INTERVIEW: ROOM SERVICE: ENJOY THE PRESENT MOMENT
Room Service photographed by @arune_daukantaite
Your band crafts songs that are “purpose-made for people to let them go of themselves and be in the present moment”. What is one band, song, or album that helps you let go of yourself?
Devin: I know when I got that question, one thing that I wanted to say was, at least from our side of things, and we're very split with our musical tastes at some point. But I quite like LCD Soundsystem, especially that song, "Lose Yourself," which feels apropos to losing oneself. But that's just me.
Nez: I've gone down two very different avenues. The first one is an album by Field Medic with the longest name in the world that I literally had to write down. grow your hair long if you're wanting to see something that you can change, one of my favorite albums ever. And I mainly use that, just to take some liberties with the question, to get more in touch with myself a little bit and ignore who I think I am and sort of reset. And the very literal answer, if I need to just become someone else for a minute, is any song by Only Fire
Devin: You know what, I hesitate to say it as well. One song we've been playing a lot recently, and we've been really enjoying, that I don't know whether we want to use here, but we've been loving "Friday" by Rebecca Black. Sometimes when we want to lose ourselves, we'll just put that bad boy on. That song has been really in the zeitgeist of us lately, so I throw that one out there as well.
Melvin: I speak for Devin and me on this one, but I think the two maybe niche, but not that niche, artists from the UK. One called Fat Dog and the other one called Home Counties. I think they're definitely up there for me, to kind of lose yourself. Bands that I recommend seeing live definitely. And you kind of have to dance, you kind of have to get in the crowd because the music's just insane. Those kinds of artists do it for me.
Helena: And I'm just going to The Strokes through every question. So here's my fifth answer, that is The Strokes. I love their new album. To be honest, it made me realize that sometimes you have to learn how to love something that you didn't think you'd like about one artist's evolution. And I didn't think I was going to be a fan of the auto-tune, and now I really can't hear those songs without it. So well done, Strokes. That's my take. And also, last week I saw an artist that I really like at Rock en Seine in Paris. I saw Djo. I really love all of his last album, but there's that one line that really stuck with me somehow since I heard it live. But it's this line in the song "Delete Ya" that says, "Remember to try and forget." And I love this line so much, and now I think about that every day.
So more on the topic of being able to let go, we all know that everyday life can be quite stressful. Whenever you're on stage performing your music, how do you immerse yourself into your performance? How do you make sure you're not thinking about a million other things while you're performing?
Helena: I feel my way to approach a live show has really changed since COVID, but I think for a lot of people it's the same thing. Whether it's attending a live show or performing a live show, you kind of just appreciate how precious it is to have this kind of opportunity so much more than you would pre-COVID because it was sort of a given. If you live in a city, for example, there are a thousand venues around you that are going to put on events all the time, and it's just part of your life. You don't realize that these things, sometimes they can stop for ages, and you don't know if you're ever going to get back to this lifestyle of performing or attending gigs. I feel the fear of not being able to do this anymore when COVID was happening made it so much more precious. And now every gig, I'm not going to say in a dramatic way where you should feel as if it's going to be your last gig ever, but you should appreciate that it might not happen anymore. And you need to honor these opportunities.
Devin: And just to add on to that, I was just going to say, I do feel very similar to Helena. We probably all feel a similar way of being on stage. Performing music and being together is sort of the release. So it's a lot easier. As far as how we put our lives aside, I feel like when we're in those moments, we don't have a choice, which is really nice. If we're in the moment, we're stuck here, we have to do it. As soon as we're off the stage, that's whenever life kind of flows back and we think, "Oh, shit. I have work in the morning. I've got to get home.". One of our band members couldn't be here because he's moving right now. Everything outside of the music is whenever life gets crazy. When we're on stage, just like Helena said, I think we really appreciate those moments, so it's a lot easier to disconnect from life. When we're on stage is when real life is happening, and when we're off stage that's just a distraction from being on stage.
Nez: I completely agree with that. I found it really difficult. I brainstormed about this question quite a lot because I don't really know how to describe the way it makes me feel and why it's so easy to shut it off completely. I don't know whether I'm just getting older, sick of staring at screens for 90% of my life, or I'm homesick but as time goes on, the easier it becomes. And the more addicted I become to those moments that feel climactic of some work has come into this. There is a community here. And we all occupy a space together, create an energy, create a vibe, feed off each other in a way that is really unique to this moment. It won't be replicated. It's never happened before. And as soon as I get up on stage, I genuinely just don't think about anything that happens outside of that space in any capacity. I don't think it is able to come into my brain. I really crave those moments of connection and genuine timelessness in that way.
Melvin: I feel a lot of the live music process resembles the process that you go through playing a sport. There's a lot of preparation and anticipation. Usually you do it with other people, and other people impact you. If someone in the band is not feeling great, or if anything impacts them, it impacts us as a band. And I feel if someone is playing a game of professional football, and one of the best in the team were feeling down, it would impact the whole team. I feel the way we approach music, at least for me, is a lot of preparation, thinking about it, and a lot of training. And the day of the show, it's similar to playing a big match in a league. "This is finally happening. I'm playing the gig." And then when it's done, all those emotions are going down. And I think for me, it's quite hard to not think about it and to think about life when I'm on stage because it's so much effort to get out there, to be able to play music. It's such a privilege to be on stage that I just have to think about it, and the rest of my life just disappears because this is happening. And it gets emphasized. The bigger the gig is, the bigger the pressure and the prep is getting. We're going on tour in September, and I know just for a month before, every time we're going to meet, we're going to be talking about it, rehearsing, prepping merch, and I feel like it's just taking over my life. And so for me, it's really easy not to think about my life because it's such an effort and it's so much work that everything else disappears for a moment.
Helena: I'm already dreading the post-tour blues. I can feel it coming bad. It's going to be pretty horrible.
Nez: I'm always kind of waiting for permission to finally switch off to everything with whatever it is that I'm doing. And I think that touring is the perfect thing. You know when you're on a holiday and you don't have to check your phone. People aren't expecting you to reply to them. People aren't expecting you to be available to them. It's that feeling. Going on tour, getting on stage, you think, "Well, everything has been about this, so nothing else matters right now. People know I'm on stage. I can't text them."
And you mentioned the post show blues or post-tour blues. How do you deal with that? I'm not in a band, but I experience post-concert depression after a show or a festival. So how do you deal with it?
Helena: Do another one. Prep for the next thing. Because I get it for attending shows as well. I've had that where I've been waiting for a gig for so long. And after it happened, I've been so depressed. I've had that before, and you just need to go out again, find more artists, just go see more gigs. When it's us playing, you need to plan the next gig and start rehearsing for the next big thing. We've been very busy with other things this summer and we've all been away at different times, so we haven't really been gigging much in the past three months. Not only is this upcoming tour the biggest thing that we've done so far, but also it happens after a long time of not gigging. So that's what I mean when I say I think I can already feel the post-tour blues coming. It's going to be tough. We were discussing that with our manager the other day. I don't think we came to a decision, but I said we need to plan for a headline show maybe a month or two after that, because maybe that's the selfish thing. Not necessarily selfish, but maybe that's just a me thing, but I need to be looking forward to the next thing. Otherwise, I can't. It will kill me to end this tour on, "Okay. Well, Christmas, maybe we'll record some music?”. I can't.
Nez: Thankfully we're all really good friends still, somehow. So when we can, I think usually we tend to stay together for a little bit after we play as well, to kind of process it. Or at least it helps me process it, and think, “Okay, we did that, and we can actually actively celebrate a little bit now."
Devin: The pride we feel after, it's bittersweet when you finish a gig, but there's a mixture of sadness because obviously the big thing you've waited for is gone now. But we're proud of ourselves 90% of the time. 10% of the time, even if we're not happy with how we perform, having that decompress afterwards, it's so nice. It's a very unique feeling of leaving, getting off stage and thinking, "Oh, we did it. Oh my God, it's been done." But it's bittersweet. Helena's right. We're always looking forward to the next thing. There's always something to prepare for. Every time we finish, we say, "But two weeks from now we have that to do”, so it keeps us moving.
Helena: And we've all got jobs, full-time jobs, so we can't ever get too bored.
Devin, you mentioned that 10% of the time you might not be happy with your performance. What makes, I guess, a performance of yours perhaps not as good to you as other performances?
Devin: Well, I think artists hold themselves to a harder line of acceptance than the audience obviously would. Melvin had a good point earlier. We're a team. So it's a lot easier to feel okay because everyone as a whole did well. But I guess a bad performance for me at least might be having me drop a drumstick. And I will say we have less of those now. We have less moments. We are getting better. But it's just an individually based thing. No one else notices, but you notice your own mess-ups. And on the performances where there's maybe multiple of those, you might be feeling a bit negative afterwards. But the band backs you up.
Nez: I can imagine it's the same for you guys as well, but I have certain milestones to hit during a set. I think, "This is the bit that I'm looking forward to. This is the bit that I really need to get right. This is the bit I'm really anxious about." And if I have a certain percentage pass of those milestones being hit properly, then I'm probably quite satisfied afterwards. But if it's half and half, then that makes a lot of difference.
Devin: The audience has no idea about this either. This is all just internal mental stuff. We have to assume the audience loves it every time.
Nez: Recently we played a new song a few months ago, and I wrote down the lyrics because I was so worried about forgetting them. But I wrote them down wrong. So I just repeated the same first verse twice, and not even the rest of the band noticed. So if the band doesn't notice, the crowd isn't going to notice.
You are described as a band that is guaranteed to put a smile on people's faces. Is there a particular song of yours, music video, or even just a line that makes you smile?
Helena: In our music videos, there's one thing that I really like that we've never really explained, but one of our guitar players is called Zach. He appears in all of our videos as another character that we've called Rack. But we've not really called him that. This is an inside joke. And his appearances in every music video that we made, it could make me cry just thinking about it. It's just so funny. I love it so much. I like stuff like that because this is just an inside joke. We don't feel the need to explain that. Most of the time we just put little jokes there in our music videos, and we wait for people to notice or not notice, but we're happy we did it.
Nez: There's a lot of bits that we do there just for us. One of my favorite bits of the newest set that we're doing, is I'm doing some backing vocals behind Helena on a song called "Move", and I just yell, "Feet." It is just the only line I do a couple times throughout the song. There's a song that is kind of older now. But we had a bit of a point of contention writing the lyrics for it because there's a "por favor, mashari" bit, and the three Frenchies really hated that being in there. I didn't mind the por favor, but it got through. Every time I sing that, I always think about the arguments that we had trying to figure out what the lyrics were going to be. And how a few months later, literally nothing changed. Also there was a song early on, "Tiffany Applegate", where I was singing the wrong lyrics to it for about a year. And I was doing the backing vocals, and it was my flatmate at the time, Sid, who was singing it, and I corrected them. I thought to myself, "It's a pot of noodles. Why do you think it’s butter noodles?" I was wrong. That's how I found out.
Devin: We got too many bits. We have too many bits we do throughout the show. A classic bit of ours, we have a song, "JCD", where in the middle of the song, we make up a new bit to say every time if we can. And so for our fans who watch us quite frequently, it's always a bit of a fun point of the show for them. They always think, "What's going to happen now? What's going to happen now?" One time during that middle bit, I pretended like I had a sniper and I was trying to shoot someone in the audience. That's personally one of my favorite bits for "JCD".
Nez: It's always just the first thing that comes to Devin's mind. We used to prepare for this shit, but not anymore.
Helena: Even when we used to prepare, Devon would say, "Oh, yeah, I'll say exactly this," and then end up saying nothing that he's actually planned to say, just any random things that are on his mind. Literally at rehearsal this Monday, we recorded our sets because that's the set that we want to do for the tour, and our manager wanted to hear it. So we recorded that, and I replayed it, and then ended up crying to the bit that you did during "JCD" because you're just shouting at Melvin. Melvin has no idea what you're saying to him. You go, "One, five, four, six, seven, eight." Melvin goes, "Six, seven, eight." This is the funniest thing. It's a hilarious part of the song. You have two people not knowing what they're saying, just having a laugh on stage
Devin: We keep ourselves entertained.
Melvin: Just playing with each other and the whole project, I used to think, "Oh, yeah, we're never going to make it to the big stage." And now we're playing a sold-out tour with a band, and it's almost funny that we're here. I think, "How is it even possible?" So I think the funniest thing is we made it this far, and we just keep on pushing, so it's just really funny.
Helena: It's funny because Playlunch, the band that we're supporting on tour, also gives off that vibe. Their song "Keith" is about their neighbor they had arguments with. And then their whole thing on social media since they started touring all over the world, and playing this song is, "We wrote a song about our angry neighbor, and now we're playing on the other side of the planet”. That's absolutely mental. And we think, "Yeah, makes sense. We're playing with these guys”. We wrote a song about an action movie star because we saw a film with him that was nonsense. Then we watched more and thought, 'Well, he's a funny guy. We'll write a song about him.”
You share a love for late 2000s indie rock music. If you could each pick one indie rock artist or band to go on tour with, who would you pick? What kind of venues would you like to play in, and would you play across the UK, would you go everywhere in the world?
Helena: The Strokes. Anywhere they want to go. I love their show that they did two years ago. They played at Red Rocks for the first time, which looks like literally the best gig venue on Earth. It’s the most beautiful place. That's the absolute dream to play there one day. But you can't even begin to think about adding that to your bucket list. It's a next-level kind of dream.
Devin: I'll speak on behalf of Thomas, our guitarist who isn't here, and I'll join up with him. We grew up listening to a lot of the Gorillaz. We're big fans of Damon Albarn. That would be a big dream, to tour with them. They have that big orchestra and choir that toured with them, that would be sick.
Nez: I was trying to think of who do I really like within that scope, and then Peaches just kept coming to mind, and I cannot imagine what a tour with Peaches would be like. It would be so sick.
Melvin: I've been obsessed with Fountaines D.C. for a bit now, so I'm going to go with them. I just love their music, and I think we wouldn't be a good match, but fuck it. I love them.
Helena: We're none of these bands. None of us.
Melvin: In terms of places to play, I know in Vegas they have the Sphere. I just know with enough time to prepare, we could do something hilarious with it, because you're in a room surrounded by a screen. I think we can come up with really, really funny ideas about this. Because everybody that does it, they really make something super serious with The Sphere.
Your latest single, Hotdog, has an awesome music video for it. It's really funny and entertaining. I know it's a collaborative effort with your manager. How did the concept come about, and how was the experience shooting it?
Helena: Well, it was funny doing that one because we only started doing music videos last year when we released the first singles from our EP. We did a few videos with someone who had some great equipment and some previous experience in that as well. So, it wasn't just us, whereas this time we took that little bit of knowledge that we had, and we took this song. We thought, "This time it's just us and we don't have the equipment, so we're going to rent it." So we rented a camera from a friend. Good camera, good friend. Cheap rate. Very good. But we only had it for a day. And we weren't all free on that day. Or at least not for the entire day because we had a gig in the evening that we wanted to go to, and lots of things. We had to do it on that day, which restricted the amount of time that we had to make it. We ended up doing that all together, I think, maybe five hours that day. And we had to shoot some extra last minute shots with Tommy on his phone because we didn't have the camera anymore on another day, because then when we started editing, we were missing quite a lot of footage. We had to finish just with a phone. So really the idea behind it was just, we'll go to the beach. We didn't really have a concept for it. We had some different settings in mind, so we wanted to have the hotdog stand in a few different places. We knew we wanted to have shots of me eating a hotdog. We knew we wanted to have chef hats, us being silly in the hotdog costume, things like that. But it wasn't really planned. There was no storyline or anything like that. We thought, "Go to the beach. Let's go to those locations that we said we'd go to because they look pretty, and see what we can do on the spot." Luckily, it was very sunny. We managed to set up quite quickly, and we got a lot of the shots in the first couple of hours. It was very DIY, which is a great thing and also very nerve-wracking. We wish we had a bit more time to shoot on the day. Would've made our job way easier, especially for Tommy, who edited it. But it was very fun. It's nice to have full control of this whole project from A to Z.
Devin: When we wrote the song, one of the reasons that the song came out the way it did was because Helena and I used to write a lot of the songs together. And then at some point I started writing a couple songs, and I believe on this song, we put the song to Helena to come up with the lyrics for and then came up with the hotdog idea. And it just blew up from there. It was one of the first songs we really wrote as a band altogether. The idea of Hotdog was just really funny because I remember this was Helena's song. I found it really funny that when it came out, it somehow became a song completely about how much Helena loves hotdogs.It's one of our favorites, a really fun one.
Helena: The first time we played that live, we saw that it was very well received. It's like a really dancey one. People really liked it and sang along. So we thought, "Okay, it sounds like people like that. We'll keep on playing it." And then we kept on playing it. A few years later, when we become sick of playing some of the stuff. And it's not necessarily that we get sick of playing certain songs, it's that we always get 30-minute slots at gigs. And we like to put more of the new stuff in the set and get rid of the older stuff. So we don't play "JCD" or "Hot Dog" this time because they're older songs.
Nez: We sort of went in without a storyboard or anything. With the instruments sort of laid out and playing along with it. That took so long, on account of the people walking through the shot. We had to pull on either side to make sure that no one was walking past, going out of their way or to walk in front of us as slowly as possible. It was brilliant.
Helena: I feel it's great to have people from all over the world because we write songs collaboratively. You can hear everyone's different influences, and I feel one big reason why we all have such different music tastes and influences is because we all grew up in different places. At the same time, but in very different places. So that's very interesting. And also, it's very good because it helps us unlock some opportunities to play abroad. Our first tour, for example, was in France. It was a real privilege to be able to go to my hometown and take my friends from all over the world to this tiny place in Brittany, in France, and play our music to them. It felt really special to me because it's my hometown. I think it felt even more special to the rest of the guys because it's a brand-new place and, speaking for Devin, who comes from literally the other side of the world. Ten years ago, when he was back in Texas, he would never have imagined, not in his craziest dreams, that he would be playing his original music in Brittany, in France. That's a real privilege that we get from being multicultural.
Nez: All being from different places, I feel is one of our most valuable assets. I feel with that sort of diversity in any sort of group, bringing different mindsets, different lived experiences, it creates quite a rich environment generally. The songwriting sort of benefits from it, I think. Since we've spoken about it before, and other people can put it more eloquently than me, but we all come from places where music is consumed very differently, and English language music is obviously consumed very differently. I know that a couple members of the band have used it as a way to sort of learn English, or inadvertently have learned English as a result of music. It literally is their language, the language that they learn in. And yeah, I feel bringing a bunch of different perspectives keeps things also quite fresh, generally. We all live our lives in very slightly different ways. I just think it's quite fun.
Devin: We each have different musical influences, grew up with different musical taste, and different parents shoving musical shit down our ears. So all of us approach a song in a different way. I find the Frenchies approach the song more musically and more connected with the music of the song, while I'm a little bit more focused on lyrics, being a Southern boy where country and rhythm and blues and folk songs are very big. So I think I'm very focused on the lyrics, which makes sense. But honestly, it impacts the band in a fantastic way. We have a big wide berth of fans from different countries. We always know if we had to travel, we'd have places to stay. But also just in terms of who we are as people, I think we appreciate that each other have come from places that aren't the norm in British music society, and that kind of gives us an edge that we appreciate.
What would you say you are the most proud of in terms of what the band has accomplished so far? Is it a show in particular? A song in particular? Your live show in general?
Helena: The EP that we put out last year and the release show for it. It was a very collaborative project. We've all put our special touches on each of the songs. So it really represents the six of us. I think it says a lot about Room Service because of how different all the songs are. You have so many different genres in that EP. It kind of sums up what this band has always been about. The release show that we did for this EP was definitely my favorite show we've ever played, and it's going to be hard to top. It was in a beautiful venue. It was sold out and felt amazing. It's something we rehearsed for months, and we've put a lot of effort towards it. And we had visuals. Because the thing is a concept EP with a real story to it. We had someone introducing it at first, visuals matching all the songs projected behind us, and costumes. It felt very special, almost like a play. And I think it was received very well.
Nez: I would say that one of the things that I'm proudest of in terms of what we've accomplished so far is the fact that we're how many years in, and we still all get on. We haven't really had any big arguments. We haven't really had any really trying times that we didn't see a way through. We still all hang out. We get on really well. Anytime that there's any sort of disagreement on how things should be handled or written, we're very good at saying our piece and then moving on. Regardless of how strongly we feel about it, we always listen to each other. We've also done some really fun headlines and some fun tours. Really proud of being able to get on with Playlunch at the end of September.
Devin: The fact that we've come together, that our music has grown with us, that more than ever, we feel like we can show up in a rehearsal studio or show up on stage and connect. When we're away from the band, having that emotional connection where we feel as if we're family. That's what I'm most proud of, this growth as us as a family, and that it hasn't devolved or fallen apart, which can happen in a lot of bands. It can all go to shit, and no one is friends anymore. But we're all still best friends. If anything, we're family. And besides getting closer, I guess the music itself I'm very proud of. I think if you were to take our first song we ever wrote and the last song we wrote and put them next to each other, at least for me, I can see some clear momentum and moving forward and improvement. And that's all I really want to do. I just want to get better. I want to know that I can write music to the best of my abilities, and that's what we're doing.
Ariane
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