Talking to: A.D. Scruffs
When the opportunity came to my inbox to interview A.D. Scruffs I jumped at the chance just from the description I was given ; “a totally independent, Bristol based ‘Roots Revival’ band. I was already intrigued, but it took less than ten minutes of listening to, and watching, their incredibly energising performances and collective musicianship to know I wanted to talk to this musical palette cleansing band further.
With their debut self-titled album release last month and some exciting live dates ahead of them, I knew we’d have a lot to talk about. I met up with Jake, Will, and Nick to dig deeper into their roots.
Welcome guys, before we start talking about your roots, I’d like to begin with the always dreaded ice-breaker question. If you could have any superpower related to music, what would it be?
(J) Haven’t been asked that before, I’ve been asked just superpower, but that’s better.
(W) That’s a very good question.
(N) The only one I can think of, is just being, what I was thinking of was to know a key straight away, but that’s just being good at music.
(W) Yeah, maybe pitch perfect?
(J) I reckon I’d like to, just at the flick of a switch, be able to play any song in any style, regular fire, like instantly. I mean I love practice, it’s necessary, but it would be amazing to just go ‘I’m going to just play a classic concerto now’…
(Me) That’s a good one, I’ve always wanted to do that, just sit at a piano and say ‘right, I’m going to ace this thing’.
A.D Scruffs is a roots revival band, what is it about the genres of soul, blue grass, and country that speak to you?
(W) Nick and I grew up loving pop-punk music. Then a friend of ours, a good friend, George, gave me an Old Crow Medicine Show CD one day, which was sort of my first insight into Americana, old-time music. And it stuck, maybe, for about, I think 15/16 years now. So, I might one day move to jazz, but for now, solely Americana.
(J) Yeah, I think as well, like country out of those genres you said, so Americana, country, obviously so many other influences, but I think country is one where in its oldest, purest form, it’s all about storytelling and it’s about, just character to the songs, and I think that component for us is huge because we’re all songwriters individually and collectively.
(N) Yeah, I guess also, to go on from that, roots music, blues and sort of Americana, the instrumentation is very raw and not a lot of production, so the whole storytelling part of it, you’ve got a very raw and very honest sound. I think that’s a great way to be forced into creating great songs rather than relying on production.
As a creative person myself, I often find that when I’ve been making something to put out into the world that afterwards, creating just to create can be kind of tricky. How do you guys make time for creativity outside of the music?
(W) That’s a really good question, really good point. You’re definitely not alone with that. I guess it’s hard enough to try and make time when we work full-time jobs and trying to find time to write songs or be creative around those. Now, we’re not all great at social media, but we understand the importance of it and it’s sort of content creation in itself is a full-time job, one we are new apprentices in. Back to your find time question, I find in the UK, this time of year, while it’s beautiful out, getting outside with the instruments. We just go find a nook or a knoll or a hut somewhere in the woods and we can just play music there together. That helps my creativity.
(N) Yeah, Sunday we were in a rehearsal studio just jamming together. I think post writing the album and putting the album out, we put a lot of effort into that. Recently we did this thing where we had our voice note ideas, when you’re jamming away, playing on your own or whatever, you take that little nugget of gold and record it onto your phone. We put it all on Google Drive for us all to listen to and then over the last few days we’ve just been picking one or two of those things and seeing if we can nurture those ideas and be creative together.
All the live content that I’ve seen of your shows, it looks like such a good mood feeling, genuinely really captivating energy. You all look overjoyed to be playing. What is your favourite thing about playing music?
(J) That, exactly what you described, for me. There’s so many elements to it, obviously the process Nick’s describing where we all come up with little ideas, little scenes and they grow into songs and then by the time you get to gig, it’s like, I’m so excited to share these new songs. Then you get on stage, and you don’t know what the crowd’s gonna be like. It’s such an adrenaline rush, and even the calmest gigs, we did a really lovely gig recently and it was so calm and serene but there’s still so much adrenaline going through, me, us and I think, this is crazy what we do. Every time I gig, in different bands, and together with this band, for years now, I just feel like I’m still getting used to it. It’s always new and fresh.
(Me) I think that you don’t really want to get used to it really do you? Then you know you’ve still got stuff to do and learn. The minute that you get used to it, that’s when you know, nope, it’s not for me now.
(J) Exactly, yeah.
(N) Just going off on that, when you put the effort in, going to put it in front of an audience, especially an audience of people who, are not obliged to love what you’re doing, there night is dependent on your performance. We just go out there and have a good time because we want to have a good time playing music and then when that translates across the crowd, we have a bit of rapport with them. That connection is great for me. Even mistakes, a good example is turning around and have the rest of the band smiling and laughing at you and you can laugh it off. I think that is something the crowd really enjoys as well, a bit of humanity involved. I enjoy that, even if I’m the one that makes most of the mistakes.
You’ve supported a lot of known acts internationally and nationally in the last year, what’s been your biggest take away from all of it?
(J) I think it’s just pride. I think like so many things in life, you need to surround yourself and be in the presence of people who are so far beyond you, right? To keep you on your toes. That’s genuinely how I feel about being in a band, just with my boys, you know? I’ve got to try and keep up with their play and their songwriting. It’s that kind of competitive thing in me that’s totally healthy. I think that’s the only positive way to be in life, watching someone and try not to be intimidated, being inspired. There’s always so much to learn. Playing with you know, True Strays, or Dylan Earle, just seeing people who are full-time, they’ve been on tour, they’re at that level that we’ll get to, or want to get to, but we’ve just got to take notes and let it soak in.
(N) Yeah, taking those lessons and also I think it’s great to sort of celebrate that they took a chance on us. When people take a chance on us, it’s about cherishing those moments and putting on a good show for the headline act as well as the audience. Doing your best to be on their level and not letting them down.
If you could have your choice of bands to play with, in or outside your genre, who would your top 3 be?
(W) Are they touring now, sort of an active band or any band?
(J) There some offers on the table?
(Me) Let’s manifest, get into some manifestation power…
(W) Maybe it’s an achievable thing at some point, maybe in a few years, but The Wood Brothers. We’re really big fans of The Wood Brothers; we are completely in awe at their musicianship.
(J) Totally achievable, it might take a thirty/forty years, but The Rolling Stones. I mean, they’ve only just started really haven’t they?
(N) I agree with Will with The Wood Brothers, they’re huge on the Americana scene. They’ve been going so long and have achieved so much it would be great to play with them.
You are a totally independent band, what has been the biggest struggles for you in regard to this? Outside of social media as you already mentioned the struggles you have there.
(W) That’s a good point, I think, I wouldn’t say there is anything major as such. We’re all making time for it, and that seems to be working but obviously, in an ideal world, we’d do this full time. Work-life balance can be tricky to navigate, so yeah, by any chance The Rolling Stones World Tour comes up, I’ll have to switch-up my priorities, but things seems to be going okay at the moment. I don’t know, I can see that maybe being something to consider down the road but we’re not at that point yet.
(J) I’ve talked about the adrenaline and the highs of the gig, but it’s actually the one- or three-hour journey back, next day go back to work, we’re all still flying high, it’s so funny to me and it’s so affirmative because if you didn’t love it, you’d just go “Well I’m tired of it”. It doesn’t matter how tired you all are you are still energised. It’s all about the adrenaline, it doesn’t matter that we bombed it all the way up to London, drunk god knows how many coffees, barely made any money, it’s about the connections that we made. So I think that’s a struggle within itself, continuing to see the silver-lining.
(N) The only thing I’d like to add to that I think is that with the way the industry is at the moment, especially in the UK, it’s venues. With us being an independent band a lot of venues don’t always take the chance on us. It would be great to maybe play in a town we haven’t played before, but the venues wouldn’t necessarily take the chance to put us in front of their crowds because they need to get bums on seats and people through the door. That’s one thing I’d say is a little bit of a struggle these days. I think it’s a good thing that recently the Music Venue Trust said larger acts are taking a pound from every ticket they sell on arena tours and putting it back into independent venues. That will potentially give us a better chance as it may open up more opportunities and we want to play those smaller venues more.
You’ve got your debut self-titled album that was released last month, congratulations on that, the tracks I’ve heard so far are genuinely wonderful, my 9-year-old son is loving it also, wants it on our Spotify Car playlist, how did you find the recording process? Did you go in with any particular expectations or game plan?
(W) I lost more hair than I care to share on that one! It was really interesting; we met Scott from the Newcastle studios a few weeks prior and he suggested a way to fall into that authenticity and to make a feel of being live to use just two microphones and blend them harmonically and capture everything that went on in that room, warts and all. It was a very quick learning curve because we made mistakes and we had to be okay with that and know that whoever listened to the album would also hear those mistakes, of which there are plenty, and it became quite an ethereal experience really. On our first weekend we were very meticulous with it and had 10 plus takes per song but then on the second weekend something happened and we just had 3 takes per song and fell into a slipstream of positive energy between us and an understanding of the brief of the song and, actually, a lot of the other tracks came from that second weekend. So it was quite the experience, I actually learned a lot about myself, music aside, and we all learned to have the patience of saints to each other.
(J) I thought I knew everything, and I learned that, well, it was very humbling wasn’t it?
(N) I think the point of getting four guys in a room with two microphones and acoustic instruments created an incredible energy. This allowed us to see the difference, be it positive or negative, so as Will said, we could be at the end of a real slog of 10 plus takes and then go away and have lunch, come back and say, you know what let’s just give it one more go.
After having been outside, got some food and chatted about some different things and just smashed through a song that’s when we went, Wow! All that hard work and strife to begin with has sort of opened the door for us to come in and capture the energy in the room perfectly and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. I also enjoyed the development of it and I feel we really came out of the experience as better musicians, because Scott helped us learn the dynamics of it, it almost became a choreographed dance and getting us to work as one. For example, if there was a solo section, we would move closer to the mics to produce a punchier sound in the mix of things. It became really interesting to know you’re recording a song with very little editing and mixing, especially when you are working on a song that maybe someone else has written, you just want to play it perfectly but that just doesn’t happen and it’s okay to make mistakes you’re not letting anyone down.
(J) That was the really interesting part for me, the common thing happened where you come out at the end of a song and go that’s awful and I can’t believe I did that, but then the other three guys would come in and they couldn’t hear anything wrong. I think definitely part of the talent of this band truly shows through, and that truly came out in the album.
Guys, we’re gonna wrap this up now. Thank you so much for your time and energy today, I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to talk to you all more, it’s been great!
Jake, Will, and Nick are such genuinely lovely people, the band has so much synergy and joy to bring and I look forward to hearing more from them in the months to come.
You can follow A.D Scruffs on social media or catch them live this summer at the follow dates: June 7th - Volksfest Bristol, July 5th – Sandwich Folk & Ale Fest, July 31st - Fieldview Festival.
A.D Scruffs debut, self-titled album is also available now on Spotify and other platforms.
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