The Artist Explains: SOFY - 'Lads! Lads! Lads!'
London alt-pop artist SOFY recently released her wonderfully tongue-in-cheek single ‘Lads! Lads! Lads’. Both a hilarious send up of lad culture, as well as an important comment on the negativity it perpetuates. She took time to talk us thrugh the track.
The song takes aim at LAD culture and toxic masculinity. At what point did you get sick of seeing and experiencing this kind of behaviour and decide to write a song about it?
There wasn’t really a specific turning point or incident that inspired the track. All of my songs are inspired by everyday experiences, and I feel like lad culture and the problematic behaviours associated with it are a big part of life when you live in a city like London, or anywhere in the UK to be honest. It’s something that me and my friends lament and laugh about all the time so it felt like a natural topic to write about.
The video looked like it was a lot of fun to film. Can you tell us how it connects to the track?
It was so much fun! When we wrote the song I always had the idea of a boys night out in my head for the video, coz I think that’s when the behaviours that the song touches on, like catcalling for example, are at their most obvious. The song itself is also quite raucous and boisterous, like a big night out, so it all felt like it fit together quite nicely.
Are there any recurring themes or imagery between the track and/or the video?
Yeah, there are lots of visual cues in the lyrics that we brought to life with the video which was really cool. For example in the first verse there’s a line “how can he be bringing girls home back to his mum’s?”, so we set up a scene where the lads are all drinking in the main character’s room before the party whilst his mum shouts at them which was jokes. There’s quite a few little moments like that in the video so keep an eye out for them!
Do you have any behind the scenes stories you want to share with us?
Haha we had such a good time making the video, it’s honestly hard to pick one. My personal favourite moment was probably filming the rickshaw scene. We shot it in Soho on a Saturday night so it was absolutely mobbed, and Alan and Charlie (who played two of the lads in the video) had to zoom around in a rickshaw shouting “Lads! Lads! Lads!”. Because the camera was small and attached to the rickshaw it wasn’t obvious that we were filming a music video, which meant that people just thought they were acting like dickheads. They had to stop at a red light for a bit and I think a few rowdy passers-by ended up hurling some abuse and throwing stuff at them, which was really ironic and funny.
Finally, despite coming across tongue-in-cheek, the track deals with serious issues. How important is it for you to explore such themes and ideas and how does its tongue-in-cheek nature work with that?
Well, like I said before, I feel like the issues surrounding lad culture are unfortunately a big part of life for young people in the UK, and something a lot of us can relate to, so as a theme it felt like a natural fit for my music. I thought there was space in the general discourse around the topic for a song that addressed the issues in a tongue in cheek way, because behaviour like cat-calling is so ridiculous it felt right to ridicule it right back.