summer camp interview

Meet Summer Camp, the delightful duo of Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey making nostalgic and infectious music that corresponds with the old photos and films they use in video clips and blog posts. What was supposed to be a bunch of songs no one would ever hear snowballed last year into a blog pet favourite and number 15 on NME's 'Best New Bands of 2010' list. When I chat to them over Skype they're self-deprecating, they say 'because', 'sort of' and 'kind of' a lot and they're also wonderfully British ? they apologise for my phone problems and feel terribly awkward about that time they pretended to be a band from Sweden.

Madeleine: I wanted to start by saying I loved your Christmas song, 'Christmas Wrapping'. My sisters and I had a massive Christmas playlist, and I think that song had the highest rotation.

Elizabeth: Oh brilliant.

Jeremy: Thank you!

Madeleine: I think the Spice Girls version was number two on rotation?

Elizabeth: Oh okay.

Jeremy: It's pretty solid.

Elizabeth: It's pretty fast!

Madeleine: Congratulations on your success so far. Does it still feel like a whirlwind, or are you used to it now?

Jeremy: It's pretty early days. We feel like we'd be pretty arrogant if we thought anything that had happened so far was anything massive. We've certainly been lucky with all the support we've had from the Internet and stuff, and we really appreciate it. But we've only been a band for a year and only so much can happen in a year.

Madeleine: Do people ever get you confused with the nineties band, Summercamp?

Elizabeth: I don't think anyone has. It hasn't caused any issues that we've heard of. Probably because they're not around anymore. I don't mean like they're dead! But they're not releasing anything anymore.

Jeremy: They're pretty awesome. They were on the Buffy soundtrack. That's pretty cool in my books.

Madeleine: That is pretty cool. You've done some soundtrack work, right, Jeremy?

Jeremy: Um?

Madeleine: For a short film?

Jeremy: I don't think so. I don't remember it. I don't think I have yet. If that's from my Wikipedia page, I should warn you that my Wikipedia page is full of lies. It gets hijacked, probably by my friends as a joke. For a while it said that I wrote 'I Believe I Can Fly' by R. Kelly. Unfortunately I didn't write that song.

Madeleine: I was a bit apprehensive about a lot of the stuff I read about you because of the whole 'secret identities, seven-member-band from Sweden' thing. Can you tell me a bit more about this?

Jeremy: When we started the band, we literally just recorded a song together. And we weren't purposely trying to create a secret identity, we just didn't want to put it under our own names because we thought our friends would laugh at us ? we thought it was pretty hilarious. And then some blogs happened to cross it and thought we were being serious... Then we were in this awkward situation where we didn't want to let anybody down by being, like, "Yo! We were lying! Sorry!" We didn't know what we were going to do, especially when it came to playing live. As soon as we started doing the band properly we took all that stuff off the Myspace and if anyone asked us about it we just ummed and ahhed about it and didn't really answer. We thought, when we start playing live people will just realise and it would gradually just seep out. Which is sort of what happened. But there was a magazine in the UK [Stool Pigeon] that kind of did the investigative journalism thing and tried to? they took it a bit too seriously and it got a bit weird. But I think it's kind of in the past now and it's just kind of funny.

Madeleine: Well it didn't seem like a malicious kind of secret identity.

Jeremy: Yeah, it was just a weird set of accidents slash coincidences and then?

Elizabeth: No, it wasn't an accident! We just didn't think anyone would find it. We didn't even think about it, there wasn't even a thought of "What happens if someone finds us and we've been lying to them?" It was like, "We don't want Dave to see this, we should hide it". [pause] We don't have any friends named Dave, I don't know why I said that.

Jeremy: How can you say that ? what about Dave?

Madeleine: That's really interesting because some of the other things I've read say it's because you didn't want to mix it up with your music journalism career and it was a conflict of interest or something. But it sounds like you were just messing about and didn't think much would come from it.

Elizabeth: I definitely don't have a music journalism career. I wish I had something to mess up but no. I'd written, like, five reviews by that point, I think... It was only afterward people were saying "Oh you're a big music journalist" and blah blah blah and I was like, "God, I'm really not". But at the same time it's a good story, I guess.

Madeleine: So what do you have planned for 2011? You've got an album coming out?

Elizabeth: Yeah, hopefully.

Jeremy: Yeah we're working on it with a guy called Steve Mackey who is the bass player in Pulp, a really awesome band. We're about two thirds finished and it should hopefully be out in the summer. Our summer, your winter.

Madeleine: Is it going to be a similar sound to the stuff you've done so far, or will it be a bit different?

Jeremy: I think it's recognisably the same band but I think it's a step forward, a slightly bigger sound. We've still got the hazy, nostalgic thing but bigger and clearer? I think the songs are better as well. We've written a lot of songs and picked the best ones, whereas the EP was sort of the first songs we ever wrote. I think it's better.

Elizabeth: Yeah, it's better.

Madeleine: I wanted to talk to you about the whole old photos and the films you use in your video clips. What do you find so appealing about analogue film and its subjects?

Elizabeth: I just like the aesthetic, I just think it looks nicer, richer and the colours ? everything's a little more beautiful. And also, there was a time when having a camera was a sort of novelty, so people didn't really know how to do their Facebook pose, so the photos have a different sort of quality to the stuff you get now. I don't know, I'm really into it, I collect old cameras... That was a weird sort of development because we used photos from my big collection on our Myspace because, again, we didn't want to have photos of us... that would be weird. But you've got to have a photo because otherwise you look like a creep. So we sort of did that, and then it made sense to keep going with them and leak them out. And we had a blog but we didn't want to say anything about us, because we kind of think that bands that have a Twitter and a website and update you daily on their dietary habits? well, we never really wanted to do that because we've always liked the idea of having a bit of mystery. And the photos said so much more than we ever could about the music.

Madeleine: I've heard you guys are big John Hughes fans ? what's the appeal there?

Elizabeth: I think a lot of people think John Hughes is just this guy who made films about the eighties teenagers, but it's so much more than that, and we think about it a lot more than that. He created this town, this fictional town called Shermer in Illinois, and the films he made are so funny and have stood the test of time and are really universal. And the fashion is fantastic. I think Duckie is one of the best characters ever written, and his fashion is fantastic. I love how he [Hughes] would take the same actors and just put them in different scenarios in this fictional town. And the idea that in this town that they could have bumped into each other, that they were living parallel lives. And also, there's something about the eighties which seems to resonate really strongly now. I don't know if it's sort of economically, or culturally or socially or whatever, but there's something there that our generation holds onto. Maybe it's because we were kids or toddlers or whatever, we were in our formative state. Yeah, I don't know ? I just think John Hughes is forever. I guess when we first started writing our songs we wrote them with that in mind, it's something we wanted to emulate. I don't know if we got there but it's just nice having that framework and he created a really brilliant one.

Madeleine: I also wanted to ask, what are Summer Camp fans like? I came across a lot of obsessive Jeremy Warmsley fans on the internet who are like, "I've got every song Jeremy has ever made."

Elizabeth: Yeah, Jeremy has obsessive fans. I have fans who come to shows and shout at me afterward. [Once] I was wearing a jumpsuit ? I have a huge collection of jumpsuits ? and I referred to it onstage as my "MC Hammer trousers" and this guy came up afterward when we were selling some merch and he shouted at me "You don't have to recreate everything from the eighties! Let it go!" I was like, "I'm not living in some fake eighties world, I'm just wearing a jumpsuit! Get over it!" Whereas Jeremy has these girls who are like "Jeremy! Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod, he's so hot, I love him."

Madeleine: That's awesome.

Elizabeth: Yeah, awesome for him! It sucks for me!

Jeremy: You have a lot of followers who are quite shy.

Elizabeth: They're not shy! They're outspoken! No, we've met some really amazing people and most of the people we meet are really really lovely. Or by default, really hilarious, because they get really angsty about jumpsuits.

Madeleine: You guys have been great, thank you.

Jeremy: Thanks so much, it's been fun.

Interview: Madeleine Atkins

www.myspace.com/summercampmusic

Oystermag