joan: "Pop can be whatever you want it to be"

It’s a warm day in Brighton, but joan are savouring the UK climate. In the upstairs apartment they’ve found themselves in, they’re finally taking a moment after rushing down to the seaside - and conversation has turned to the sounds that soundtracked their childhood. There’s Prince. There’s Michael Jackson. There’s James Taylor.

“I’m a pop guy!” declares frontman Alan Thomas, sitting across from drummer Steve Rutherford as they call together a gambit of styles from singer-songwriters to out and out pop giants.

“I loved it all. The thing is, the essence of pop is that it can be whatever you want it to be. You can play by a lot of different rules with that, but for us, let’s not corner ourselves in a sound so that then the next thing we put out has a different flair to it. It’s pop music, so we can. I’d hate to be pigeon-holed, or pigeon-hole ourselves.

Knowing joan, there could be many golden years ahead. There may only be a scattering of tracks out in the world right now, but trading in mammoth 80s pop in all its styles and flavours is really the name of the game. An evolving lead of tracks with insatiable hooks and an effortless sugar-coated charm, it’s nothing short of unabashed fun. The sort of combination that would naturally start when…