Simon Rushworth
Rising Scots rockers Serpico could be the next big thing and this summer you’ll get the chance to deliver your verdict as the boys unleash their debut album and pack their tour bus ready for a full headline tour.
Neon Wasteland hits stores next month and the boys will be heading out across the nation – stopping off in Whitley Bay along the way – in support of a record already exciting the likes of Kerrang! and Rock Sound.
We caught up with frontman and former Oxford student Mikey to chew the Serpico fat so sit back and enjoy yet another rushonrock exclusive.
rushonrock: How important is your summer headline tour?
Mikey Serpico: Over the past year and a half we’ve done a lot of support tours. We’ve had a lot of people come to see us but this is the first chance we have to identify and cement people as Serpico fans. It’s like we’ll finally be persuading people to see us for what we are rather than as the other band on the bill. In that respect it could be quite a significant summer for us.
rushonrock: And you’ll be touring on the back of your new album Neon Wasteland. What can we expect from that?
MS: It’s been a long time coming. We started recording it and finished it fairly quickly about a year ago. The time was spent on post-production, mixing and mastering in the States. If you book out a studio for a week to do all of that then it costs you a lot of money and you make sure you’re in and out and hit your deadline. By farming out the record to a production team in the US and doing everything remotely there wasn’t really that urgency or financial concern.
rushonrock: So what slowed the whole process down?
MS: We could tweak everything again and again and again and we just kept sending it back with new ideas and it would come back to us and the process seemed to go on forever. On the positive side we got everything to sound exactly how we wanted it to sound. On the downside it took a long, long time to pull it all together. Being on our own label the time frame didn’t really matter – having said that it’s a relief the record’s here now. We’re our own masters and we can do what we like. That can be dangerous!
rushonrock: Is the live show still fresh considering you’ve been playing the same songs for so long now?
MS: They’re not new to us but they’re still new to most of the people we’re playing to and every time we get a great reaction to one of our songs it doesn’t matter how well we know them. The tunes that people have heard before tend to send them a bit crazy so we’ll keep on playing them for as long as we can! Just because the album’s been so long coming out doesn’t mean we’re sick of playing the songs that are all over it. When you’re playing live it’s more about the crowd reaction than the band reaction. We’ve got a couple of new songs for the headline set that we’ve been working on but we can’t lose sight of the fact that, to 90% of the people we’ll play to this summer, everything is brand new. We’re looking at these shows from the perspective of new fans, not from our own point of view.
rushonrock: But after two years fine tuning these songs your attention must be turning to the next album?
MS: Honestly, no. We haven’t started thinking about the next record yet. How can we when the first album isn’t even out? Of course we’re always bringing new ideas to the table and some of those ideas will become new songs for another album. But right now we’re just concentrating all of our efforts on Neon Wasteland.
rushonrock: Of those efforts Last Honest Cops is a modern classic. Is it right this track almost didn’t make the cut?
MS: Spot on. It was actually the last song we wrote for the album and I remember I had to fight pretty hard to get it on the record at all! I had it in a germinal state for some time – I write all of the stuff and then hand it over to the rest of the boys to work their magic and add a few bits and bobs. It’s like peer review with our songwriting process. If the guys don’t like a song then they’ll just kinda forget to learn it. It’s the subconscious confirmation I need that they don’t really like a song. That’s what happened with Last Honest Cops.
rushonrock: But it made it! How?
MS: I just knew it was good in my head and kept banging on about it. When we got into the studio it came down to that song and one other as the final track on the album and so I played it to our producer and said ‘what do you think?’. I played it to him on the acoustic guitar and he liked it enough to give it the nod. I slowed it down, sped it up and gave it the full works. But it could so easily have hit the Serpico scrapheap.
rushonrock: You’ve been four years in the making as a so-called breakthrough act. What’s taken you so long?
MS: We’ve only really been doing this full-time for a couple of years. When I formed the band I was still at university in Oxford. I had a lot of material and I was doing a few open mic nights and that kind of stuff but I wanted to find a band. I put out a few adds and it was like blind dating for bands. I’d meet guys I’d never net before in dodgy bars and if we hit it off they were in. If we didn’t they were out. There were some pretty creepy dates if I’m honest. I was still at uni in 2006 and so we’d hook up, play a few gigs and then go our separate ways for a few weeks. Once I’d finished my studies things got serious. That was in 2007 and we’ve never looked back.