Interview: Scouting for Girls

With the charts awash with the eccentric and downright bizarre, Scouting for Girls are a little oasis of normality. Andy Welch speaks to lead singer Roy Stride.

Eccentricity is currently flavour of the month.

From the loveably bonkers Lady Gaga to the professionally kooky Paloma Faith, the charts are awash with oddities on a mission to prove their left-field credentials. Not so Scouting for Girls.

"We're just normal blokes I think. We're only successful because our songs are so catchy," says the band's frontman Roy Stride. "You only have to look at our gigs to see we've got fans of all ages and backgrounds. We're like the Ant and Dec of the music world."

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Thanks to the 850,000 sales of their 2007 self-titled debut album, Scouting For Girls – a pun on Robert Baden Powell's 1908 manual, Scouting For Boys – are one of the country's biggest bands.

Expectations surrounding follow-up Everybody Wants To Be On TV are high, but Roy is very confident the album will meet them.

"We didn't want to just recreate the first record," he says.

"Most second records are artistically crap and commercially disappointing, so we knew we had to avoid falling into that trap.

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"We wanted to make a second album better than the first, and sell so well that we could do a third and a fourth, that's our target.

"Plus, we can't have Greg (Churchouse, bass player] going back to work at Threshers. He always just looks so happy not to be working there any more. Actually, he can't go back, can he? It closed down. That's the impact him leaving had on the chain.

"It's a clich", he continues, "but it's hard making a second album – you don't have the same amount of time as you did on your first – but luckily our label (Epic) were really busy working with JLS last year so we didn't hear from them and they just let us get on with what we were doing.

"Everybody Wants To Be On TV is a step up from our first album, but it keeps the quirky, sing-along aspect that people love."

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Had it not been for the intervention of the MD of the band's record label, however, this might not have been the case.

At the 2008 Brit Awards, Roy and bandmates Greg and drummer Pete Ellard presented their label boss with a CD of demos. They'd been recorded in Roy's hotel room during downtime on the last dates of their UK tour.

The day after, Roy expected a call to congratulate him on another batch of instant classic pop songs.

"There was nothing," he says. "The day after, still nothing. Eventually, four days later I got a call saying that he didn't think there were any singles on there.

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"I couldn't believe it, but I was only half annoyed. The other half of me said, 'I'm going to write some really good songs to show him what we can do', plus I think he was bluffing as a way of making us come up with the best songs we could possibly write."

If the MD was playing a game, it worked. After Roy went back to the

drawing board, the trio ended up having to filter through between 40 and 50 songs.

Current single This Ain't A Love Song is the perfect comeback track; at once familiar and undoubtedly Scouting For Girls, but also bigger, almost Keane-like in tone. Elsewhere on the album there are songs

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such as the urgent Good Time Girl and the Buggles-inspired Famous and On The Radio.

"I write a lot about falling in love and breaking up," says Roy, drawing to a close. "Someone once said the best songs are about the first five minutes and the last five minutes of a relationship, which I agree with.

"Most people have been there and I try to harness that, but I think about a situation from a character's perspective.

"When people listen to your music, they have to be able to connect with it and feel what you're singing about. And that's why people like us, because we're normal blokes who sing about things everyone can understand."

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Scouting For Girls release their second album, Everybody Wants To Be On TV, on Monday. They play Leeds O2 Academy on May 6 and Sheffield O2 Academy on May 10.

Scouting – The story so far

Roy, Greg and Pete all hail from Ruislip, north-west London, and met in school. They only formed the band in 2005, although they had played music together for several years.

Scouting For Girls' debut album is nearly at triple platinum status. They've also been nominated for a string of awards, including Best New Act at the 2008 MTV Europe Awards, and three Brit awards in 2009.

Roy has recently been writing songs for other artists – although he won't say who – and has also been working with former Robbie Williams collaborator Guy Chambers.

Pete is "the world's biggest" Emmerdale fan, according to Roy. The band recently recorded a live radio session from the soap's pub, The Woolpack.