The Luca: 'It became a much more personal and cathartic process'
Once part of Heir, the five-piece yacht pop band who formed as students at Leeds Conservatoire, Sam Perry now has a new solo musical vehicle he’s calling The Luca.
Billed as a theatrical pop and rock musical project, he’s launching The Luca’s debut album 100% Alien at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds with a full live band that features Sam Newham on drums, Nathan Apps on bass, Tim Malkin on electric guitar, Harrison Stanford on synths and vocals, and Charlotte Lynch on acoustic guitar and vocals.
Of Heir’s demise, he says philosophically: “I think artistically it was always a bit of a challenge. I think the band served each of us in lots of other ways, being the family away from home, having all moved to Leeds from various parts of the country. You have this kind of unit of friendship that you get to travel with, we got over to Europe and stuff. Whilst we were in it we treasured it so much for its extracurricular things that it brought to our lives aside from artistry and music. It was fun to play onstage together, we all had a great time and still remain good mates but it became more apparent the longer it went on that the ability to be ourselves artistically was pretty hard.”
Personally he says he was “just ready to take more responsibility for my own relationship with music”, adding: “You realise how little you’re writing songs and how often you’re spending building content calendars on your laptop for the social media rollout. It was just no, I need to shift this about a bit and get back to the fun stuff.”
During the Covid lockdowns, Perry began demoing songs on his laptop. When he took over events programming at The Cardigan Arms on Kirkstall Road, he would perform some of them at open mic nights. “From various angles there were these encouragements to put my own songs somewhere,” he says, “and then as soon as those songs started to emerge it was very hard for me anyway to not let the mind race on to ‘imagine playing this with a band, imagine gigging this, imagine getting to the studio with this’ and then you’re away.”
He credits the influence of his former bandmates Tom Hammond and Ste Fisher on his latterday approach to songwriting. “I was always more of a craftsman...Tom and St was really good at identifying that pure emotion in those day to day life moments and translating them then into song… It was fun then going to my own stuff and maintaining the stuff I’ve always felt more instinctively comfortable with and good at but then chiselling into your own head and heart a little bit more. It became a much more personal and cathartic process.”
The album turned out to be a “chronicle” of Perry in his twenties, “moving to Leeds without very much confidence in myself and reaching age 30 and feeling a lot more settled – all orbiting the topic of love and relationships and dating, which is the area of life I’ve had the most ups and downs with”.
The Luca plays at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on Saturday September 12 with guests Lola Simms and Masi Masi. Admission is free.