Playing House

Rarely, and with immense caution, do I use the word “refreshing” to describe a band for fear of sounding like a cliché tooth paste commercial describing new musical endeavours. However, I find it hard to use anything other describing term to explain Playing House who are releasing their EP entitled New Haircut. With an alt-pop sound but a punk attitude, the band melds an incredibly heartfelt felt and intimate release that is anything but cliché, unlike my intro…

Starting off what were your influences and how did they influence you? M: Generally Bowie, the Talking Heads. K: Bowie and the Talking Heads as well, although we take different things from them. I: I’m more in to pop punk, even partial to a bit of Sum 41. M: I’m in to cheesier pop, Abba and even Carly Ray Jepsen’s new album. K:  I really like some of Rita Ora’s stuff. M: We’re really all over the place, even some of the British Punk like the Clash, we don’t really sound like them but we try and take their attitude and bring that to our live shows.

Can you explain the name Playing House to me? M: It’s something my girlfriend says, like how we’re all pretending to be adults and grown up, kind of like playing house.

How did you guys start out? M: Well Killian and I have known each other and played together for about five years. Then I musically stalked Izzy for ages and through connections we met about two years ago. We benefit from knowing each other closely, it makes the writing process a lot easier and we get through some emotive topics when we write in Izzy’s room.

You guys play with five people, yet the band is only you three, whys that? K: Currently we have a keyboardist and a guitar player but we don’t have them involved with the song writing. I: Too many cooks spoil the broth sort of thing. M: We’re all so tight knit, when we’re writing in Izzy’s room we are able to talk about so much because of how comfortable we feel together. It allows us to say a lot in our music. We start with a theme and then turn that in to music, not the other way round. K: It means we can focus on the feel of the music and not just the production.

Having played a church, Saint Jarvis and Fields, before this and now a refurbished tram shelter, is there a thing about quirky places? K: Before Playing House, we’d done a lot more grotty venues and gigs. M: Having done music for a while and played all over the place we decided that after having done that we wanted to be a bit more selective about where we played, so we made the decision to start in places we thought had good potential. K: We want to be moving onwards and upwards. M: We’re pretty serious about where we want to go and have long term goals because we’ve had a lot of experience in the music industry. I: There’s no point doing the music if you don’t enjoy it. M: It comes out it our live show; we try to make our gigs as entertaining as possible for our audiences.

Do you have any other plans for live shows or releases in the summer?

K: We hope to have some new stuff recorded by the end of summer, after this EP release on the 13th of April.