Getting to know... Marsicans

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Hopefully you’re already familiar with Leeds quartet Marsicans - Dork premiered a video of theirs earlier this year, and our pals Get Inuit are fans too. They’ve spent the year playing Dot to Dot, Live at Leeds and the like, and touring about all over the show. Now with their latest single ‘Too Good’, it’s time to get to know them a bit better - courtesy of a chat with "dedicated Alan Partridge fan and lunging enthusiast”, guitarist Oli Jameson.

Hey Oli, how are you today?

I’ve just got back from Leeds Festival where the music was great, but the paella left a lot to be desired. So, all in all, pretty good thanks!

When did you realise you wanted to make music? Did you have a musical upbringing?

My parents brought me up on good music, thankfully. My mum is a big Motown fan, and my dad is into guitars and sweet licks. He reckons he lost a large percentage of his hearing going to a Motorhead concert as a teen, where kids we’re sticking their heads in the speaker cabinets. I think as soon as I realised that we could cover a song as a band and it didn’t sound terrible was when I thought, ‘This is fun. I wonder how far we can take this before people tell us to get a real job’.

What was the music scene like in the area you grew up in?

Leeds has always had a thriving and very diverse music scene, which I think we’ve come to appreciate over the years. When we were growing up, we were lucky enough to have a venue called The Cockpit around, which of course closed its doors for good a few years ago. We’d spend most our money on going to gigs there and saw both Catfish and the Bottlemen and The 1975 support Little Comets. Now we put on our own night at a bar called Oporto on Call Lane where we have guitar bands, and we DJ afterwards which is really fun. There’s a lot to sink your teeth into in Leeds.

How did you guys get together?

James, Cale and I started playing together at school as a way of skipping lessons, I think. Half an hour down the M62, Rob was doing a similar thing at his school. Then a few years later, the fours of us came together as Marsicans. Rumour has it that James talent-scouted Rob and lured him into the band through a string of mid-morning coffee dates.

Are you creative in non-musical ways too?

I sometimes wake up in the early hours with vivid concepts for terrible Photoshop edits. Only very few make it online, but they all get made. Most recently I've had ’Sundara O’Briain’ stuck in my head, which is a picture of Sundara Karma with Dara O’Briain’s face on every member. I haven’t posted it online yet in fear of breaking the internet.

What do you do for fun?

We’ve started writing a sitcom. We don’t have a radio or any kind of music player in our van, so we’ve started writing a pilot episode. Each of us has a character with equally complex personality traits, and we improvise short passages. I don’t want to give too much away, but Cale is our manager’s wife.

What would you most like to achieve during your music career?

We’re pretty simple, reasonable guys. We all want to take our time and release a debut album we’ll be proud of in 20 years time. I think we’d all love to tour in places like the US and Japan. And then there’s the big one - record a Number 1 hit with the nation’s favourite: Martine McCutcheon.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width="2/3"][vc_column_text]What’s been the highlight of your time as a musician so far?

Probably when we woke up one morning to find out Coldplay had shared our single ‘Friends’ on Twitter. It’s huge gratification for us when someone who writes melodies that good says he likes your song. Playing Glastonbury last year is a close second. That felt like a real milestone for the band and a big one to tick off the bucket list.

Tell us about your new single, ‘Too Good’ - what’s it about?

‘Too Good’ is a straight-up love song, really. It’s about being so involved with someone that you feel like you’re dreaming and the day-to-day grind begins to fall into the background. In the video, we stacked up a load of old televisions with this nostalgic 8-bit colour imagery running through them and had four amazing dancers dancing in beams of ethereal light. Then there’s us, bouncing around like clumsy idiots and just generally lowering the tone, but that’s what we do.

What are you up to for the rest of the year?

We’ve got a busy autumn coming up supporting Clean Cut Kid in October and Jaws in November which we are so buzzing about. We’re huge fans of both bands, and these tours take us to some places we haven’t been able to reach yet, so it’ll be good to finally meet and apologise to the people that have been sending us hate mail about skipping their town for the past year. You can expect some more music before the year is out too.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/3"][vc_column_text css=".vc_custom_1504102517505{margin-right: 15px !important;margin-left: 15px !important;border-top-width: 10px !important;border-right-width: 10px !important;border-bottom-width: 10px !important;border-left-width: 10px !important;padding-top: 20px !important;padding-right: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 20px !important;padding-left: 20px !important;border-left-color: #1e73be !important;border-left-style: dashed !important;border-right-color: #1e73be !important;border-right-style: dashed !important;border-top-color: #1e73be !important;border-top-style: dashed !important;border-bottom-color: #1e73be !important;border-bottom-style: dashed !important;}"]

Who's in the band: Cale, James, Oli and Rob

How long have you been together: Three years

Where are you from: Leeds

What musical pigeon-hole can we shoehorn you into: Dirty-pop

What track should we embed in the space below: 'Too Good'[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z94yT8Wm584"][/vc_column][/vc_row]