You were part of the charity indie supergroup Bands 4 Refugees. Who introduced you onstage at the 2017 NME Awards?
“Was it Justin [Young] from The Vaccines? Or Kano?”
WRONG. M.I.A. introduced the group, which also included Charli XCX, Olly Alexander, Soft Play’s Isaac Holman and members of fellow B-Towners Peace, covering The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’.
“No way! I remember meeting Kano, because I made it my Facebook profile photo. A friend at my day-job is obsessed with Charli XCX and I told her: ‘I played in a supergroup with her once!’. She was impressed. A lot of us were pals, and Charli entered the room, who did feel like more of a superstar, but it felt like we were all playing in a talent contest at school. It was a good laugh.”
Which actor was emblazoned on your T-shirt when Swim Deep played Glastonbury in 2015
“I borrowed the T-shirt off my manager. It was his when he was about 17 and I remember him being precious about it. Oh God, who was it? This is going to kill me! I feel it’s in the Patrick Swayze realm?”
WRONG. The shirt featured Robin Williams in character from the 1970s sitcom Mork & Mindy.
“Ugh, that’s so annoying! We played on the Other stage at Glastonbury that year, and it felt special. There’s something in the ley-lines. We were just going wild. They strictly give you one guest-list place each, and we tried to get our mates in by putting them on the crew list as ‘tambourine player’, etc. As we were getting out of our van, Fat White Family turned up and said, ‘We’ve forgotten our wristbands and we’re on in 20 minutes’. And obviously they’d not lost them – they’d given them to their mates. We thought: Why didn’t we do that? Why are we such chickens? They’re a real band! [Laughs]”
What number did Swim Deep’s 2013 debut album ‘Where the Heaven Are We’ reach on the UK album chart?
“20?”
CORRECT. How do you look back on that period?
“Fondly. Throughout my twenties, there were phases of looking back on it in a cringe-worthy way because, ultimately, we were teenagers making music. When you’re in your mid-twenties, you rebel from that a bit, but now I’m in my thirties I look back on it as a magical time and a whirlwind. Before my wedding [in 2024], I sat in a cubicle with my best man, Cavan [McCarthy], our bassist, at my stag-do. We were crying to each other about how much we’d done together, and we’d never really had that conversation before.”
Did you enlist any of your musical mates for the wedding band?
“No. We’ve been in a wedding band before for our friends and it always feels like a lot of work. But everyone got on the decks. My wife’s half-Irish, so I got a trad-Irish band to play. I didn’t really want an Oasis cover band which is my heritage!”
Ever meet Oasis?
“We met Liam [Gallagher] outside Pizza Express once in Camden. It was in our hippie era, and Cav was wearing a big poncho at the time. Liam said a snarky comment like, ‘Yo, psychedelic, dude!’. We loved that.”
Which former UK political party leader once professed to being a fan of Swim Deep?
“Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems? No? If it’s not Nick Clegg, then God knows!”
WRONG. Close – it was Clegg’s successor Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader from 2015-2017. In 2015, the Westmorland and Lonsdale MP claimed he was “eagerly awaiting the new Swim Deep album”, adding “I think they’re great”.
“I know he also said he liked Everything Everything.”
He did! Who’s been the most unexpected fan of Swim Deep?
“In 2014, we were playing a festival in Europe, and there was a knock at the door. It was a Tyler, the Creator and he popped his head in and said, ‘I love the new video guys’, in his really low voice. In his true humorous fashion, he then just ran away. We were gobsmacked. He was talking about our original video for ‘King City’ which is just us skating around Birmingham and was shot by our friend. It feels like a very Tyler, the Creator-adjacent video, but it was unexpected – and welcome ‘cause we’re big fans.”
At Glastonbury, which musical titan did Alexa Chung once tell Cav he looked like?
“[Laughs] Was it Bowie?”
CORRECT.
“YES!! That’s another unexpected fan. Alexa Chung is my poster girl from my teenage years, which is awkward to say because I know her now. She’s great and a real icon. I loved her humour when she interviewed bands on Popworld. When she said she was a fan of us and Tame Impala, we lost our minds. Actually, at the start of ‘She Changes The Weather’, when it’s just the piano and quite ambient, you hear talking but you can’t make out what we’re saying. I wanted it to feel like being at a gig and you can hear just indistinguishable nattering in the crowd. When we went into the booth to fake this talking, we didn’t know what to talk about, so I just remember us saying ‘Alexa Chung’ quite a few times. Maybe we manifested her being a fan!”
Swim Deep’s ‘One Great Song And I Could Change the World’ appears in which video game?
“FIFA 16.”
CORRECT.
“Definitely one of our proudest achievements! When a posted about being in FIFA, every friend from school congratulated me. When he found out I was in a band called Swim Deep, the bouncer on the door at my day job said: ‘No way! ‘One Great Song And I Could Change the World’ was one of my favourite songs on FIFA 16 and it reminds me of my childhood. That song has one of the best riffs I’ve heard’. That inspired me to write the riff for our recent single, ‘You, Me & Mary’ because I wanted to prove to myself that I could write a riff again ‘cause I hadn’t done it in so long.”
“Early on, we toured Europe and The 1975 supported us. Even then, they had a sleeper bus and we were in a tiny van. [Laughs] They were bigger than us already. But we’d go onto their bus to play FIFA a lot and they were big stoners, so you’d come off their bus feeling like it was yesterday.”
Who was the best at FIFA out of Swim Deep and The 1975?
“The 1975’s George [Daniel] and Ross [MacDonald] were probably the best out of The 1975 – but I think we were better, I’d like to say! [Laughs]. We all ended up being friends and then they later took us on tour with them throughout America. They stretched down their hands when they got really big to us, which was a really sweet thing. Don’t believe everything you hear about them: they’re really nice guys.”
Can you complete the following lyrics: ‘Don’t you put a spell on me…’?
“Is this a Swim Deep lyric? I don’t believe I’ve ever written… oh!… it’s ‘Don’t you put a spell on me, tassel man / I wanna live past twenty-three, tassel man’.
CORRECT. From your and Wolf Alice’s (officially unreleased) collab ‘Tassel Man’ that you co-wrote together when dating.
“That’s a deep cut! We made it when we were 23 so that puts a stamp on it. Obviously me and Ellie Rowsell were both writing our own songs – me for Swim Deep, her for Wolf Alice. We had a couple of beers and decided to see what would happen. At the time we were listening to Temples and a lot of psychedelia and Nuggets compilations. We’d come back on a bus somewhere and there was a guy who had a cotton crocheted thing with tassels coming out the top it. It freaked us out and we called him the Tassel Man, and wrote a song about how we thought he was putting a spell on us. We made a second song, ‘Tassel Man 2’, so maybe we’ll put it out at some point. I’ll text her.”
Which Swim Deep band member won at bowling when NME visited you in Brussels earlier this year for an in-studio feature about your latest album ‘Hum’?
“[Laughs] I think it was me?”
CORRECT. When you look back on Swim Deep’s journey, how does it feel to release your fifth album?
“This album reflects that journey a lot and how we’ve grown up together. The band’s changed a lot, but the heart, the ethos, the drive, and the dream is similar. We’re an inspiring band because it’s real-world and we all go back to our jobs. For the first three years, we didn’t have to do that, but watching this journey of friends trying to make music whilst juggling real-life feels inspiring and we’re proud to get it out.”
When you recorded ‘Hum’ at ICP studios, you were warned, ‘The lead singer of Placebo is in the flat below you so please, no parties’.
“I saw him [Brian Molko] once or twice and we nodded our heads to each other, but he was very to himself. He chain-smoked constantly, so my bed smelled of cigs constantly! It was nice being in the presence of greatness, though.”
‘Fueiho Boogie’, the closing track from Swim Deep’s second album, ‘Mothers’, takes its name from the Japanese ‘Fueiho’ laws which policed dancing in clubs. In what year was the legislation change?
“That song came out in 2015, so 2016?”
CORRECT.
“[Joking] Thanks to us and that song! [Laughs] I always worried whether we were going to get trouble for it in Japan, if it might be seen as a slight on the law. We haven’t actually been back there since we released the song, so maybe we did!”
“It’s one of my favourites and a departure from the world we’d created on the first album, which some reviews called ‘wishy-washy’. That got to us. I wish I could go back and give myself a slap and say: ‘Look at the people who actually like your music rather than listening to the critics’. ‘Mothers’ was partly us saying, ‘we can make an album that is reviewed well’, but mainly we wanted to experiment and were listening to krautrock and acid house.
“The first album was made on the dole on GarageBand and then taken to a studio when we got signed, whereas with the second one we had the time, money and freedom to do what we wanted.”
What is the B-side to Swim Deep’s 2015 single ‘To My Brother’?
“Is it ‘Si Si Me Voy’?”
WRONG. ‘Hotel California’.
“Of course it is! I knew I was going to do badly, but zero points is not good! ‘Hotel California’ was the first song that we wrote after ‘Where the Heaven Are We’. We were really into ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles and kept singing it, so my chorus has echoes of it.”
The verdict: 6/10
“That’s the same score NME awarded ‘Where the Heaven Are We’!”
Swim Deep’s fifth album, ‘Hum’, is out now via Submarine Cat Records. The band embark on a UK headline tour this autumn, with remaining tickets available here