In Conversation With Sad Boys Club
London’s Sad Boys Club are back at the forefront of the capital’s creative scene. Combining the emotive sensibilities of 80’s pop with an erudite brand of emo-tinged indie rock, the four-piece have honed their sound during the pandemic, releasing singles ‘25’ and ‘Could Have Beens (& What Ifs)’ to consistent acclaim. As they prepare to release their sophomore EP ‘Echoes In The Shallow Bay’, we caught up with frontman Jacob Wheldon to chat all things SBC…
For our readers who are unfamiliar with Sad Boys Club, how did you guys get together and what is the band about?
I’ve been in bands since I was eleven or twelve years old, just trying different things out and throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. One of those projects took me to a studio in Crouch End. The assistant engineer on that project was a guy called Pedro, with who I developed a relationship through that project, and we decided we wanted to try something a little bit different. So we started it up! Sad Boys Club was born out of that. Tom the drummer has been my best mate since school days and has always been the drummer in all of my bands up to that point, so I got him in. We were in need of a guitarist, and I was at a party and Chris was in the covers band who were playing. I was like, ‘oh my god, I’m so desperate‘. He played a masterful ‘Mr. Brightside’ and I was like: that will do. The next morning I woke up to a text that just said ‘Were you serious about that by the way?’ and I thought, why not? Let’s see where we end up. Fast forward kind of… it’s hard to know the timeline now with covid, but I think it’s probably been two years since this version of the band got together. That’s how it came to be! I’m not sure what to say, best off just listening to the tunes and seeing if it’s for you.
“There’s also an energy about it that requires a certain amount of energy to keep up with, a pace about it that’s demanding”
You’re based all across London, I’m interested to find out how the city and its surroundings influence you, musically and personally?
I’m born and raised in London, and so is Tom – I think that for me, the biggest thing has just been that there’s so much exposure to so much music. We’re really blessed as you are in Manchester with so many great venues over the years, lots of which have been shut down, and lots of these micro-movements and scenes and stuff. We’re really blessed to always have something new and something exciting, some of which sticks with you and some of which becomes a footnote. But you’re just soaking up so many ideas and so much creativity, and from such a multi-cultural city you’re getting so many ideas from so many different backgrounds. They can’t help but influence you, not just in making music but just in seeing the world, and engaging with it. On a similar note to that, Pedro coming from Rio de Janeiro – he came here for university, and just never left – he obviously has this slight outsider perspective on London. It’s super interesting to me, and one of the things that we try and fuse into our writing is this sense of otherness, because in very different ways - him as an immigrant and myself as a Jew - we have experienced an outsider perspective on certain things over the years. It’s something that we’ve bonded over and deem worthwhile exploring, I suppose. London is a beast. It can fling you around quite a lot. For all of those qualities that I’ve outlined, there’s also an energy about it that requires a certain amount of energy to keep up with, a pace about it that’s demanding.
You’ve been lauded in the past for your kind of confessional lyricism - what inspires your songwriting?
I think it changes from song to song, being completely honest. I’d love to say I have a really set philosophy on my stylistic aesthetic and the things that matter, and what makes up my identity as a lyricist and a writer or whatever, but I’m not smart enough for that! A lot of it’s more instinctive. There are certain songs where you just feel compelled to write about certain things. For example, the Sarah Everard stuff has been a really moving conversation to be a part of and to work out what our place has been, as basically… white men. It’s something that’s affected me and the way that I think, and I’ve tried to engage in those conversations with the people around me. But then it’s like, do I have a right in my position as an artist to try and explore that or is that not my area? There are grander narratives and you have to figure out what the right way of approaching it is. Topic by topic that changes, what you deem to be the most effective way of exploring it. So the confessional element just comes from a place of needing to get things out. It’s not necessarily a stylistic decision – often if I’m not moved by anything I just won’t write for like three or four months. It’s not like I just try and create something that sounds confession-like, as it were.
Your last two singles marked somewhat of a departure from your previous output. I read a quote somewhere that said it was a move to the more emo/punk side of things, as opposed to the indie-inspired guitar stuff you were doing in the past – would you agree with that?
We were always influenced by emo music. To be completely honest we always found it a little bit annoying being branded indie, because we didn’t massively relate to that. I think a lot of that is PR. The idea of boxing it into a genre, saying it’s this or that, is certainly not the way that we think about being creative. The influences we take are from all over the place, and what it ends up sounding like is sort of up to you, or to journalists or listeners or whoever, to decide. From our perspective, it felt perfectly natural. A lot of people say there has been a definitive change from the last EP to this one, but from our standpoint, it wasn’t overly intended. I think we were just a little more confident with wearing some of those influences on our sleeves. I think also this is a London thing – you go to Brixton Windmill and you’re hanging out with Shame and Sorry and that lot, and you start demanding that the DJ plays ‘Taking Back Sunday’. It’s not going to go down particularly well! Having had a year out from having to trek down to that place, and just being on our own, I guess we’ve got over worrying about that, and enjoying a bit more freedom. I guess that’s coming through in the songs, we’re just getting comfortable with our own identity. It’s only been two years of us being in a band together, which doesn’t feel like that long – especially because as a group of four we didn’t know each other before starting the band, so we’re still getting to know one another. Those friendships have really cemented over the past year, which has allowed us to be a bit more bold about those things. I would say it’s just a bolder record, rather than a grand step in one direction or the other.
“I think it’s important to be creative and think about what exactly it is you want to do with that side of things”
I think your videos are always great. Are the visual elements as important to you as your musical output?
I wouldn’t equate the two – most of our visual stuff is done by a guy called Jordan Logan, who’s a close friend of the band and mine. We certainly talk about it, but I would distance myself from the authorship of that visual aesthetic. We bounce ideas off each other and I’m interested in it, but I wouldn’t want to take away from that being his vision, or at least his execution of our vision, whereas the music is very much us four, certainly me and Pedro, in total ownership. Certainly, the visual aspect of bands nowadays is such a big part of people understanding the world that you are immersing yourselves in. I think it’s important to be creative and think about what exactly it is you want to do with that side of things. There’s a lot within guitar music especially for white male blokes playing ‘Red Stripe’ music, shall we say, that really bores me. It plays with the same old staples and it just bores me. There’s so much music out there now, why would I pick this? So yeah. It’s still important to me, I’d never want to be too lazy about what it is we’re trying to create in a kind of multi-dimensional sense.
Your new EP, ‘Echoes in the Shallow Bay’, is due this year. What was the recording process like?
The recording is so difficult to remember you know. If I remember correctly… We went away for a week to Oxfordshire, and I think we were sort of tying up the writing for that EP around then. This was March last year. We were there when lockdown came in, and we had to leave a day early to get back in time. From then, it was very different. Usually, you’d get six days together or whatever, and you’d knock out the four tracks. But the legalities of us being in the same room together and so on and so forth kept changing. It often takes us a while to get tracks together, we like to revisit things and get several versions together – because Pedro mixes everything, that whole side of the process takes quite a long time, I think longer than a lot of other bands. So it was spread out over a good six to nine months, putting these four tracks together. And I can’t remember anything interesting at all to tell you about the process, whatsoever! But you know, six to nine months for a band of our size – was it ‘Chinese Democracy’, that record Guns n Roses put out after like twenty-one years or whatever? It felt like that! It felt like it had taken so fucking long. And let me tell you now, it’s better than ‘Chinese Democracy’. That’s your headline. I don’t know, the recording has been weird in covid, it’s been very, very strange. I think it ended up working out alright.
“When we’re talking about confessional lyricism, it’s probably the closest track to that. It’s the one where I’m thinking, is this a little bit too vulnerable?”
What can your fans expect when they first hear it?
Well, I mean luckily for them in terms of not being let down, they will have heard three of the four tracks already! So that’s something. The fourth track is probably my favourite track on the EP, to be honest. When we’re talking about confessional lyricism, it’s probably the closest track to that. It’s the one where I’m thinking, is this a little bit too vulnerable? I’ll probably leave it at that. But within that world sometimes you can worry about being over sincere, to the point of things being uncomfortable. Sometimes that’s a really good discomfort, and sometimes it’s a discomfort where you need to trust your artistic instinct and step back. It went back and forth and back and forth for some time as to where I sat with it. Eventually, the boys convinced me to keep it, and now it’s probably the track I’m most proud of.
It would be crazy not to mention the pandemic. You said it gave you guys lots of time, but did it hold you back at all? And what are you looking forward to when the world returns to some sense of normality?
Live, is the obvious answer! But it certainly is. Live is where we thrive. I probably think of myself as being a performer before being anything else. I’ve really, really missed it, especially if you’re someone who’s done it for quite a long time, it doesn’t matter at what level, I think you depend on it for a certain kind of release or whatever. So I think for my own sake and for the boys’ sake we’re really looking forward to that. I think also, just a sense of community, being in the same room all singing the same songs, we haven’t had many opportunities to do anything even close to that. So yeah, I’d say getting back to life. And we were about to go on tour, I think we were two weeks away from going on tour with the Slow Readers Club. The shows are now happening in October and touch wood that all happens. But just getting out and playing shows and creating – I don’t know, it sounds a bit fucking sappy, but creating moments. Those memories. I think even over the course of this interview I’ve realised that my memory of the past year is really distorted. Some things I remember very, very clearly, but I have these huge gaps of processes that I’d normally be extremely engaged in, and be able to talk about far better, like the recording process of the EP!