Embracing the Mystique: Marsicans' Take on Music
The effervescent indie-pop group Marsicans recently released the poignant and unrelentingly self-conscious single “Your Eyes” earlier this year. All having previously been in different bands, the Leeds-native quartet met, instantly clicked, and named themselves after the Marsican bear. As they prepared for their UK headline tour, they came down south to Luton for a benefit concert to support Alzheimer Society. I had the opportunity of sitting down with them for a chat before their warm-up gig.
Hello! Could you introduce yourselves please?
James Newbigging: Hello, I’m James. I play guitar and sing.
Oliver Jameson: I’m Oli. I play guitar and do a bit of singing.
Rob Brander: I’m Rob. I play bass and keyboard, do a bit of singing and go to bed early on tour.
Matthew McHale: I’m Cale. I play drums and sing a little bit as well.
What significance does the balloon emoji have in your social media posts?
JN: Basically, it started off by using it ironically all the time to make everything seem like a big thing, like a ‘Whey! It’s a party!’ kind of thing. Then we didn’t use it all the time, but then we were like, ‘Well, we might as well continue, because we’re using it a hell of a lot.’
OJ: It was either the balloon or the dancing man, but the balloon just took key position. We also started to use red balloons with our merch orders.
MM: With our name on them.
OJ: Yeah, so we basically said that this emoji is now ours.
RB: We’ve turned ourselves into a meme.
OJ: I’d say it is pretty significant.
JN: Basically, have a good time. It’s just a balloon. Everyone loves balloons…
When writing, do you focus on writing for the consumer or catharsis?
JN: I’d say a healthy mixture of both. It’s in our mind what the consumer might want but only so much as we don’t go off and write—
MM: Experimental, crazy, lucid.
JN: Yeah, it keeps you on a loose track; either you veer off it, but it’s pop music, isn’t it?
RB: Writing lyrics is a cathartic process; it always starts out like the subject matter will be something personal. But then, it can often broaden and we can start thinking about shared common experiences and that, in essence, is thinking about the consumer. It’s not necessarily in the ‘consumer’ way, but the audience and how they might be able to relate to this and whether this will make sense to someone else. Then we just think about making as much money as physically possible.
OJ: Yeah, it’s just all about dollars, just gotta get those dollar bills…
JN: Lyrically, I just like to make it not make sense, but then it makes sense to people differently and in different ways. It could mean a number of things, which is quite a nice thing and I like that, but sometimes it’s annoying.
RB: That’s because we don’t understand things and we get scared of things we don’t understand. Quite basic people.
You’ve previously referenced drawing from real life to inspire your writing through tracks like “Wake Up Freya” and “Your Eyes,” so do you rely solely on real life?
JN: A song popped into mind quite quickly there. “Arms of Another” wasn’t a real experience we had. It was kind of taken around from people we had seen in clubs. Rob started it off.
RB: It kind of started off like there was a friend of mine, and it’s not about him, but at the time, there were parallels between the song and what he was doing. He was the inspiration for it, but it’s a made up story, which is kinda fun.
JN: “Throw Ourselves In” is actually similar. It is loosely about [our friend] Kev, who, at the time, was falling in love with people very fast. He’d meet them a few times and he’d just be like ‘I just love them.’ I’m like, ‘No, you don’t. Just think about it.’ Rob had the chorus already, but not the verse. Then, without wanting to be harsh to him, I made an exaggerated version of what he was like, so it was loosely based on a person and an experience that you kind of elaborate a bit for the song to make it actually sound good.
You’ll be playing a huge festival stage in a couple of months and a stadium with the Kaiser Chiefs. What is the most important aspect when adapting your sound for different performance spaces?
JN: For us, a lot of it is how we pace a set. You mentioned “Wake Up Freya.” We will not be playing that at Elland Road with the Kaiser Chiefs because we’ve got a diverse group of songs and you can kind of pick ones that you know will fit better for different audiences or just lineups in general.
MM: Like festivals! For festival season, we always want it to be fast-paced, upbeat, and energetic. Just because it’s a festival; sometimes they’re very short sets (like half an hour) and it’s just party time.
RB: Give them the hits!
MM: People might come see you that have never seen you before, and you need to try and get these people involved straight away. If it’s our own headline tour, you can throw in the slower ones to pace the set nicely to give it a vibe throughout.
RB: You can look at changing the scenery of your gig by choosing the song order and how people will react to it, like the urban flow of that.
JN: We would never do that detrimental thing of wanting to play a song but thinking, ‘Oh no, that crowd wouldn’t like it.’ I don’t know, it’s just the little tweaks here and there to make it suit.
OJ: You mentioned the stadium gig. That will be like nothing we have ever played before because, by a very long way, it is the biggest venue, and even the biggest stage we’ve played. The speakers are so far away from you and it’s getting projected and you’re such tiny people, you know?
JN: It’s a weird thing.
RB: I think it’s easier to play, because the biggest show we’ve played so far was Reading and Leeds festival last summer, and the capacity of those tents is 10,000. They weren’t full, but they also weren’t empty.
JN: They were pretty full.
RB: It’s kind of easier to play to more.
OJ: They were more full than they were not full.
JN: Yeah, you made it sound like they were empty there, but honestly, there’s photographs to prove it!
RB: It’s easier to play to 5000, because if you’re playing to 50 people, you can physically see on their faces and their movements the way that they’re reacting to the songs. You can be slightly self-conscious about how it might be going down, but bigger crowds tend to move as one big ball of people, and I think it’s easier to command a small crowd.
JN: It’s what you want. It’s why you’re doing it, isn’t it? Festival-wise, just keeping the songs energetic throughout the set is what we want to see.
How does the atmosphere differ when playing festivals to that of your headline shows?
RB: When you play a headline show, you know everyone there cares about you, and they know all the songs, or most of them. They’re there to see a specific song or, like Cale said, there are a lot of people who are just stumbling into festival tents by accident, often because it’s raining, since that’s the UK and that’s what happens in summer. You have to just impress people on a total whim.
OJ: It’s also a different dynamic in the sense that when we do a headline tour, we know how many tickets have been sold that night, but when you do a festival, you’re backstage ten minutes before you go on. You have no idea how many people are there. You might clash with a really great band that know all your fans, so if there are loads of people there, you’re a bit more pumped.
RB: There’s also a bit more of a techy, nerdy band thing to talk about. When you play a headline show, you turn up at the venue at like 3 in the afternoon and soundcheck and kind of live with the space for a bit and prepare. If you’re playing a festival, you often don’t really have a lot of time. It’s a lot of ‘Your band will come in at this time. You have to be on stage twenty minutes after that, playing ten minutes after that,’ and you don’t really get any chance to breathe and stop and think about what you’re doing.
JN: Festivals are just kind of 100% mystique; you don’t know what’s gonna happen, who’s gonna be there, if it’s gonna work.
MM: It is gonna work!
OJ: There’s a great story from Liverpool Sounds City from last year. We were stuck on the motorway on the way there and the stage rep had already cancelled our slot, but we weren’t aware. We turned up at the venue at the time we were meant to go on stage and just ignored everyone and went and took all our gear onto the stage. We’d already cut down the set in the van and were like, ‘We have to chop it down to 20 minutes.’
JN: I think we only did about 5 songs, didn’t we?
OJ: We were basically like, ‘Finish the song, James does something to shout out the next song, play that song…’
JN: ‘Go!’
OJ: We actually ended up with the last note of the last song at bang-on 20 minutes and then we walked off stage.
JN: But it was such a good gig because of the crowd; everyone’s buzzing, you’re buzzing, like you fucking did it! Let’s have a good time!
RB: I was so hyped, it’s the most I’ve ever sworn on stage! I was just so focused on just getting through the songs!
MM: I had the worst drum setup ever for a gig for that. Drums were everywhere, but I didn’t care. I was grateful someone helped me set them up, I was happy to hit something, but that was crazy.
Does your extensive knowledge of music impact your enjoyment of it? Are you more or less critical of it?
MM: Oh, that’s a brilliant question!
JN: We discuss all the time that we can’t go to a gig now and just enjoy it like you used to because you’re looking at what everyone’s doing and wondering how they did that. Is there a backing track? How much is on the backing track?
RB: It’s like, what pedals people are using? That can be equally as fun as it can be really annoying. Sometimes you’re looking back and there’s a guitar tone that’s unbelievable so you’re there looking and just trying to see on their pedal board how they’re even making that sound. That’s kind of exciting because you’re a nerd and you wanna know.
JN: Do you remember when we were at the Foals gig and the tech guy changed the amp speaker?
RB: Oh yeah! It was like the coolest thing!
JN: We were watching Foals playing while this tech guy changed his speaker.
RB: One of the amps blew and we could visibly see this happening, and no one who wasn’t in a band was even remotely aware of what had happened. The tech got on stage, took the amp off the cab, took the back off the amp, changed the speaker, put it back up within about two minutes while the band were playing, and we were all just watching that.
JN: At Glastonbury last year with Royal Blood, there was this big vocal on one of the new songs on a backing track, and it really upset me because I love the song and I quite like them. There’s nothing wrong with backing tracks, but they could’ve done it! I was like, ‘Why aren’t they doing it? Neither of them are singing right now and it could’ve easily been done in real life.’ I pointed it out to my girlfriend, who went, ‘Will you just stop ruining gigs for me?’ I was like, ‘Ugh, sorry, because it’s so true!’
RB: That’s like a really good test for me of how music affects different people, because my girlfriend knows nothing about how music works and isn’t actually that bothered about music in general. She just drives the car to and from work every day and listens to whatever is on BBC Radio One. If I catch her singing along to something, that must be a really good song or that must have a really good hook, because you’re not in a position where you’re musically overthinking things and having specific tastes and stuff. We talk about the science of pop music and how there’s repetition and hooks and words that you’ve heard before in a similar order, chord progressions that are the same. It’s a familiarity thing. Most people just put the radio on and are like, ‘Yeah, this is a bop. I like it.’ I don’t know whether it’s more fun or not, to be honest.
RB: You can’t just enjoy things for what they are anymore.
What would be your dream venue to play in?
RB: Headline Glastonbury Plymouth Stage.
OJ: Mine’s always Red Rocks.
JN: Alexandra Palace.
MM: Uh, I’ve forgotten the name of it, but there’s a colosseum in France or Italy kind of thing. [Arènes de Nîmes]
JN: The Colosseum?
MM: Rammstein played it. It’s like a giant colosseum, and there’s a live video of it on YouTube. It looks amazing.
Your favorite venue to perform in as of late?
JN: Shepherd's Bush Empire was bloody wonderful! It’s so cool.
OJ: Koko is similar!
JN: When you’re on stage and you’re looking at such beautiful venues, you’re like, ‘Wow! This is alright, isn’t it?’
RB: It’s a treat because often, at venues, especially like the O2 Academy, circuits are all such generic looking buildings and they’re all just horrible.
MM: Playing the O2 in Leeds was good because of the amount of bands that we’ve seen there, like The Maccabees. It’s cool sharing a stage with them.
What have been your favorite places to photograph?
All: The Cathedral!
MM: Yeah, the Cathedral in Cologne.
OJ: Basically anything in Canada/USA last year. Everything you looked at was like, ‘Yup! I’ll take a photo of that!’
MM: ‘Look, the street sign! That traffic light!’
JN: Yeah, street signs, fire hydrants, school buses.
MM: Such pointless crap.
OJ: It’s the stuff that people don’t care about.
JN: Seeing those yellow school buses, to us, they’re so cool, but to Americans, it’s like, ‘It’s just a school bus.’
RB: I actually entertained myself by just looking at things, so it was great!
Okay, this is the last one! Dream artist to collaborate with?
OJ/JN: Kanye West and Paul McCartney.
RB: Those are always the same answers, but they are two good answers though.
OJ: For me, Kanye West to produce something. James, yours is probably Paul McCartney, right?
JN: Oh yes! We’re both just sitting with a guitar. Someone plays something and we’d go, ‘Oh, that’s good!’ He could play something and I’d go, ‘Paul, that’s great!’ We’d just keep doing that for hours, and that would make me happy.
MM: Dave Grohl would probably be fun to collaborate with. Me and him have got our hair going on.
OJ: What are you gonna do? Some drumming?
MM: I can play guitar, can’t I?
OJ: I’d love to hear that. Mine would have to be Will Rees from the Mystery Jets, just so he can teach me how to play guitar, how to jam. I’d go to his house, probably have some toast.
JN: And jam?
OJ: Different kinds of jam…
Thank you to all members of the Marsicans and their brilliant team. The entire evening was incredible; getting opportunities such as hearing brand new tracks that will be released soon! You can keep up with their endless escapades as they keep their fans entertained with segments like ‘Cale’s Woeful Wednesdays’ and many more by following them on all their social media. You can also stream “Your Eyes” here.
Hosted by: Chelsea Tiso
Edited by: Meg Clemmensen & Mary Perez
Graphic by: Emily Lantzy