I first heard Spygenius on Big Stir Singles: The Sixth Wave, and loved what I heard, a nice updating of college rock. It’s a genre that I love to this day, and I think it’s a shame that for all its popularity in the 80s and critical acclaim, it never had a game-changing hit album. Not even iconic bands like the Pixies managed that.

Man Of The Sea, Spygenius’s new album, features cover art wonderfully designed by Champniss, and is a literal trip--there is a treasure map of the journey one takes with it, with music and lyrics that will make you think in all directions.

The band was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

AW: How did the band form?

Spy: We got together in mid 2000s. We’d all been in different bands in and around South London. Matt (keyboards) and Peter (guitar, most lead vocals) had worked together, then after that Ruth (bass and some lead vocals) and Peter had been in a band. Meanwhile Matt had played with Alan (drums), and one by all the bands and musical projects that we’d been involved with separately folded for one reason or another, and loads of our contemporaries gave up playing music, but we weren’t ready to do that. So, in the beer garden of the Greyhound pub in Carshalton, Matt, Ruth, and Peter conspired to put Spygenius together. Our manifesto was to form a group that would write, perform and record original music of the sort that we’d like to hear, without really worrying about what was in favour with the world at the moment, for as long as we could get away with it, and just hope that we could find enough interested people to keep that going. We had a couple of false starts, bringing other old musician friends of ours into the fold, but when we finally persuaded Alan that he wanted to be our drummer, that’s when everything gelled and Spygenius proper began.

AW: What are your influences?

Spy: Wow, too many and various to name! Lots of 60s ‘B’ bands – Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, Bonzos… and there’s a good dose of late 70s new wave in there – Costello, Dury, Squeeze… and equally bits of college radio darlings of a later generation – the Soft Boys, XTC, REM… but then there’s loads of other stuff in the mix too – surf and psych, folk and exotica, lounge and blues, rock and roll… and we don’t all like the same things. Matt loves Queen, Alan loves Studio 54 disco, Ruth loves 60s soul and 70s cheese-pop, Peter adores the Seekers. Matt and Peter inherited a grounding in trad jazz from their parents. And there’s a no holds barred approach when we’re working on a song; we just pull anything out of the musical cupboard that seems right for the moment. Except XTC. Ruth hates XTC. They are forbidden. But we all love harmony singing. I think we slightly hanker for the days when artists were allowed to do that. It was their personalities rather than a particular style that defined what they did.

AW: College rock and jangle pop, as popular as they were in the 80s, are now more underground. How can you reach out to people who don’t know what they are and get them hooked?

Spy: Good question, but, ultimately, word of mouth, building networks, building communities one contact at a time and then putting in the effort to keep them alive. Then, once you’ve got a strong and vibrant creative community, well, that’s an attractive thing and people are going to want to find out about it. For us, getting invited to the International Pop Overthrow festivals was a real turning point, not just for the chance to play to a new and appreciative audience, but for the chance to see and get to know so many other like-minded musicians. And of course that was where we met Christina and Rex from Big Stir, and getting involved with them opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for us. But I think that focus on community building, that’s what it’s all about, and then even if you never get a huge audience, well, everyone involved has had a great time being creative and having other folks around to appreciate what they do.

AW: Or do you feel college rock and jangle pop are more popular and above-ground than ever?

Spy: Ah, no – it’s pretty much underground now. It’s just not what the major music channels are interested in, but that’s OK, it’s liberating not to have anything to live up to but your own expectations and musical aspirations. And there are so many underground outlets – blogs and radio shows – it’s a niche, but a lively one.

AW: Where do you see yourselves in this genre?

Spy: Off to one side of it! When Big Stir formed it sub-titled itself “Power Pop And More,” and we are definitely in the “and more” bracket. We’re pretty eclectic. We don’t play straight down the middle power pop or jangle pop, although there are elements of both in what we do. So I guess we’re happy fellow travelers, grateful that we’re able to tag along and be part of the extended family.

AW: I love the whimsy in your lyrics. Where do you get your ideas from?

Spy: So many places! Overheard conversations, misheard conversations, imaginary conversations, books and films and plays, cereal boxes, road signs, other people’s shopping lists, bad puns, memories of word-play comedy from days of yore, ill-advised games of Truth or Dare, late night Messenger conversations with Blake Jones, and Googling pictures of Deryck Guyler… there is actually a book available (the Spygenius Book of Forbidden Fruit Cocktails) with a lengthy and largely unintelligible explanation of the process of how many of our lyrics are written. As far as we’re aware no one has actually managed to read it from start to finish yet, but it also contains loads of lovely pictures by Champniss.

AW: The treasure map and the journey of the main character are great. Do they make this a concept album?

Spy: We pretended the last album was a concept album, except that on that one we invented a story to try to tie the songs together, so it was all the wrong way around. The text of the story came out very small on the cover though, making it really hard to read, so we thought we’d give our listeners a break this time. No real “concept” for this one, the map is more a guide to Spygeniusland, which could be a theme park, maybe, or a special island like Bali H’ai? “Man On The Sea” as a title was borrowed from a children’s book, and so the idea of a map of some sort just grew out of that. Anyway, the only way that we’re going to get into the charts nowadays is if we draw our own.

AW: Do you see yourselves as more college rock, more jangle pop, or equal parts both?

Spy: Well, as we’re musical magpies with a penchant for puns, how about we call ourselves Collage Rock?

AW: What do you think is the future of both types of music?

Andrea Weiss