Project Description

Interview with

RACHEL AGGS

of UK duo

SACRED PAWS

Interviewer – Vicky Hebbs

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Have you always wanted to make music? When did you know you wanted to start releasing your songs into the world?
I’ve loved playing music with other people since I was really young and used to play folk music with my family. When I started my first band we just really wanted to write songs and play gigs, it didn’t occur to us to make an album until someone actually asked us if they could release it! I think making records seemed like a thing that only ‘professional’ musicians did and that seemed quite inaccessible as a young person. But also for me my main passion has always been playing live and touring. When Eilidh and I met it was similar, we mostly just wanted to hang out and jam! Recording has always been a little bit daunting for us but I think we’re getting much more confident in the studio and better at capturing some of the excitement we feel about the songs when we’re writing them and putting it on record.

What kind of music did you grow up on? Which artists inspired you?
I listened to a lot of folk music from the UK growing up because thats what I used to play with my family. My mum’s from Detroit so we did also listen to a lot of Motown and Parliament Funkadelic, but also Jimi Hendrix everything in-between really! I first got really excited about guitar music when I heard weird and noisy No Wave bands like DNA and The Contortions – I really loved how they captured so much crazy energy in their recordings. That led me down a rabbit hole of punk and post punk but when I discovered riot grrrl bands like Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy that was what got me really hooked. I was really inspired by people like Alison Wolfe and Corin Tucker, who had so much to say and seemed to demand attention and take up space so powerfully. Im musically inspired by tons of different things but those two would be the ones that really made me feel like I had to get a guitar and get involved. 

How did you two meet each other? When did you decide to start writing and recording together? 
We met when I was living in London and I was on tour with my other band Trash Kit in maybe 2011 or something? We got on really instantly so we decided that starting a band would be a good way to keep hanging out although we lived really far away from each other. 

Your new album, ‘Run Around The Sun’ is out on the 31st of May. Can you share the origins of the album?
The album came together in a much more concentrated burst than our first record. We wrote about six of the songs and went straight into the studio with them. Then we took a little break and finished last few a little slower. It was a really nice way to work and although there was a little pressure to get it done I think the way it all came together was all fairly organic.

What inspired the track, Brush Your Hair? Or are you really just reminding your fans to brush their hair? 
Haha! Its sort of a song about my younger self and how I used to put on a brave face a lot when I was often having a hard time being a teenager and trying to fit in. Eilidh is singing about totally different stuff tho! We never really discuss the meaning of song lyrics we just let them come out, it means that sometimes accidental poetic moments can arise when the vocal lines step over each other and the song stops being about any one subject. I hope it means that they are open to interpretation and loose enough to allow people to insert themselves into the narrative or identify with a feeling thats hard to pin down in words.

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What was the most challenging song on the album to write? Perhaps one that you weren’t sure would be included or that took time to craft? 
When we wrote Shame on Me I remember literally lying on the ground staring at the ceiling thinking we were never going to write a song again! But then the line came into my head out of nowhere and I remembered a riff I’d been playing around with for a while and the two just fit together really well. We wrote it really fast but the moment before writing it was kind of what inspired the lyrics. Its about the feeling of shame that comes with knowing how close you were to giving up. It came from the experience of songwriting but I think it could be about anything that you have trouble committing to, a passion, a relationship, a dream maybe.

How does this album depart from or evolve from your debut record, Strike A Match? 
It’s hard for us to tell really, its not like we discuss specific concepts prior to writing anything, it all just sort of comes out. So I think I probably just sounds different in that we are different people now, we’ve grown up a little so I hope the music has too.

What does your songwriting and production process look like? Do you have any kind of personal “formula” or method for writing music, or is it just about experimenting and discovering something you like the sound of? 
The only formula we have is that the two of us really need to be in the room together or we can’t really write. We just jam together until we find something that feels good and then we work on adding changes and vocal parts. We mostly just make a huge mess until something sticks. One song I wrote on my own is How Far, and I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Maybe we’ll try and do that more in the future but I think the songs that we write together have a really special energy.

What’s next for you in 2019? Will you tour once the album is released? 
Yes! Lots of touring in Europe and the USA, hopefully Australia too!

I know your songs make me feel energised. What music do you listen to when you need something upbeat and positive? 
I listen to the Bhundu Boys!

If you could meet any musician in the world and get an insight into their life and creative process, who would you choose? 
I’d like to travel to whatever planet Sun Ra is on these days and find out what he’s up to. Would love to have been a fly on the wall at an Arkestra rehearsal, I cant even imagine!

What do you hope people take from your music? How do you want to be known as musicians?
I hope it cheers people up and I hope that people can identify or hear themselves in it.

What are your major goals or milestones for the future?
We just want to keep doing what we’re doing!

Finally, a few questions for some quick answers –
FAVORITE:
Album – Sleater Kinney – The Hot Rock
Artist – Xaime Hernandez
Movie – The Wizard Of Oz
Place to visit – The Sea
Venue to play – anywhere I have friends
Food – Sushi
Drink – Sierra Nevada 
Person in History – Elizabeth Cotten
Tattoo – (if you don’t have one, one you would get?) I have a lightning bolt on my knee after Patti Smith and I have a tattoo of my first bands logo Trash Kit on my arm.

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Check out SACRED PAWS below
Website   Facebook    Instagram    Twitter 

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Sacred Paws biog – Feb 2019

Sacred Paws have a natural inclination not to take things too seriously. You can hear it all the way through a conversation with its two members, guitarist Rachel Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rodgers, punctuated by rolls of giggles and thoughtful pauses, and you can hear it in the light touch they bring to their music, a jangly blend of indie-pop full of fizzing world rhythms and bright horns. “I think taking yourself seriously is always a bit scary,” Rachel says, laughing at the absurdity of the statement in a Serious Music Interview for a Serious Music Biography. 

This new danger of taking things seriously is a by-product of winning the Scottish Album of the Year award in 2017 for their debut record, Strike A Match. Winning felt “very weird” to the two women whose aim had never been anything other than to make music they enjoyed and have fun with it. “To be like oh, ok, right – we have to believe in ourselves now?! It’s mildly challenging.” But if you thought that meant Run Around The Sun would be a po-faced follow-up rammed full of lofty pretentions, you’d be wrong. It brims with upbeat reflections on growing up and looking back. Shimmering guitar riffs dance between snappy beats and swooning melodies that will have crowds committing to far more than a simple head-bob. “I think we’d get bored if it was too slow,” Eilidh says. “We’d never want to play something live that people couldn’t dance to. It would feel really strange to us. It’s kind of the whole point.” 

The first iteration of Sacred Paws was a long distance affair – Eilidh in Glasgow, Rachel, also a member of post-punk outfits Shopping and Trash Kit, in South London. They’d meet up periodically to write songs and Strike A Match was “all the songs that we happened to have, put on an album,” Rachel says. “We really didn’t think about it all that much. It was just like here are all our songs.” She recently moved from London to Glasgow – not a requirement of winning the SAY Award – and though it made little difference to the scrapbook approach Sacred Paws have to creating music, grabbing studio time here and there, it did lend Run Around The Sun a sense of focus. “It was a broader kind of gesture, like, a song – what is a song? Thinking about that a bit more.” Written and recorded in fits and bursts over the course of the 18 months up until November 2018, they had the mindspace to think more about the shape of the record too. “We did spend more time thinking, well, what would it be nice to have? Rather than, ‘Oh well these are the songs and what you get is what you get.’ We’d be like oh we’ve got one song left. Shall we make it a slow one?” 

It was a friend celebrating a birthday by toasting, “Here’s to another run around the sun!” that lent the album its name. “You know when you hear a word and you suddenly keep hearing it everywhere? It was one of those,” Rachel recalls. “It just kept coming up.” Songs do tend to have a preoccupation with time and growing up, although that wasn’t a theme that the band really noticed until later. Brush Your Hair sees Rachel singing to her younger self, while Almost It deals with the phenomenon of looking back and realising you were exactly where you were striving to be and Is This Real urges you to take advantage of the present. “‘A run around the sun’ sounds so effortless but it’s such an understatement; that’s never what a year feels like! But it’s a useful way to think about it when you look back.” 

It wasn’t until they began parsing the album for meaning that Sacred Paws realised they’d written a collection of songs about time. “We often sing over the top of each other, about completely different things and we never really talk about it,” Rachel explains. ”That means the songs always have really different ways that you could interpret them; but they both come from a personal place for both of us. So there’s a lot of potential depth in there but nothing is preconceived, it’s just not how we do things. We don’t even really know what’s going on…” “So we make it up,” Eilidh deadpans. 

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Opening with a scream of guitar and a Hey Mickey-esque beat, the album’s first track, The Conversation, was written about a long-forgotten argument between friends, composed in the band’s traditional haphazard approach, each member’s thoughts and feelings slaloming through the other’s. “You’re all wrong, you’re walking away/Why would we even try to have this conversation?” the song asks before resolving to move on – “I’m running, I’m hiding out, resisting 

I’m keeping this to myself…” The argument that inspired it is long forgotten (“It was probably something really dumb”) but the feelings remain. 

On Brush Your Hair, the band’s chopped and screwed style of lyric writing is most evident. Pop melodies simmer over insistent drums as they sing back and forth. “I’m kind of talking about lasting memories and how time and different things will remind you of people,” Eilidh says, going on to joke: “But I don’t know – what’s Rachel singing again? Something about brushing your hair?” “Er, I’m singing more at a younger version of me, actually,” she laughs. 

The outcome of this approach is something unintentionally poetic. “It ends up like a cut up poem because we’re thinking about different things. That’s a nice combo because usually you are when you’re two people in a room, even if you’re having a conversation about the same thing, everyone’s thinking about different things. But we do respond to each other, it’s just that we don’t really talk about it.” And just as we’re in danger of getting too serious about the whole thing, Eilidh asks, “What, like we’ll sing ‘I know, I know’ at the same time?” and we’re laughing again. “Yeah, we’re just singing the same words.” 

“A slow one” isn’t really Sacred Paws’ MO but there is, in fact, a slow one on Run Around The Sun. How Far was borne of a riff Rachel had been noodling about with for some time, and a desire to try their hand at writing something a bit different. Nestled in the middle of the album, it’s a slightly twinkly, stripped back meditation that inspires more of a sway than a pogo. Rachel wrote the bones of it alone at home (“A really nice, calm way to write songs!”) and brought it to a studio session to be built on. “It was sort of the first song we’ve done in a while that was carefully done, in that way.” 

Meticulous planning, careful preparation, a masterplan – none of these are really Sacred Paws’ thing, and perhaps that’s why Run Around The Sun is such a vibrant, optimistic sashay of a record. It’s no surprise that winning more awards and making their millions isn’t what they aspire to as a band; “We’re just enjoying it and having fun with it,” Eilidh says. “The minute it stops being fun…” There’s a pause as if it doesn’t bear thinking about, before she concludes: “That’s not success for us.” 

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AMNPLIFY – DB