12 Questions With Holiday Ghosts
12 Questions With Holiday Ghosts
Sam Stacpoole
Brighton-based Falmouth garage rockers Holiday Ghosts are pleased to announce a brand-new album ‘Absolute Reality’, set for release April 21st 2023 via FatCat Records (TRAAMS, Honeyblood, The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks), and also share rollicking lead track ‘Vulture’, out today (January 26th).
Arriving hot on the heels of acclaimed 2022 EP ‘Credit Note’, ‘Absolute Reality’ tackles different themes of social commentary, with fiery lyrics and hard-picked guitars, holding both honest confessions and tall tales, lived stories and movielike landscapes. Bringing the noise and texture that Holiday Ghosts love from New York punk and the new wave era, ‘Vulture’ cements their status within today’s alt-rock scene.
We caught up with band member Sam Stacpoole for a natter.
NSG: Good afternoon and how are you? What have you been doing today and how’s that going?
Sam: Howdy, I’m OK. I’ve been on the phone all morning with a fake Vodafone offers company, phonetically spelling my name over and over again. I got a whole new version of my surname: Acatoola – I kinda like it. I’m at work, warming up the record lathe.
NSG: Where did you grow up and how did Holiday Ghosts come to be?
Sam: I grew up in Maenporth which is a beach outside of Falmouth, Cornwall; Kat grew up in Stevenage, via Malmo; Ben – on a farm in Wadebridge; and Morgan in the hills of North Wales. All of us lived at one point in Falmouth, me just as a local and the others as students. But this is the fourth Holiday Ghosts line-up of Falmouth-associated musicians. I suppose the band in its full form began when Kat moved in with me and we started jamming. I had been doing it on my own for a little while since 2011…
NSG: You are set to release your new album ‘Absolute Reality‘ next month. Could you tell us all about it?
Sam: The title ‘Absolute Reality‘ is taken from one of Kat’s tracks on the album. That song was written when she and I lived in this tiny flat in the centre of the Old Lanes in Brighton. It had a 3-metre high and wide single-glazed window on the first floor looking out to two off-licences, the main music venue, a strip club and also two or three bars. It felt like it was a dedicated spot for people to go and scream, if they wanted to scream at 4am or rev motorbikes in a group. We seemed to get lots of writing inspiration from it though. I wrote “B.Truck” in there and “Big Cold River“, plus a bunch of other music that’s currently in production. Just before the start of the first lockdown, we had enlisted Ben and Morgan to be in the band as second guitar and bass after our previous line-up disbanded. We did one show and then, the next day, everything got closed up for a long time. During that period, we managed to continue practising once a week and writing the rest of ‘Absolute Reality‘. Again the space where we wrote this stuff was a pretty nasty spot. It was honestly like being inside a shoe box with no air in it. It seems that dehumanising and poor conditions are great for writing music in.
NSG: How would you describe your sound to a listener who hadn’t heard you before?
Sam: I normally leave people pretty confused when they ask me this. It’s jangly punk that is clean and poppy, sometimes gentle and sometimes really rockin’. It’s like The Velvet Underground sometimes.
NSG: Who or what have been your influences as a band and personally?
Sam: Speaking for myself, every time I listen to Yo La Tengo or The Clean/old Flying Nun records stuff or Tall Dwarves I end up wanting to write music. We get endlessly compared to The Clean, but fuck it; I may as well own it. We listen to a really vast range of genres and artists. As a group though I think we all agree that The Ramones are the best band ever.
(Holiday Ghosts Spring 2023 UK Tour Poster)
NSG: How do you go about writing a song? Do you have a set process?
Sam: When I write on my own, my process is just catching an idea spontaneously and then, if it’s good enough to get stuck in my head, I write the words on the go. I rarely write them down. This process takes a really long time and often there are huge gaps between when I write one song to the next. The songs I write with Kat normally come from her singing some words at me and me fitting chords around them. She writes words before the music comes most of the time. I am jealous of this. A lot of the songs on ‘Absolute Reality’ were written by both of us together from the start, riffin’ off each other. I don’t know what Ben’s writing process is – I’ve never asked him. He’s full of bangers though.
NSG: You start your UK tour next month – what are you looking forward to most about it?
Sam: Yeeeeeehhaaaa! I’m just looking forward to being on the road. It’s definitely my main purpose in life, and where I get the most fulfilment. Playing the electric guitar loud is my favourite thing to do. I get really itchy feet in the time between playing gigs and being at home so a nice long tour is super exciting. Going back to Falmouth is always a party! It’s my nephew’s first birthday on our day off there as well, which is great timing.
NSG: You’re coming to Liverpool, well Birkenhead which is only across the river from us, on 12th April – have you been to Liverpool before and, if so, what do you like most about our wonderful city?
Sam: We’ve played Future Yard before. We did the Future Yard festival last year and it seemed like a really cool place. Hopefully we’ll have time to have a look around Liverpool. I haven’t spent much time there before, but it’s got some cool-looking old buildings. Yeah, I really don’t know much about it as a place.
NSG: If you had not become a musician, what other career do you think you’d have chosen?
Sam: I was at art school planning to do a degree in fine art/painting before I started touring in a band. That was in about 2010. So following the standard path of a fine art student, I’d most likely have ended up… Playing in a band! Ha ha ha.
NSG: If you could sit down for dinner with any three people from history, past or present, who would they be and why?
Sam: Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith and Nigel Slater. They’d also be cooking.
NSG: What is the rest of 2023 looking like for you guys?
Sam: More touring – a few European dates are in the works. We’ve also got a lot of mixing new material to do.
NSG: Do you have a message for your fans?
Sam: Thank you fans. We appreciate you. Stay tuned – there are lots more where that came from. Be safe. Spread joy. Keep on rockin’ in the free world. Come see us live.
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