Published on 30th September 2007.

The Rosie Taylor Project

After the recent release of one of this year's sweetest singles 'Black & White Films', The Rosie Taylor Project caught up with Leeds Music Scene to discuss the past, the future, and the city of Leeds.

As an introduction... Can you give us a brief history to the band?

Jonny: September 2006, we formed...

Sophie: [laughs] Cast your mind back...

Jonny: Oh, wow, this is our first anniversary!

Nick: Anyway, at the start, Sophie wasn't there... so it was better [laughs]

Sophie: Lets try having a nice interview!

Jonny: We asked her to come sing... and she brought some brass along, and we added a nice trumpet. I think that was November...

Sophie: And then we managed to play Carpe Diem and Bad Sneakers guys came along by chance, and they liked us so they got involved... I think that was our third gig so we were really nervous.

Jonny: This isn't the brief history though, this is the long story of every single thing...

Sam: So, after we signed to Bad Sneakers, we played lots of good gigs... with Camera Obscura, Midlake, Vetiver...

Lally: ... and some rubbish ones! We did all those before we started rehearsing properly!

Sophie: [laughs] I think Bad Sneakers were just testing us...

Sam: ...and then, we brought out our debut single a few weeks ago... and that's it.

Lally: Oh, and then we took the day off and played with Jeffrey Lewis and got a few drinks and now we're sat here doing this interview... [laughs]

I feel this is a really obvious question... but why the name?

Sophie: We need to have a proper story! We're not having some shit thing where we don't know...

Nick: Well, we do know! Shall we just explain...?

Lally: Okay - so we basically had two names... one was The Rosie Taylor Project, because it was like someone's friend's ex-girlfriend's ex-crush sorta thing when they were twelve... and her name was Rosie Taylor, and we thought that had a nice sorta country summery sound ... and the only other name we had was Lally and the C*nts [laughs]... but that's very offensive...

Lally: But the actual story is that we couldn't come up with anything else.

Nick: Yeah, because when Jonny first came up with the name we all said no, but we kinda just starting using the name when talking about the band...

Lally: Thing is, if you search for Rosie Taylor, we're the only thing that comes up really...

Sophie: I can't believe you've been googling your own band!

Lally: It's true though... everybody does it!

Jonny: I actually hate the "project" bit of it... I think it's like all "project" bands are all sorta temporary... I think the worst thing was when Sam told me there's a Rose Tyler in Doctor Who... and I hate Doctor Who!

Was there a specific motivation when starting out...?

Lally: Well, we'd just left Uni... except Sophie, she's a year behind us. And a few of us had lived together for ages and now we didn't have the excuse of being students.

Sophie: I think we all felt it'd be a bit of fun, sorta a bit of a hobby... I don't think any of us thought it'd be serious until Bad Sneakers got involved...

Jonny: Our goal was to play the Fav... wasn't it?

Sophie: I remember I was revising in the library, and I ran down all excited - because Jonny works there - and it was just like "we're playing the Faversham!!"

Nick: I think it was just trying to cling onto something that wasn't work-related.

Sam: Yeah, I think it was just sorta being lost in the world of work. Well... lost in the world of work and unemployment. You get lost in doing a 9-5 drag, and you just sorta need something to do in the evenings...

Jonny: People say it'd be hard to have a full-time job and do this, but I think it'd be much harder to do 9-5 and not do this.

Being involved in the Leeds Music Scene, are there any artists or venues that you're particularly fond of?

Sophie: We all really like Wild Beasts...

Sam: I really love iLiKETRAiNS.

All: We like Laura Groves, she's amazing...

Sam: The Folk Theatre Partisans, on their own too - especially Michael Rossiter.

Lally: I think we've managed to see all of them individually... oh, and a couple of us used to live with Middleman, so we really like them...

Sophie: It's interesting the whole music scene has suddenly become so prolific.

Sam: I think the thing with Leeds is that there's band for every person.

Nick: Well, everyone started to get really pissed off with the whole "New Yorkshire" thing...

Sam: Yeah, with "New Yorkshire", it got stuck in its ways, so all the bands trying to sound like Forward Russia and The Pigeon Detectives - who are both good bands in their own right - just started wanting to do new things...

Sophie: The Pigeon Detectives are shit! That's what I think...

Sam: You're being recorded, Sophie!

Sophie: [laughs] I don't think they care what a lowly trumpet player thinks...

Sam: I quite like them... but I don't like to admit it.

Lally: When we first moved to Leeds the music scene was sorta dead...

Sam: It'd be rare to find a decent band from Leeds...

Lally: It's like, how many NME features do you see about the Leeds music scene nowadays?

Nick: Yeah, whether you like Forward Russia or The Cribs or not, they really brought the attention to Leeds...

Sophie: I think before I got involved in a band I thought it was really cliquey and scenester-ish, but once you actually get involved, or even go to a few gigs, you see that it's a really friendly atmosphere.

Sam: Yeah, I think everyone we've come across has just been really friendly and helpful.

Lally: Like that free paper, No Quarter, did a comic about it - It was like "Leeds man is not in band! Concerned friends say he isn't even working on acoustic stuff between bands!" That was really funny, and it's sorta true.

Sophie: Venue wise... I really like to play the Brudenell.

Sam: Brudenell's really good... but the stage is much smaller than it looks!

Lally: I like The Fav a lot, everyone says the sound isn't the greatest, but I really like it...

Sophie: The Wardrobe's great too, we all really like playing there.

What have you been listening to lately? Individually... and as a band?

Sophie: I've been listening to a lot of Iron & Wine recently...

Lally: We're going to see Beirut! Although Sam doesn't like Beirut... everyone else in the band loves them.

Sophie: Sam's the only one in the band with very bad taste! [laughs]

Jonny: I've been listening to this Swedish band called Sambassadeur.

Lally: I've been listening to Gram Parsons, Bonny "Prince" Billy... Beirut. Too much stuff... my CD player's broken so I just listen to the same stuff on my laptop. I must've listened to both Joanna Newsom albums about 200 times, and Blinking Lights by Eels...

Nick: Lally often likes to inflict us with whole days of country music.

Lally: Country weekend was a good weekend! Lally: It's really hard to say, because there's just so much. It's like; I often think I only like American bands...

Sam: That's a good quote for Leeds Music Scene - "Lally doesn't like English bands"!

Lally: I really don't like English bands that are really forced, which is why there's so many good bands in Leeds. Like The Enemy would never get anywhere in Leeds... I've heard The Twang are supposed to be nice guys, but the music is just horrible. I think a lot of what's been happening in Leeds is like a reaction to what's happening elsewhere... Is Fran Rodgers going to make the front cover of the NME? No, but is she brilliant? Yes.

Nick: I'll try to keep this up-to-date... I've been trying to get into the new Queens of the Stone Age album... it's a little disappointing, but there's some very, very good songs. The great thing about being in this band is that it's opened me up to so much more music I wouldn't have known about... stuff like Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Beirut, even Ryan Adams and Elliott Smith.

Sam: I've been listening to a lot of iLiKETRAiNS, and Hope of the States, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor ... and recently I've been listening to a lot of Iron & Wine, Julie Doiron, and Joanna Newsom...

You just played with Jeffrey Lewis and have got a date coming up with iLiKETRAiNS... are there any artists you've been really pleased to play with in particular?

Sophie: Camera Obscura was brilliant. Although they were a bit moody... well, the lead singer was...

Band: Shhh!

Sam: Midlake was really good...

Lally: Yeah, at the Irish Centre... something like 500 people?

Sophie: That was really exciting. Because Ed from Bad Sneakers was like "do you want to play a gig on this day?" but we were all going to see Midlake... And he told us that it was actually supporting Midlake so we were really pleased. Jeffrey Lewis was really fun to play with as well...

Lally: Yeah, he was great. Although I don't even think of him as an American artist... I mean, while we were at Uni, he'd be playing all the time around Leeds.

Nick: Vetiver were really fun to play with as well... those are the nicest guys ever.

Sophie: It's fun to play with lots of Leeds bands too... like Wild Beasts and The Sugars.

Are you happy with the reaction that [debut single] Black & White Films has got?

Lally: [laughs] Well, it didn't make top 10...

Sophie: How many has it actually sold? I still don't know... we've had really nice reviews though.

Sam: And it's been played... the video's been on MTV2, and played on Radio 2... which is nice. I just think how you can buy it nationally is great... like in Rough Trade down in London.

Jonny: It's been a tight race between Girls Aloud and us for Number 1...[laughs]

Lally: I can safely assume if Top of the Pops was still around, we'd be on it...

Sophie: And SMTV! We'd be there, talking to Cat Deeley...

Lally: So many things you don't realise, like all the stuff we recorded was with Richard Formby... we just wonder what he's doing in Leeds, because he did Pulp's first album and has played Lap Steel with Mogwai... and with us!

Nick: Leeds Music Scene said something like "if you like this sort of thing, you'll like this band" which is exactly what we wanted to hear - you can't aim to win over everyone...

Sam: And I like to hear people's criticisms, because then you can complain about them in interviews!

Nick: It could be really disheartening, because we just started this as something to do with out friends, and we're really excited about how it's gone, so it'd be really kinda heartbreaking to read something horrible... it's like, "we're just trying to have some fun!"

Lally: We're just still waiting for it all to go really wrong...

Sophie: The worst someone could say about us, is that we're really boring...

Jonny: I think it really gets to bands if it says they're really inoffensive...

Nick: The best thing is when we got some Portuguese guy messaging us on MySpace telling us how much he liked the music, in really broken English...

Lally: Yeah, there was some Greek guy on last.fm who listened to us tons, and then the week after all the guys on his friends list had listened to us too... that was nice.

So finally, what plans have you got for the future?

Lally: Album out in spring...

Sophie: Yeah, we're recording it now with Richard Formby

Lally: ... and writing it!

Nick: Yeah, hopefully that'll be out in January/February ish...

Sophie: I think the best thing is that if you'd asked us our expectations a year ago, we never would have imagined any of this...so, it's already kinda surpassed what we had hoped.

Nick: We'd love to play some festivals next summer...

Sophie: Yeah, my next big goal is to play Glastonbury...

Lally: Buying a van would be good! And writing our name on the side!

Nick: Doing a proper tour would be good...

Lally: And trying not to get sacked!