Look, they’re from Sheffield, guitars that sound like that are issued on arrival, let’s just move on from anything that mentions the Arctic fucking Monkeys, shall we? Excellent. The Crookes, then, instead of going down the rampantly excitable route, tread the lesser-travelled, but much, much more difficult path of trying to weave in Motown references, big choruses and The Smiths, without it all sounding like a mess of the first water. The soon-coming single ‘Bloodshot Days’ is a little cracker, with some fine crooning, musically managing to reference almost all of my favourite records at some point or another. There seems to be some chatter about them at the moment, and it’s well-deserved. I’d dearly love to end with a really duff joke around how The Crookes should become famous or it’d be criminal, but I think we’re all well past that, and I’m not sure everyone finds the same stuff as funny as me.

The Crookes are:
George Waite – Vocals and Bass
Alex Saunders – Lead guitar
Daniel Hopewell – Guitar
Russell Bates – Drums

Where are you all from?
We’re from all over, but met at University in Sheffield.

How did you meet?
We did English literature together, but spent more time a similar clubs and music venues than studiously attending classes.

Why are you in a band?
Getting laid wouldn’t hurt. But I think having a career where we could play live every night would be amazing. That’s always been our favourite part of being in a band. We don’t mind going in the studio, but getting out and playing to people is what we enjoy most.

How come you sound like that?
To be perfectly honest, we don’t know. Its hard for us to tell what we sound like or why but its probably got something to do with our mutual love of all things 60s. Melody is really important to us – so groups like The Shirelles and other motown acts really inform that side of things. We’re starting to explore some different rhythms to get people dancing too. Seeing a crowd of people at our gigs up and dancing would be massive.

Where do the songs come from?
Since moving in together in June the writing process has become more collaborative. Whilst we were all at university Alex and Dan would write all the songs but now we live together it is much more of a group thing. The songs can come from anywhere; a line in a book, a scrap of of a tune, but recently though they have been arriving out of a sense of panic… we are set to start demoing our debut album soon and we are feverishly writing songs so that we can operate a squad-rotation system when it comes to live shows and album tracklisting.

How do the songs come about?
In terms of writing we never had a problem coming up with catchy parts it was fitting them into a song that was the challenge. Recently I think we have become much better at constructing songs more intelligently with more interesting structures. When it comes to playing live we have our favourites and its always more exciting playing new songs but the older ones usually get a better reaction.

Why will people hate you?
‘Cos really under all the pretence were actually a rubbish band. All the positive press and radio support has been cleverly engineered lies, Max Clifford is our publicist.

Was there a pivotal moment in your life that got you where you are now?
There were three main moments:
- When all of us got rejected from our first choice universities and ended up at Sheffield
- When Daniel saved George from a near fatal equine accident – it really bought them closer
- When Alex became attrached to our balding drummer Russell. In a sex way.

Is it hard to stand out these days?
I think it’s much harder to stand out when music is so easy to access, but when you twitter as much as we do about 1990′s footballers, how can you not stand out?

Have you been to SXSW before?
Unfortunately, we’ve never been to SXSW – we’re all looking forward to it. We’re hoping to have a great time and hope that out of the 1500 bands on offer, someone actually comes to one of our shows.

The Crookes have a single ‘Bloodshot Days’ coming out in April, coupled with a month-long tour

URL

http://www.myspace.com/thecrookesmusic

MP3

Bloodshot Days