In Conversation With: Sea Girls
Sea Girls are a band that have quickly become a household name, we had a chat with them at their biggest headline show to date when the played London’s Scala.
When the average person hears the words Sea Girls together, I assume their brain jumps to vision of the film Blue Crush rather than four lads from Leicester England playing indie rock tunes together. But those who cognate Sea Girls to the band are the lucky ones, because one day, in the not too distant future I might add, Sea Girls will be in everyone’s ears, and those lucky few will be able to say they knew them when.
I got to sit down with front-man, Henry Camamile, and drummer, Oli Khan, at one of London’s most iconic venues, Scala, and talk all things Sea Girls. The band-mates have been friends since their school days, for those none Brits that means high school (about age 13/14), playing in many different bands together as well as separately before forming Sea Girls. You’d never be able to tell by the way that Camamile can carry a tune, but he wasn’t always the frontman, in fact the first band he was in with the guys he played bass and Khan sang. It wasn’t until Camamile started writing songs that he realised he could take his singing to the next level and put his voice out loud and proud as the frontman of a band.
We get into discussing how Camamile began writing songs, “I always liked the ideas of writing songs I guess,” he tells me, “but, until I did that, I didn’t try [to write creatively] because I thought I wouldn’t be able to. I know some artists and song writers used to write poetry, but I never did that.” The band tends to collaboratively write all their music, it’s very rarely a situation of somebody showing up to practice with somebody bringing already finished work to the table. “Whoever brings the idea to the table writes the lyrics, but I do like to put my stamp on it” Camamile continues to explain. While the band do write their music together, the songs are still very much based on real life scenarios, “if we’re doing it collaboratively someone will take the lead, so it’ll be Rory’s story or Oli’s story.” A great example of something like this was when they were writing ‘Eat Me Whole’, this song was based on a time when bassist, Henry, had been wronged and was really angry. “You get more varied stuff when you collaborate,” Khan explains, “and if one person has not enough to write about, the rest of us can take over.” And while the band does love to collaborate, they do sometimes write lyrics, at least, fully on their own. “It’s usually what’s going on in my head at the time,” Camamile says, “it’s not like I’m like I’ve got to make this really arty or something like that. It’s more like what most honestly depicts what I feel.”
The song writing and recording process is really important to the guys, which is why they still aren’t 100% sure when their first full length album is going to drop. Khan and Camamile promise me that the album will come into fruition at the start of 2019. “We’re quite fluid as a band with how we put music out, we don’t have any labels or anything, so there’s no one telling us what to do. So we just do things on our own terms,” Camamile tells me, Khan chimes in with a laugh, “we’ll know when it’s done, we just don’t know when that might be yet.” I’m hoping to get at least ten new songs out of them on the full length, I mention this and they smile. Sea Girls most likely will include some remastered old songs, as Khan says there is still some life left in a few of them. But they can promise that the new record will have some new gems for us to enjoy.
When I ask what the reason behind including some old songs on the full length would be, Camamile’s eyes light up. “As a band, an album is like a package, or a story, and a debut album particularly has got to be our story, our statement,” he begins to explain, “and that’s massively part of our live shows” Camamile pauses, clearly in thought of how to best explain this to me. Khan continues, “I think if you’re picking up new fans, they won’t have heard the songs before, so the album version will be their version of the song.” “Yea, I think like meanings of songs and things like that, put that in context next to another song and you can kind of hint what that’s about, like the journey or like that song might be written about the same person, like a story. I think it’s almost like the songs on albums can be like chapters and you don’t want to leave out a chapter, or rewrite a chapter just for the sake of it.” Camamile starts laughing at his comparing music to books, but I think he makes a wonderful point. Music and novels are both things that everyday people love to get lost in, so comparing the two is really a beautiful thing to do.
Sea Girls create music that is relatable, yet very easy to lose yourself to. Because of this I think it’s clear why the band were able to go from less than a year ago playing their first headlining show at a three hundred and fifty capacity venue in London, to now selling out a venue that holds over a thousand people. Having spent their most formative years amongst the population of London, a feat like this, selling out Scala, is a huge deal for the band. They mention artists such as Sigrid, who has only recently become a household name, also selling out Scala, and when they mention this with smiles on their faces, I know that in a years time I’ll be interviewing some other up and coming indie rock band who mention the fact that they saw Sea Girls headline here and that’s what made them know they could do it as well.
Feature created by Sara Feigin