It’s been ten years of fine tuning, but after ditching several managers, an independent band from Yorkshire have had their first Top 40 hit ahead of their debut album release.
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00:00Tell me about your latest success.
00:03Yeah, we just had our first ever big top 40 single with a song of ours called My Blood
00:08and our fans put it there because we're an independent band. We don't have any like
00:16label behind us or industry market and all that sort of stuff. It's just our social media and
00:21the fans have just really got behind us and promoted.
00:26And what are the fans like?
00:28It's incredible.
00:30Yeah, it's weird. Me and Ryan went to play a gig the other day and we like
00:35arrived at this tiny country pub in the middle of a village we'd never been to.
00:40And it was like, yeah, there was like 300 to 400 people there. We had no idea what
00:47walking into them. Every single person there was like a fan and had been a fan for years.
00:53They were like family. They welcomed us in. There were people wanting to buy us drinks.
01:02We thought we were going to just play in the corner of a pub, but it was much more than that.
01:10Family is the right thing. That's what it feels like. It's like going to a house party
01:18with my cousins or something, you know. That's what it feels like whenever we're with our fans.
01:23Just exactly the same vibe. It's because of the songs. It's the way the songs are written. They're
01:27just about real life experiences. So I think people resonate with that and sort of have
01:34probably very similar morals and outlook on life. It's like family time, you know,
01:41it's that sort of age group. And then that's where we get the kids and then that's where
01:45we get the grandparents because the songs are about life and we all go through similar things
01:51in different ways. So I think that's why it's so wide. But we have days where kids are doing
02:00little tic-tacs of like one of the songs or something or our grandparents doing it with
02:05their grandchild or the whole family's doing it together. It's mad because it's actually what we
02:11really like. This house is like a revolving door on it. People are just coming in and out. It's
02:16the same back at home. It's just a family vibe, you know. I've got to say it's one of the only
02:24times I've been contacted about 10, 12 times by different ones of your fans going,
02:30Saisley, why have you not done an interview with these guys yet? Yeah, and honestly I got
02:35contacted that many times by different fans of all demographics and ages. I was like, okay,
02:42yeah, I've got to, I don't know, like literally. But that's what's quite incredible actually,
02:48because I've not been contacted like that about, I've not been contacted like that about other
02:55bands and a lot of those are fine. What made you make the decision to become independent?
03:03We did, we've done three record dues, three major dues. Every one of them didn't work because
03:12they didn't understand our vision and I think part of that conversation about the demographic,
03:17they want to know that you're appealing to a certain age group and then they can focus everything
03:22on that age group. Whereas because it's so wide, I don't think they quite understood how to market
03:28a band that's like us or has the vision that we have. So they tried a couple of times to
03:36sort of change the direction that we were wanting to go in or telling us things that we were doing
03:40weren't good or backing something that we did that we thought was all right but wasn't really as good.
03:47So it felt like when Medj-Lev will sign a young band specifically, that they sign them like,
03:56it seems to the band like they're signing them for who they are but to a lot of people at the
04:02label it's kind of signing for who they think they can become and a lot of the time like
04:08the band don't think they can become that and it's not because like in our mind it's like we
04:13didn't think we couldn't release like real great pop tunes and like blow up but that wasn't who we
04:20were. So it's like we're kind of being drawn into somewhere else. Much deeper vision behind it all.
04:28It wasn't it wasn't about like having pop success and all that stuff or that wasn't what we wanted
04:35to do. We just wrote songs that were emotional about life and that's what we wanted to do.
04:41So we left the first record label and tried with another. It didn't work with that second that
04:47second label so they ended up dropping us and then the third day we tried a whole different
04:52thing because we'd sort of lost vision of lost sight of what Skinny Living was because of the
04:57amount of like facts. Things were being changed around or it just it was a tough time and then
05:03lockdown happened and we just had a moment to sit still and just be like what's actually going on
05:09here and then we had a couple of gigs after lockdown and we were in that sort of like
05:13community atmosphere again being in a pub and seeing people pouring their hearts out about what
05:18the songs were about what the meant to them and seeing them connecting together and we were just
05:22like we just need to do exactly what we set out to do in the first place. So although it's hard
05:28it's far more rewarding and we're just we're just hoping that we get a moment where it
05:36just takes off you know like somebody yeah somebody making us broke again.