Introducing: Two Penny Blue
- Grace Patey
- Oct 16, 2017
- 6 min read
Two Penny Blue have been hard at work this year and with their debut album Let's Say coming out any day now, we think it's about time to introduce you properly. Meet Tommy, Will and Sean:
So firstly, what are your names, and what's your role in the band?
Okay, I'm Tommy I'm the singer and the guitar.
I'm Will I'm lead guitar.
And I'm Sean and I'm bass and drums.
What's the correlation between the band name and you guys? Where did it come from?
Tommy - Oh no! Well... okay... the official story is, I used to collect stamps. Yeah no not the best story is it? I used to collect stamps and I once got a Two Penny Blue stamp and a Penny Black, which are really rare stamps to find. We were thinking of band names and couldn't agree on anything, and we thought this sounded nice and it just stuck!
So you've said you were inspired by bands like Alice In Chains and Pink Floyd when you were younger, where do those bands that you used to love sit within the current sound?
Sean - Well Pink Floyd, there's definitely a few elements where you'll hear the direction we're aiming for. With one of our singles 'Lament', you'll hear the end of the track, and it will be the first thing to come to your mind. And the same with the end of 'Book' which is one of the tracks on the new album where one of the first bands you'll think of is Pink Floyd or that rocky sound. I think it's that Pink Floyd, progrock, going a bit over indulgent on your instruments kind of feeling, and having a bit of fun with it really.
Will - We all come from different backgrounds really, so I never used to listen to Pink Floyd, I come from a more grungy background.
Tommy - I write most of the music and I'm primarily folk, old school bluegrass kind of music but you can always feel the others then driving us to have long instrumental ballads. And I love them, especially gigging them, I can always get on the floor and have a little dance. Will's always pushing it especially the guitar work, into the intricacy of it all. Folk music for me is much more about having the chords and lyrics and then everything else is fine. And then there's Will who's much more rock 'n' roll.
We'd say you fit into a folk rock meets blues kind of category, do you see labels like that limiting or more of a challenge?
Tommy - We have got the folky elements to us and you can hear that in many the tracks. Most bands don't often say this, but I quite like to get a 'label' of what we are from other people, rather than trying to just explain it myself. I don't mind being put in a genre and I think that’s quite a cool description of it; bluesy rock. But our music is definitely evolving.
In your single Lament the progression is really intense and we would say the first part of the song is a very different genre to the end, is that something you tried to do, or did it just happen?
Tommy - I remember the story of when we did this, we had a lot of practice before recording and we actually recorded that single live. I remember we were practicing one day and the chord progression that mixed them together. What was funny is that it was such a beautiful moment and it was really fun but it only lasted two phrases and it wasn't enough, so we just had a practice and we jammed it and we just kept on making it longer. So in the song it just gets louder and louder and more instruments, more intense.
Sean - We didn't even think we'd add it in but we were like yeah this is really cool so that kind of just came through jamming and developing.
In your song Gypsy there's quite a lot of delicate moments, how do crowds usually react to that?
Will - Especially with 'Gypsy', as well as a couple other tracks, when we're playing live we adapt them to fit in that live environment. Even if we keep the song quite delicate it just gives them that bit more. If you listen to 'Gypsy' and 'Lament' in your own home they sound as good as the first recording. Whereas when we play them live we'll change them up a bit, maybe play them a bit quicker, change around a couple of the instruments or change the song a little bit just so it fits that live environment. It also makes it more fun.
Tommy - Yeah to be fair in the recording studio it's hard to go all out, vocally, but at gigs I do a bit of grungy screaming (laughing). Also 'Gypsy' is very different live though. It becomes a lot more upbeat, a lot jumpier.
Do you have a usual crowd, or what is your usual crowd?
Tommy - We've got a venue that we play at quite a lot called Belushi's Bar in Camden and we get regular punters. But we play anywhere we can around London and we've got a gig coming up in Allycat on 20th October.
Sean - Well there's also pub around the corner from us and we get free drinks when we play, and we're really good friends with them all. It's kind of like an open mic night. We do some of our new tracks there. I think we wrote one or two songs there, they just came alive in there. It's just a fun local pub where we can have a few drinks.
So what can we expect from the debut album?
Tommy - Greatness!! This is the big one for us. A single or an EP is very isolated, it's about making a good song, but we've spent the last 3 months forging this album together in the studio. It was a long hard process, but one we loved and so we've really poured our heart and soul into every part of it.
Sean - There's a real mixture of sounds and we've added a lot of elements to some of the tracks. There’s a lot of strings involved in it, I told our producers that we wanted a lot of strings involved.
Tommy - It sort of sums up the last four or five years. The album follows the arc of growing up and now I’m in my 20s, the last songs are quite sad, they’re quite ambiguous, kinda optimistic but also a sense of reality to them, it’s a lot sadder. There’s a lot of playful songs at the start then it starts to develop into something more mature. The ending is quite important, it’s got the orchestration in it. There’s a song called 'Lets Say If I Die', quite an aggressive title I guess, it’s about asking serious questions after being a child. The album has a lot more meaning than the singles I think. It’s a playful rock kind of sound, then it’s a more serious approach.
Will - You have a lot of the rock element at the start, but then towards the end the tracks become more contemplative and have to pay more attention. Your attention starts to get more and more drawn to the music towards the ending, there’s a lot more poignant messages. It’s much more direct like we’re talking to you. There’s a song called 'Get Well Soon', which is a quite personal experience, it’s almost like a recited poem, It's about the last stage of maturity when you start to understand things a lot better. It’s about having a general sense of awareness.
Tommy - The album has a really important shift at the end, both the nature and the meaning of the songs. The album is a nice message, we’ve written an album about the very stage of life that we’re at which is kinda cool.
How long have you been sitting on the songs for the album or were they all written for the album?
Some of them have been around for a while, but there’s an element of them which have a new sound to the band. The older songs have only just started to come together now when we’ve written the album. Some of our songs were written about the month before the album, 75% were old songs.
'Let's Say', the debut album from Two Penny Blue will be available on ITunes and Spotify from 23rd October.
Twitter: @two_pennyblue
Instagram: @two_pennyblue
Facebook: @twopennyblueband
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