Hello Betty and the Werewolves! Tell us about your forthcoming debut album Teatime Favourites.
Hello! Well, we wanted the album to sound a bit like a tea party with a mad aunt who serves teacups of gin in her loveliest china set whilst surrounded by cats, books and cakes.

Will the album feature your two past singles “Euston Station” and “David Cassidy” or will it be all new material?
Yes, the two singles will be on it, and our new 7″ “Paper Thin”, then eleven other songs – some that we’ve played at gigs a lot already, and some which are completely new, so new that we’ve only learnt to play them properly since recording the album…!

You recently played at Camden Crawl. How did it go?
Ooh, it was lots of fun! We were playing on both nights so it was quite hectic, but we managed to escape for a clandestine afternoon of craft on the second day, where Emily made a bag!

You seem to be following in a long line of female dominated groups like The Shop Assistants and Talulah Gosh. Were they influences?
Yes, definitely, as well as bands like Delta 5, Dolly Mixture, Marine Girls. We’re influenced a lot by stories and poetry too – Emily Brontë, Keats and T.S. Eliot appear in our songs, and some of our favourite writers pop up in the video for “Paper Thin” as well.

What are you listening to at the moment?
Today so far: The Mo-dettes and Je Suis Animal.

You’ve got a new single “Paper Thin” out in June on Damaged Goods. There’s been a real lack of indie pop videos recently but thankfully you’ve made one. How much fun did you have shooting it?
A ridiculous amount of fun. Our friend Charlie Phillips made the video and got a group of our friends to dress up like authors. We filmed most of it outside – in the cemetery and the park – but then it got too cold (it was January) and so we smuggled werewolves and authors into Stoke Newington Library for the rest of the filming. We had to pretend that we were there just to borrow books! It was very daring!

Speaking of being on camera, you appeared in the film 1-2-3-4. How did that come about?
The director Giles Borg was looking for a band for one particular scene and got in touch with us through Damaged Goods. We knew that Giles had made some Talulah Gosh videos in the past and so got very excited about it all, and had our fringes trimmed especially.

Is this going to be your first trip to Indietracks? What are you looking forward to the most?
It’ll be the first time we’ve played at Indietracks but we’ve been there before. Apart from being excited about playing there of course, we’re really looking forward to seeing some of the bands on the steam train – always fun! Emily is also looking forward to the campsite disco.

What does the rest of 2010 have in store for you?
So “Paper Thin” is out in June (we’ve said that already, haven’t we?), and our album Teatime Favourites is out in July. As well as Indietracks, we have some fun gigs coming up in London, Cambridge and Nottingham. We’ll also be doing a live session for Marc Riley on 6 Music on 5th July.

myspace.com/bettyandthewerewolves

Tomorrow: The Understudies

Your single “Dancing” caused quite a stir in London’s indie pop scene last year (making #3 in our Festive Fifty). Have you been surprised how things have taken off so quickly?
Emma: It’s been fantastic to be made to feel so welcome by such nice people in the indie pop scene, both across the country and abroad. We’ve been a band for quite a while; just over 5 years now and we’ve always enjoyed playing and writing together but in the last year it’s all moved up a level. Getting the chance to play so many gigs and having people like the album too has just made it all so exciting for us.

Tell us about your debut album The Noyelle Beat. What hopes do you have for it?
Dan: The album’s about romance and friendship and all those little things that come between the two. It was released back at the beginning of April and in two months it’s far surpassed all the hopes we had for it. When we recorded it, we didn’t think it would be heard by half the people it has, and for their reaction to be positive, is better than we could have imagined. It’s given us so much energy for what we’re doing.

How was your trip to the US and SXSW?
Andy: Yeah the US trip was incredible! Really enjoyed playing at SXSW, it was great being asked to play there. Everywhere we walked in Austin music was blaring out of every door we past, lots of people, lots of great bands, and the weather was good too.

What are your influences? Emma, did your mum’s previous band Poison Girls have a big impact on your writing?
Emma: They’re all quite varied really; my influences are bands like Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, Van Morrison and also stuff like the Be Good Tanyas. Yes I remember really liking the way the Poison Girls wrote their songs – always quite upbeat happy music and then more uncompromising lyrics.

Dan: I guess I’m influenced mainly by bands like The Lemonheads, the 100 Broken Windows era Idlewild, and early Green Day. It’s generally something that has that urgency about it but that still has a melody tucked away somewhere

Andy: American pop punk was what made me want to start playing the drums, really enjoy Britpop, and just recently been listening to a lot of dance music, which has given me influence on a couple of our new songs.

Who are you looking forward to see play at Indietracks?
Emma: None of us have been to Indietracks before although we wanted to get there last year. We’re really looking forward to it.

Dan: I don’t want to build anything up but I’m sure we’ll think about doing something a little different. It’s a great line-up; I can see us rushing round all weekend trying not to miss anyone! I heard the Mexican Kids at Home are playing, I love their stuff and I’ve not seen them play for a while, so that’ll be really cool.

Andy: Yeah there are loads of bands I’m looking forward to seeing! Really excited about Allo Darlin’, I really enjoy their music.

You’ve got a UK tour lined-up for July. What else have you got planned for the rest of the year?
Emma: Indeed we are, July is going be fun and especially with the festivals we are doing! We are also doing another US tour down the east coast in August and then we are hoping to record the new material we’ve been working on and we’ll just keep playing anywhere we can.

myspace.com/standardfare

Tomorrow: Betty and the Werewolves

Hi Elizabeth! What have you been up to since we last saw you guest DJ at Scared To Dance?
Hey Paul. We’ve been pretty busy since then, we’ve just come back from a 10 day tour of the East Coast of the States. We had an awesome time playing shows in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Quebec.

How was your in-store gig at Rough Trade East?
It was really cool. Our vinyl copies of the album just arrived before we went on stage so we were really excited to see those. See how the artwork turned out and things. Kind of amazing to see our record on the racks. Although Bill and I were wondering if we would end up in the Oz/NZ section at the back of the store!

The New York Times had some very nice things to say about you. How was NYC Popfest?
Yes that was pretty exciting for us. I met the guy from the NY Times after the show but I didn’t realize he liked us that much. It was a really great article about indie pop in general I thought – he really captured the kind of DIY spirit and mentioned Cloudberry and WeePOP! which was pretty awesome! The popfest itself was super cool. Our show was really good fun – Gary Olson from the Ladybug Transistor sang Bobby’s part on “Dreaming”. He was so good I kind of forgot what I was doing because I was just listening to him. I was only there the night we played and the previous night at Cakeshop because we had gigs the other nights. I really loved Pants Yell! and I was sad it was one of their last shows. Still it was cool to see them before they broke up.

Your debut album just came out on Fortuna Pop! and it’s had some excellent early reviews. What are your hopes for it?
I think we’ve already exceeded what we hoped for with this album and this band – anything else is a real bonus. We’re kind of amazed at everything that’s happened to us. But we are very proud of the album, even though we started recording it just under a year ago and now we know these songs so well it would probably sound very different if we recorded it now.

The album is full of potential singles, “If Loneliness Was Art” being my particular favourite. Will you be releasing more singles from the album or will your next release be new material?
“If Loneliness Was Art” is going to be another single, but I think it’s just going to be a limited release. We’ve had a lot of support from 6 Music and Sean at Fortuna Pop! wants to give them more songs to play on the radio, because it will keep up interest in the band and the album. We released “The Polaroid Song” last December and you kind of have to follow up the album with singles to keep momentum going. We will have new material soon but we need to find time to record it first!

You’re playing on the Friday night of Indietracks in-between Veronica Falls and band Everybody Was In The French Resistance… Now. Will you be sticking around for the weekend to see other bands?
Yes we will and we can’t wait!

You all look so happy when you’re playing on stage which definitely rubs off on the audience. Do you secretly all hate each other and go hours without talking on tour, like Simon & Garfunkel?
No! The thing about our band is we were friends before we started playing music together. Of course when you’re in each other’s faces all the time on tour you need some time apart, but we genuinely get on well and love playing music together. They’re just a really fun bunch of people.

Speaking of Paul Simon, you played two of his songs when you DJed for us in April. Was he an influence on your songwriting?
Yes definitely. “My Heart is a Drummer” is meant to be a kind of tribute to him. It even says so in the song, specifically the song “Gracelands”. It’s pretty daggy to say it but we all grew up with our parents playing “Gracelands” and all that old Simon & Garfunkel stuff, along with The Beach Boys. It kind of sounds like the sunny music of nostalgia to me, and I guess that’s a quality we kind of have in our songs, or at least I’m chasing anyway.

Who would you say your biggest influences are?
Well The Beach Boys and Paul Simon, as mentioned above. I know for Paul and Mike it’s a lot of stuff like Super Furries and Yo La Tengo, for me and Bill, The Go-Betweens. Jens Lekman would be my favourite songwriter around at the moment, and has been for years. We all like Buddy Holly a lot. I also really love the comedian Daniel Kitson. Not that he writes songs, but he’s an influence!

Are they’re any other bands or solo artists you’d like to collaborate with? I hear Jarvis Cocker is a fan!
Haha. If I’d known as a teenager that one day he would hear our songs I probably would have died. I’ve never really thought about who we’d like to collaborate with, but it would probably be someone really daggy!

And finally, what else have you got planned for the rest of the year?
Lots of shows, in the UK, Europe and possibly back to the US later in the year. We really want to get recording the next album but at the same time we don’t want to rush it like we did this one – it was cool to do it really fast but it would be better if the band actually knew the songs before we went in to record them! We’re playing the End of the Road festival in September, which will finish off the summer. It’s going to be a good summer!

www.allodarlin.com

Tomorrow: Standard Fare

Hello Darren! You’ve been touring again since the incident in Nottingham at the end of last year [Darren suffered a fractured skull being mugged after one of his gigs]. How’s it been?
Bearable. I always enjoy my time on stage, but I was a little jumpy as might be expected.

Do you still dislike touring outside of London and being away from home?
Yep, pretty much. It gets worse as I get older. I think I maybe a little agoraphobic. Nothing specifically to do with the attack although that didn’t help, obviously. It’s all starting to feel very undignified for a man my age.

Your last album Pram Town was seen as a return to form by many critics. I’ve read that you don’t read reviews – do you have a particular distain for music journalists?
No I did read the reviews for Pram Town and liked, for the most part, what people had to say. It’s nice to be liked, even by critics, and it does help the ego but it isn’t the centre of what I do.

You’ve said in the past that your forthcoming record Essex Arms is going to be a “very depressing record” and it has “a strong theme of death.” What else can you tell us about it?
I don’t know if it’s depressing or not. It’s supposed to be about beauty and love in unlikely places. It does feature a death (a car crash), its bleak certainly but there is a love story in there.

Will Essex Arms be carrying on some of the same themes from Pram Town? Can it be seen as a sister album?
Well it’s a second album in an Essex trilogy although I’m not sure what themes link them other than me thinking about location and my home county. Both are love stories I guess. Both are sort of sliding doors narratives, that is to say what I might have been if I’d stuck around in Essex.

What are your hopes for Essex Arms? Scott Walker once said he makes each record in the hope to raise enough money to make another. Do you share this approach?
I suppose. It is tough out there. I currently make less money than ever and as discussed above I am starting to withdraw from playing live which is where people usually make up what they lose on dwindling CD sales. I want it to be good. I want it to matter to at least some people. Outside of that I don’t ask for too much.

I was recently at one of your gigs and some people were laughing at some of your more witty lyrics. I find these more tragic and morose than comedic. Does that bother you?
It’s interesting how audiences act as one and how one audience will laugh at a line that others might recoil from. People do sometimes laugh at odd places but in general I don’t mind. I’m trying to use unlikely words in songs and often they jar and amuse.

Do you still enjoy playing Hefner songs or do you see it as a burden?
I don’t mind too much. There are some I never do now, but as long as I switch them around it’s ok. My main problem is that I think a lot of the popular ones aren’t very good.

You’ve pretty much released every Hefner song. Is there anything left in the archive?
There are a lot of live tapes. The BBC stuff is proving hard to license. Completely unheard Hefner songs? I can’t think of many.

Would you play again with Jack Hayter as you did when you toured Hefner songs a couple of years ago?
Jack is on a lot of Essex Arms and does sometimes appear with me. Although I have no plans to do ‘Hefner’ songs shows.

You recently played at Stroke Your Beard in London playing just the ukulele which reminded me of your bluegrass record. Will there be another Hayman, Watkins, Trout & Lee release?
It seems unlikely. I have no objection and the four of us see each other often. Dave’s commitments with The Wave Pictures would be the main barrier.

What does the rest of 2010 have in store for you?
Trying to finish this album about the Essex Witch Trials and avoiding playing live.

Finally, Morse or Lewis?
Morse of course, but Lewis does ok as a make-do.

www.hefnet.com

Tomorrow: Allo Darlin’

Since our Summer fanzine has sold out I’ll be putting up the interviews with the bands here on the site for those of you who missed out on a copy. First up, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Scared To Dance chats to Kip Berman, lead singer of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

What have you been up to since your last tour of Britain?
Well, since we were last over in December, we had some time to practice and demo a bunch of new songs, toured Japan, New Zealand and Australia and are now on a US tour with Surfer Blood and Hooray for Earth. It’s going really great – we’re excited to be on the road again, especially with two bands that we really like a lot.

Tell us more about your new single “Say No to Love”.
If you strum an E chord, then an A chord then a B chord then the A chord again, repeat that for about 3 and a half minutes you’ve got yourself a summertime jam (hopefully). Because we tour a lot, we like to make new music available to people as immediately as possible – it’s fun to have new songs to play, and people seem to appreciate that if they come see us again, we’re not just going to regurgitate the same set we did 6 months prior.

You recently made a video for “Higher Than the Stars”. How did that come about? Why did the video come so late after the release of the single?
We wanted the video to be a certain way, and then we got all caught up in touring and other stuff, so we never got to finish it in a way that felt right. In the end we’d rather have a video we feel proud of (involving furries) than one that’s not really us. Right now we’re working on a new video for “Say No to Love” and hopefully that will get done a bit closer to the actual release of the single.

You’re headlining Indietracks Festival on the Sunday night, have you been before?
It’s a festival I’ve really wanted to attend since 2007, and we’ve wanted to play it but have never been able to make it work out. It caters to the kind of passionate pop that we love, and the people who attend are a lot of our best friends we’ve met from on tour. So yeah, we’re not only looking forward to playing and seeing other bands, but just hanging out with our friends.

What bands are you looking forward to seeing over the weekend?
There are so many, so if I forget some please forgive me. The Blanche Hudson Weekend, Allo Darlin’, Shrag, Love Is All, Specific Heats, Pooh Sticks, The Primitives and lots more.

Were you surprised by the critical successes of your debut album and the Higher Than the Stars EP? It’s all happened so quickly for you.
Each thing has sort of been a gradual build up from the thing before. While it looks incredibly improbable and dramatic looking back at our start at Peggy’s birthday party, to us at least there’s never been a sense of “overnight” rags to less raggedy rags. There was the Cloudberry cd-r, our self-released s/t EP, the Atomic Beat “Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan” split 7″ w/ The Parallelograms, the “Searching for the Now split 7″ w/ Summer Cats, and then the “Everything With You” 7″ on Slumberland as well as several tracks for fanzine compilations (Anorak City, A Layer of Chips, Fog of Ideas). Each of those releases seemed to find some really enthusiastic listeners in the indiepop community, which is all we ever really thought would happen. When we started, we figured we’d have like 12 fans, but they’d be really good fans and that was perfect. Aside from a little road trip to Athens Popfest in 2007 and a very brief mini tour of the UK with the help of The Manhattan Love Suicides, we didn’t really experience too many opportunities to play outside of our home town.

But after the record came out, we started getting more opportunities to tour and people started discovering us, which was both completely surprising and wonderful feeling. So many of the bands from which we drew inspiration never got the chance to do half of the things we have in our time together, and while it would be easy to get bogged down and feel unworthy, I think the most respectful thing to do is just try to appreciate the opportunities you have, make the most of them and continue to work hard. We try to be as upfront about the bands we admire that have influenced our music as possible, so that hopefully through people learning about us, they can also get into Close Lobsters, The Pastels, The Manhattan Love Suicides, Black Tambourine, Rocketship and Exploding Hearts.

I hear you’re working on your new LP at the moment. What can we expect from it?
Well, we won’t start recording it until we get back to New York, but we’re totally excited by the songs. I think a lot can be made of production and all the weird details of making a record, but if you’re not excited about the songs, then all the fancy production in the world won’t fix that.

Who’ll be releasing it in the US and Europe?
We’ve enjoyed and are grateful to both Mike from Slumberland and Sean from Fortuna Pop! and hope to continue to work with them on the next record. Hopefully they’ll want to too… I have to say here that I firmly believe that not every indie is run by great people, nor every major populated by music haters. But both Mike Schulman and Sean Price are two of the most virtuous, hardworking, aesthetically discerning and kind people in music. The fact that Sean lets us stay on his floor, eat his olives and granola when we’re in London, and Mike fly’s halfway around the world to see us play, despite having a full time job, a lovely wife and a 2 year old baby, never ceases to amaze us.

How’s your recent tour of the US with Surfer Blood going? Have you got a favourite gig so far?
Ha, we’ve only played three so far, but we really like both Surfer Blood and Hooray for Earth. It’s really fun to tour with bands that are both really good and fun to hang out with. To be honest, even bands you sometimes think are super serious usually turn out to be nice guys/gals when you meet them. Like, today Hooray for Earth “Iced” us during soundcheck. For those that don’t know what icing is, it’s when you’re presented with a Smirnoff Ice (alternative beverage) and you have to take a knee and chug it to prove your worth. This is a tradition among more fraternity types in the US (“lad culture,” I believe you call it), but we are happy to appropriate it for our own perverse pleasure.

Do you enjoy touring or do you get homesick?
I really like touring more than anything. Life at home is cool because I have some really wonderful friends that I like to see, but the chance to travel to new places and meet new people that I’d never get to go to or meet – that’s such a once in a lifetime opportunity, that it feels like I’ve won sort of “life” lottery where I get to do something I love more than anything. I try to just appreciate it 100 percent and do it the best I can.

What bands are exciting you at the moment?
Too many to name here. Some albums that have come out this year that I’ve really liked are (and in no particular order):

Allo Darlin’ – Allo Darlin’
Gemini – Wild Nothing,
Revenger – Knight School,
The Monitor – Titus Andronicus,
Spirit Youth – Depreciation Guild,
Chronosynclastic – The Prids,
Momo EP – Hooray for Earth,
Astro Coast - Surfer Blood and
The World that Never Was – The Secret History

Other bands I’m psyched on a lot, but maybe haven’t released an album yet:
Yuck, Zaza, Best Coast, Light Asylum, German Measles, The Blanche Hudson Weekend, Dream Diary, Gold Bears.

What are your plans for the rest of 2010?
Well, we’re going to record our album this summer, so that’s going to be a lot of fun. Also, we’re going to be touring a lot – pretty psyched about everything, especially the chance to finally play Indietracks.

www.thepainsofbeingpureatheart.com

Tomorrow: Darren Hayman