I first heard of Spygenius on their album from last year, Man On The Sea. That was a great one, and equal to it is their followup, Blow Their Covers. Guitarist and lead vocalist Peter Watts delves into it more in my interview with him, and his answers are very interesting. Thank you, Peter.
Andrea Weiss: While most people know who you are now, for anyone who doesn't, could you give a short history of the band?
Peter Watts: Of course. We are a four-piece group based in the South East of England and we got together about fifteen years ago (wow, how did it get to be so long!?). We’d all been in other bands which had fizzled out one by one, so we created Spygenius because we didn’t want to stop. Our ‘mission statement’ was to write, record, and perform original music for as long as we could get away with it without really worrying about what anyone else thought of it – which is what we’ve been doing ever since! Apart from just recently, of course, when we recorded a collection of cover versions to keep ourselves busy during lock down.
AW: Would you say these covers are songs that have influenced you?
PW: Yeah – it varies a bit from song to song, but between the four members of the band our tastes are pretty eclectic, and we draw on a lot of influences. But all the songs have some sort of direct connection to what we do as a band, and how we approach things musically.
AW: Would you say that these bands you cover are favorites of yours, even if they're not an influence?
How did you choose which songs to cover?
PW: Ooh, this is quite hard to answer because, like I said, our tastes are pretty broad and we don’t all like the same things! And different songs are there for different reasons. But some of the song selections definitely reflect musical touch-points for Spygenius, bands which we had in mind to emulate a little when we set out. Traffic are a definite point of connection between me and Matt (keyboards). I fell in love with Buffalo Springfield’s harmonies as a teenager and always wanted to do something like that. Squeeze do the whole clever, complex lyrics thing and hail from South London, which is where three of us are from originally. Gene Clark made me want to write songs. Most of the band really like Madness, and Alan, our drummer, just has the perfect voice for the lead on Michael Caine! So yeah, a lot of the selections are from groups who inspired or influenced us from the get go, but then a couple of the tracks are covers of songs by other musicians we’ve met along the way through David Bash’s International Pop Overthrow Festivals, or through Big Stir Records, and just feel an affinity for. And then there a couple of oddball selections – a song that was playing at the party where Ruth (bass) and I got together as a couple ("Griselda"), or the song that my old 80s band was named after ("Murrumbidgee Whalers") – so there’s a story behind each selection. So, for instance, "For Pete’s Sake" and "Come On Home" were songs that I just happened to hear when I was very young and that set me on the road to becoming a musician. So there’s a variety of reasons, but every song has some sort of a connection to what we do as a band and how we got here.
AW: The song “Therapy” by Plasticsoul takes a positive view of it, which is great, as does your cover. Did you want to emphasis that positivism?
PW: Yeah, it’s a great song, and Steven is a label-mate and a good friend of ours. We love him and miss him. At the last Liverpool IPO before Covid he came over to England to play and Ruth and I were drafted in as temporary honorary Plasticsoulsters, which was great fun. Somehow we all ended up spending the night in a converted double-decker bus in field in Wales…rock and roll! But as for our cover, I think we thought that the mood of Therapy was more ambivalent – it’s positive, yes, but not just positive – and that while Steven’s original version is kind of defiant, there’s also a vulnerability in there, and we wanted to try and bring that out, to just draw out a whole other side to the song. And it’s a testament to just how good that song is that it worked so well with such a complete rearrangement.
AW: I love your cover of Squeeze's “Is That Love” and a lot of these covers from the 80s. How important was that decade to you?
PW: Well, it’s probably something to do with our ages! The 80s was when I had my youth, but I always felt slightly at odds with what was going on. I suppose I woke up musically at the tail end of the 70s when the New Wave thing was happening, and then the 80s went all New Romantic and synthy, which didn’t quite do it for a guitar nut like me, but there was still loads of great stuff going on if you dug around a bit, so I took to digging around. I was kind of obsessed with Robyn Hitchcock for a while, and used to go to every Jazz Butcher gig that I could muster the cash for. Of course, we lost Pat just the other day, which is a bloody tragedy… but Squeeze hail from a part of London just a little bit round the South Circular road from where I grew up, so there’s an affinity there, and when I was first trying to learn how to sing I used to flatter myself that maybe I could make my voice sound a bit like Glenn Tilbrook’s – and we picked Is That Love because Matt and I both get a bit excited about how clever the structure is, and because I always wanted to play that guitar solo!
AW: Ditto for “Queen Of Eyes,” which is also a tribute to the late Matthew Seligman. What do you want to say about him and the song?
PW: We met Matthew through Rex Broome of Big Stir. Matthew had offered to record a bass line for the Armoires, and Rex arranged for him to do it at Casa Spygenius down here in Canterbury – and we just hit it off with him. I mean there was the obvious musical connection, what with me being a wee bit of Soft Boys fan, but more than anything we just made each other laugh. So the actual recording session was over pretty quickly and we hastily adjourned to the pub to the watch the football and talk nonsense at each other, and after that Matthew would visit us and we’d all be very silly together, and he became a big supporter of the band, offering feedback on recordings we were working on, occasionally writing nonsense reviews, planning future musical projects, and coming to our gigs, and at one gig he joined us on stage at the end for a really, really shambolic version of "Queen of Eyes," which I think only Matthew had actually played before… and I’m not sure any one of us was sober. In the wake of that, we conspired to record a cover of the song. Ruth and Matthew had teased one another one night about each other’s bass lines being either too busy or too simple, so when we decided to record the song, Ruth wanted to record a really busy bassline, just to give Matthew a laugh… but of course that’s not how things worked out. He never got to hear our version, and in the end, Ruth decided to copy Matthew’s original bass line, in honour of him. I can’t really say how much we miss him. He was a joy to know and I wish he were still here. There were so many delightful conversations that we never got to finish.
AW: You’ve had success with your music. What would you tell someone who's just gotten that kind of musical success?
PW: Success is such an elusive idea…Dylan probably had it right: the only measure of success worth worrying about is the one you create for yourself, and if you do that right you can’t really fail! We set up Spygenius so we could keep doing our own thing musically, finding out how far we could take it, and if anyone else ‘got’ what we were doing then that was great, but if they didn’t, no matter, we’d just keep on doing it anyway… and through taking that approach we’ve made a lot of music which we’re proud of, made a lot of friends who we love, become part of a global musical community which get so much from, and had a lot of great times, with many more to come! And that seems like success to me. So I guess I’d say don’t get hung up on any single idea of what success is; embrace whatever is wonderful in wherever you happen to find yourself, say yes to whatever opportunities open up, and enjoy the ride!
