciating what you’re doing right now. He was just always like, “We were always so focused on the next thing, like when’s the next tour? When’s the next show?“. And then it all went and then he just he realised he wasn’t exactly happy doing all the the really cool stuff that you should be happy doing, right. So that’s always kind of rang in my head, like whenever we get one of these shows, just to really enjoy it, because you don’t know when the next one is basically.
Jack: I think that’s a good attitude to have, obviously, take it as it comes. And just be grateful of every moment. I think that’s something that, like you say, there’s a lot of bands that are always looking for that next step, and not appreciating the moment.
Tom: It’s especially easy with the likes of Instagram, in a nice way, there’s a lot of kind of, not necessarily competition, but like comparisons that you can make, and you can be like looking at other people, and I know that some people are guilty of sort of being like, “Oh, well, why aren’t we doing these things or that thing?“. And it’s just like, focus on your own thing. Hone your craft, stay in your lane, and good things will come to you. That would be other advice that I’d give to anyone as well just kind of perfect what you’re doing. People do reach out to you and people do connect to you, we’ve seen that with the growth in this band. We’re very kind of conscious of staying in our lane and just kind of focusing on what we’re doing. For sure.
Jack: Obviously, you’ve got the EP release show, what sort of stuff can we expect from the shows and more specifically that show?
Sam: I’m absolutely terrified about that, desperate for that to go well. We’re gonna we’re gonna up the theatrics quite a bit, we’re gonna try and really sort of get across this this message from from the EP we’ve got some sort of like rearrangements we want to put in for different parts of songs. We’ve got some extra stuff that we want to we want to get across visually as well. It’s gonna be really fun and it’s going to be good to have our free reign of making that show what we want it to be as well. Exciting, but I’m yeah real nervous.
Tom: Without giving too much away, we have been given the free reins to be like “right, okay, this is our show. What what do we want to do with it? And how can we take, you know, like musically and visually what we’ve done on recording?” And with the music videos, how can we transfer that to the live stage?
Joe: Who primarily did the videos?
Sam: Mainly me with help from the boys. And we have we have a photographer, shoutout Tommy. He comes and shoots a lot shows and stuff as well. He came just to help with the camera while I was in shot and stuff.
Tom: It was pretty difficult when when you’re self shooting, and then obviously, Sam being the main camera guy who has to be in the shots as well – you do need that extra extra pair of hands, especially to get hold of the all the group shots and things like that. Music videos are an interesting one for us: when we’re doing it, I absolutely love it. After we’ve done it, I feel like I’ve been at a three day festival and I just need to sleep for an entire week. Just because of like the level of work and time pressure and everything that goes into them. It’s always a bit like, “oh, god, okay, like, we’ve got to do another one“. Then the final product is always something that I’m really happy with.
Sam: I’m like editing as well and it gets it gets unhealthy because it’s your own project. So like, no one’s going to love your own thing more than yourself, right? You just spend a lot of hours just reiterating over the tiniest details and all that kind of stuff, especially when we’ve got such a clear vision of what we wanted it to look like. And then like I was saying, before managing your expectation with no budget, you have to come to some kind of middle ground.
Tom: I think I think we’ve doing one thing that we wanted to do from the start of this project is a lot of the stuff we do is DIY. And sometimes it’s if you’re doing it yourself, you can spend more time on things to perfect, and hone in on exactly what you want to do. I’ve had it we’ve both had it in the past, where if you’re trying to squeeze a music video into one day, some things may be compromised on, where it’s when you’re doing it yourself, you can kind of be like, well, we can reshoot that or we can add extra in or we can kind of tweak things the way we want it. It’s the same with sort of thing with recording, we self record a lot of our stuff and then just send it off to be mixed at the end. Sam is the visual direction and then I’m just sat there for hours on end editing guitars and then recording the different bits and pieces in. We knew that you have to draw the line with certain things like because it’s like, you end up getting a bit blind, both visually and a little bit here blind as well to what you’re listening to. We always try to do as much as we can, ourselves as much as possible. That may change in the future, we will see.
Jack: There’s so much going on in the scene at the minute and everyone’s killing it. It’s really good to see all these bands coming together and working together like you mentioned earlier with Love Is Noise and Your Misery. We’ve got all these bands coming out right now, from the UK scene, where do we see this sort of going? We’ve got a lot of smaller bands at the minute and there’s a few breaking through? Is this something that you guys reckon we’re gonna see more and more of? Or do we think maybe it’s, it’s a bit of a bit of a flourish at the minute, and it’s going to die down a bit?
Sam: I don’t know, man, I always had the thought that with the rise of Tik-Tok, bands are kind of dying. Then I feel like it’s kind of going against it, I feel like there’s been a resurgence in the past year or so where a lot of bands are sort of appearing again, which I think is awesome. I’d hate to see guitar music die, that would be like the worst thing ever. Everyone needs to stick to what they’re doing and put their all into everything. It’s so obvious when the effort there isn’t there, you’ve got to put absolutely everything in and love what you’re doing.
Tom: With the level of disposable media that we consume in these day and age, it’s, it’s so easy to want to just be like, “Oh, well, let’s just like throw a million things out and just see if something lands”. Whereas I always do think that quality over quantity eventually always shines through in the end. If you’re consistent with what you’re doing, and you take the time and effort to put that out, then that’s going to ring through, especially if you’re in a musical scene, when you can try and convert fans. If somebody’s only heard of you because of your latest single, they’ve got that whole back catalogue that they can go through. Then you want that all to be of the same standard, or I do at least. That’s how you create a bigger following and a more loyal following. I think that one thing in the UK scene at the minute, which seems to be great is like, there seems to be more of a sense of community coming back. And one thing that we want to do and that I just generally want to do anyway is like, it’s always nice to see like other bands at the same level, help and support one another and bring one another up. I think that is key because sometimes it’s felt like everybody’s been competing against one another. If everybody’s growing together, and everybody’s building together, if a few people break through and can help lift other bands up. That’s just a win for the UK scene as far as I’m concerned. It’s great to see that and it’s and you get in bits of sort of like micro-areas where there’s little scenes forming, like back in the day. Manchester has got a bit of a scene about it, and Sheffield, those communities reappear. It’s just it’s just great. I love it.
On Death & Dying is out now via self-release, and can be pre-ordered here.