Shame

Ahead of their gig at the Waterfront on 16th November, our Callum caught up with Charlie Steen from Shame …
 
 
 
Hello!
 
Hey there, how's it going? 
 
Good thanks! Thank you for speaking to us! So first off, you're back doing some live stuff now. You've had time to be live again. Get on the road. Has that been a relief at all, or has it been hard to get back into the groove of it? 
 
I think initially it's a massive relief. I think to be in an environment where you're at a festival and with your friends again and it’s been such a long period of time. I think there’s nothing but enjoyment to be had in that, and I think everyone just sort of likes looking forwards now. 
 
There definitely were periods when we were nervous about playing again, sort of getting back into it, but I think in short, it’s a massive relief, we just want to push forward.
 
Do you think you built up some energy over the isolation period? Has that been released?
 
You're so static for such a long period over that time of isolation as well as so many people you know that people get quite used to it. 
 
I think initially it is quite surreal to be back in a non-socially distanced environment or to be playing a show, but no. I think it's more excitement than pent up energy, you know. 
 
Was there a festival or gig you have in mind where you first had that experience?
 
One of the first festivals we played was Latitude and we all went down and stayed there for the weekend, we played on Sunday so we could be in the festival. I think that was a strange thing to experience again.  It's not like it's just arriving when you're playing. Instead, it’s being in a field with all those people. It’s the full experience of all of it.
 
Recently we headlined the festival called Wide Awake in Brockwell Park, and there were thousands of people who managed to come down. It was also in South London where we all grew up as a band. With a lot of the bands on the lineup like Black Midi, Goat Girl and Crack Cloud, it was amazing to have a festival like that. Coming out of lockdown to all of those bands performing on our own lineup without needing more commercial help was really cool.
 
Like a community homecoming show?
 
Yeah exactly, I got the bus there!

 
One of the difficulties that seems to have affected a large amount of bands is short notice cancellations from Covid, has that been something on your mind, is it something you’re apprehensive about?
 
It’s always in the back of your mind. I think what’s horrible is that there’s a lot of guilt that you go through when it happens. But it’s a fucking pandemic, it’s nobody’s fault, if it happens, it happens.
 
I had Covid in March and April. When you have to notify everyone you had been in contact with, you feel so guilty, you feel so bad. But everyone is understanding. It’s definitely something that’s at the back of your mind. I mean, I’ve avoided Soho for the past 2 years for that reason.
 
We managed to do a socially distanced tour in I think May, and there were no scares on that tour, everyone was negative. That was a 3-week tour of areas that we hadn’t really played before in England. That was a real success and a great way to get back into things.
 
 
I’d just like to ask a bit about the album as well. Now it’s been out for a whie, have you thought about it differently? Obviously how you feel about an album at its release is usually quite different to how you feel 6 months down the line.
 
Sean (guitar) was saying this the other day, that it seems like so much has happened since its release. It came out in January, so it’s what, 9 months, which in the grand scheme of things is not even that long. With [the first album] Songs of Praise, we played it so many times that we have clear memories that we associate with the songs. I think playing the music live is a good way to finalise the tracks – it allows for the final [realisation] of them.
 
What other things can we expect in the future from Shame, could you tell us what you’ve got planned?
 
Well, we’ve got a new single that we recorded last night, so we’ll be putting that out in October before the tour. But we’re just working on album 3 at the moment and hopefully getting that together. We’re also doing a lot of touring next year, going back to America and Europe and places like that.
 
Where would you differentiate this album 3 from Drunk Tank Pink? 
 
Yesterday we recorded the song with James Ford in a ‘live’ way, which we’ve never done before really. I think that’ll be part of the approach going forward.
 
I mean on Drunk Tank Pink, the result from the production was amazing, but it was Josh and Sean looking at ways in which they could record things fragmented and record everything in logic and work on top of that. But now we’re working on songs in a live room again and seeing what comes from that.
 
You can hear aspects of that on the album (Drunk Tank Pink), the kind of technicality of it all. There’s lots of moving parts. Was that hard to realise live?
 
No, not at all. It’s actually been fucking amazing live. It took us a while to get to grips with playing the songs properly. But it’s gone down really really well, and it also adds so much to the set.
[The two albums] really don’t sound out of place next to each other.
 
I think moving forward, people are thinking about playing live again now, so [as a writer] you’re really thinking about that performance element to songs that you’re writing.
 
 
Drunk Tank Pink seems a lot more introspective than Songs of Praise, would you say that’s true, is there anything that caused that shift for you?
 
I think that’s definitely true. I think at the time it was just kinda coming back from touring and then sort of suddenly being a lot more isolated or having a feeling of isolation. I mean, we toured extensively for a long period of time and then suddenly had this time off after two years of properly touring. It’s like when you stand still and suddenly, you’re on your own. It was also a way of dealing with things that had happened over the period of touring that I hadn’t really confronted until we stopped and were faced by all of it at once.
 
You spent quite a lot of time in a particular room during the process. It was in an old nursing home and it was painted entirely pink. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
 
Yeah, that was where I lived. It was in an old Nursing Home in Queens Road, Peckham. I made the room with the help of my flatmate Henry and Charlie’s Dad, Lennon. Lennon is actually on the front cover of Drunk Tank Pink; he also named the band.
 
It was this tiny room, and you could only really fit a bed in it. I painted it entirely pink, lip-gloss pink. I think that’s where I wrote a lot of the lyrics for the album there. I think that’s probably where a lot of the themes of being on my own again came up.
 
There’s this theory by Baker-Miller that there’s a certain shade of pink that can repress anger and violence and calm you, and so it all comically fit together with the themes of the record and the experience of living there. It was great, with the initial time of moving in and then just being in the silence, being on your own again and sharing the room with your bandmates again.