Deep Dive with Jamie from The Covasettes
Written by: Brooke Eboule
The Covasettes are a Manchester, UK-based indie pop/rock band who released their stunning third EP, What’s Lost Is Ours to Find, in November. We recently chatted with the band’s bassist and producer, Jamie McIntyre. You can catch some of the insights Jamie shared about his bandmates – frontman Chris Buxton, lead guitarist Matt Hewlett and drummer Matt Buckley – and their new EP in our new music feature, The Covasettes’ new EP makes lost love sound damn good. Read on below for the rest, including what unexpected instrument you might hear in a future Covasettes banger, how the pandemic benefitted the band, where Chris thinks songs come from, why Jamie thinks there’s never been a better time to be a musician, and what oddly specific nicknames he’d give his bandmates.
Next Wave: Music’s clearly a big part of your life now. What role did it play in your life, growing up?
Jamie: My mom likes to tell me that I could sing before I could talk. She always tells this story – she got a new car at some point and was like “Oh God, what’s going on? It’s making some strange noise.” Turns out it was just me as a 3 or 4 year old, sitting in the back of the car, trying to match the pitch of the engine. Singing along to it. I’ve had a musical streak for a very long time. When I was 8 through 12 or 13, I was part of one of the college choirs in Oxford. We got to do some amazing stuff. I sang for the Queen and Paul McCartney and stuff like that. Yeah, crazy claim to fame as a 10-year-old. So music’s been a huge part of my life forever.
Next Wave: I see by the collection behind you that you’re clearly a multi-instrumentalist, too.
Jamie: Well, I wish I could play the drums well. I have the drum kit. I’m not good at it at all. I’ve got my keyboard just there [he lifts it from the desktop below the computer], which I play the drums on much more often than I play the actual drum kit. So that just sort of sits there looking fancy and exciting, but I play a few things. I used to play French horn as a child. It’s a beautiful instrument. It sounds amazing. But as soon as I got a guitar, the horn didn’t stand a chance.
Next Wave: I suppose there’s not much room for French horn in contemporary radio-leaning music.
Jamie: That sounds like a challenge to me. I’ll try and make it happen. If you hear French horn on the next Covasettes record, you know why.
Next Wave: I understand you all met in university and lived together in Manchester during the pandemic. How do you think this has influenced your dynamic as a band?
Jamie: Living together was one of the best things we could have done. We got really lucky as well because when most other bands pretty much had to shut down operations, we had a basement together with all of this equipment in it, so we just wrote and wrote and wrote and we made videos and we did all sorts of stuff just so that the audience didn’t die. Because it’s always a risk, isn’t it? If you can’t put something out on a regular basis, then people are just going to forget who you are.
Sticking four lads in a house is going to cause some anarchy in some shape or form. There were the predictable arguments and screaming matches and not talking to each other for a certain amount of time. But we did it for three years so at this point, we’ve pretty much said it all. We’ve got it all out of our systems. We go out on tour now and even after five days of sub-four hours sleep and you know, just feeling dreadful and getting on each others’ nerves, it never kicks off. We’ve completely just grown immune to each other. It’s like brothers. When you’re teenagers, you’re at eachothers’ throats, but by the time you’re 20 you’ve punched each other enough times.
Next Wave: As someone with four brothers, I’m just imagining.
Jamie: We never had any actual fist fights, I don’t think. There was a ceremonial burning of a guitar at one point. Our fourth ever song, we tried to do this music video concept and Matt bought this dreadful, really rubbish guitar for like 80 quid and said “why don’t we throw it up in the air and let it smash on the ground?”. And then we got the footage back and it’s all noisy and horrible and completely unusable so we just wrecked a guitar for no reason. So we burned the guitar in the garden as a ceremony.
Next Wave: I suppose that’s sort of a fitting analogy for the creative process in general, because sometimes creating is so much about throwing things up against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Jamie: 100%. That’s the other huge advantage that we had with lockdown, because we all got furloughed. So we were all being paid (not full rates), but to sit on our asses at home. We had six months or however long of non-stop writing. We wrote so many songs in that period. It gave us a lot of that kind of opportunity to just be like, nothing’s a bad idea. Throw as much shit at the wall as possible. See what sticks. Without that, we’d be so behind where we are now.
Next Wave: It’s almost like for that brief period of time, you got to experience what it would be like to be on a major label, working as full time musicians.
Jamie: Yes, it was a cruel taste, torn away from us again. (Laughs). If anything, it’s made us extra motivated to get that back again, because it was so great.
Next Wave: There’s a lot about being in a band these days that you guys have to manage aside from the music itself. Does the other stuff ever zap the energy or joy of making music?
Jamie: That’s a deep question. I don’t think it does. If 14-year-old me was looking at what it really takes to be in a band that’s sustaining itself, it’s not exactly what you have in mind, is it? You don’t think about yourself sitting there packaging up merch orders or sitting there editing TikToks until 2 in the morning, but it’s all worth it. There’s a YouTuber I watched called Adam Nealy who was talking about how, like every decade, every century of music has had its trade offs. Even with Mozart, he had to write the classical things for the pope or whoever so that he could justify being paid all this money to then write whatever he fancied. We’re playing the game exactly as everyone else has always had to. It doesn’t take anything away from it for me. If I could just have someone come in and take every single boring task off my hands and we’d get to just make music, of course I would, but it’s not that bad.
Next Wave: Do you do anything specifically to foster your creativity?
Jamie: I really should. For all of us, with songwriting in particular, we all just get in a room and mash it out until we find something we like. We’ve got the amazing advantage that this [his studio] is where we do all our rehearsals and our writing and stuff. So we just come down here and it’s essentially like doing a proper studio recording but for demos, so you can pick the whole thing apart and switch parts out. We’re not going on like spiritual retreats or anything like that. Maybe we should. Cause it’s like a creative muscle, isn’t it? You’ve got to take it to the gym.
Next Wave: I mean, it kind of sounds like Chris recently did something like that in what he’s been sharing about his trip on the band’s social media.
Jamie: That’s true, yeah. Chris has spent his month in Asia, hasn’t he? I don’t know how spiritual that would be. I think he was mostly just getting drunk. Maybe that’s therapeutic. I don’t know what his songwriting process is. He keeps that a big secret. But he talks an unbelievable amount of bollocks on the social media. It’s funny. It’s entertaining. I don’t post on anything except TikTok, so I’ll go through our own socials and just go, “Chris you’re an absolute lunatic”. I’m on there, giggling to myself, like “you’re so weird”.
Next Wave: To be fair, being engaging online is a skillset unto itself. What’s your take on the role of social media and platforms like TikTok within the broader scope of music?
Jamie: Honestly, I think there’s never been a better time to be a musician. The barriers to actually getting discovered have never been lower, have they? It’s easier said than done, but in theory, you can post an engaging clip of yourself singing a song and literally overnight, have two million eyes on it. Or four million I guess, since most people have got two. Suddenly, you’re getting EMI and Sony knocking on your door. But even on a smaller scale, like for us, we 100% would not have the audience that we have today without social media and Spotify as well. Discoverability is absolutely invaluable. The downside is that it’s a hell of a lot of work and you have to consistently maintain it. But it’s work that is worth doing, isn’t it?
Next Wave: Do you think that as a group you’ve taken any particularly big risks or experienced any significant setbacks? If so, what did you learn from those experiences?
Jamie: Arguably, we don’t do what you’re advised to do with songwriting. Certainly, if you’re like, early on, a lot of people will advise you to hone in on a certain sound, and make that your thing, whereas we sort of take pride in consistently ignoring that advice. [Smiles]. Just writing the songs we want to write at any given time. The difference between some of our most poppy stuff and some of our most rocky stuff – there’s a pretty big gulf. Maybe if there were a way to have two of the Covasettes doing it and test it out, which one did better, maybe we would have done way better if we had just stuck to one sound, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re doing pretty well at the moment. I’m pleased with where we are. I guess that’s a risk we took and I think it’s worked out for us.
Setbacks wise, 2020 was the big one, wasn’t it? We lost quite a lot of big things to that. We had to postpone tours over and over again. There were all sorts of things it impacted, but that was everybody, so it only set us back the same as everyone else. It’s not like you could take a look at other bands, and they were growing stratospheric and we were the ones taking the dive. We’ve had a pretty clean go of it.
Next Wave: And you mentioned before, there were even some silver linings to the pandemic for you guys. Overall, it sounds like you all have a good attitude about it and generally take things in stride.
Jamie: Well, thank you. There’s a lot of luck going around in all sorts of ways in this band. I’ve often maintained that one of the hardest things about building a band is finding three or four other people who are equally like-minded and ready to do the work and take it on the chin when things go wrong. I’ve got lucky that they’re not assholes, for the most part. [Smiles].
Next Wave: You sort of touched on this a moment ago. I know you guys have shared before that you don’t think a band should have just one sound. When it comes to sonic shifts, is it always an organic “going where the wind takes you”, or do you ever intentionally set out to try something new?
Jamie: Intentionality is definitely not what it is. I don’t think it’s all the way in our control, what songs are getting written. Chris sort of has this belief that songs live in the guitars. You think I’ve got a lot of guitars? Christ has a LOT of guitars. And depending on what guitar he writes [on], he believes that different songs come out of it. Maybe Chris is, in the secrets of his bedrooms, but I don’t think we’re consciously aiming for any one thing at a given time. We just go through these phases where one month it’ll be really bright, happy, poppy, cheesy songs, and the next it’ll be rocky and gloomy and all of those things. What we do is curate. So when it comes to releasing, like this most recent EP, we’re sort of picking out of our, at this point, enormous pool of songs. Like ‘Memory Chaser’, we wrote that in about 2020. There’s a couple of them that might be even older than that. So we’re pulling from what we think is going to work together as a release.
Next Wave: Is there anything, aside from the curation process, that determines what you sit on?
Jamie: The reason we sat on that for a long time is because we really, really like it as a song. We wrote it and we were so buzzing for just weeks afterwards. It became the name of the folder – What’s Lost Is Ours to Find – that all of our pre-production or demos were sitting in. So, we knew when it came out finally it had to be part of something big. We couldn’t just throw this out as a single, and have it over and done with. And this is a big old EP. You’d normally expect maybe four songs, and this is six.
Next Wave: Do you tend to sit on songs in a complete form, or do you do more revisiting and revising the stuff that’s been sitting before you release it?
Jamie: It really depends. Sometimes we get it right first try, sometimes we need six months to tweak away. With ‘Memory Chaser’ it was pretty much done. It wasn’t recorded in the version that you heard now, but we had done a demo and if you listen to them side-by-side, they’re almost identical. The only difference is one’s got fresh guitar strings on and the other doesn’t. But for a lot of them, and there are a few on the EP, if you listened to the demo and listened to what we’ve done they’re very different. It really depends on the song and how excited we are and how perfect we think it is. Sometimes we really love a chorus, but we want to inject some more interestingness into the verse or whatever it might be. We’re not tweaking for tweaking’s sake, which I think is a very dangerous rabbit hole a lot of bands will go into, especially when they self-produce because time is limitless and that’s sort of the trope isn’t it? Tweak it to death until you hate it. We’re also not afraid to completely dissect a song if it needs surgery.
Next Wave: I imagine if it’s something you’ve sat on for a couple of years, there are occasions where there are new techniques or skills you’ve picked up along the way, or maybe changes in personal taste or influences that come into play to elevate?
Jamie: There’s a perfect example of that on this EP. ‘Stung’ has this sort of big, lush, synthy thing going on toward the end. If we’d released it when we first wrote it then I never would have thought to do that cause I just happened to be listening to some music maybe six months ago now, and I thought “that’s really cool, I’ve got to use that in a song”. Then along comes Chris going “Ah, I just want to inject something into this ending” and I went “This. We’re doing this.”
Next Wave: Speaking of the EP, I know the title comes from a line in ‘The Memory Chaser’, but was there any particular thought or significance to using it as the EP title?
Jamie: That’s a great question, and one that I don’t actually know the answer to. This is Chris’ brain child and what goes on in that man’s head is a mystery to us all. I’m sure he’ll have had a really good reason for it, or he just thought it sounded great. He probably won’t tell me what it is. He’s sort of mysterious about his process in a lot of ways, and on the whole, he doesn’t like explaining what the meaning of songs is either. I agree. The meaning is for the listener to decide. If you listen to it and relate to something that is completely different from what Chris meant in his head when he wrote it, then your interpretation is just as much the right one.
Next Wave: The artwork on the EP and its singles is fabulous. Tell me about it!
Jamie: All of the artwork for the EP has been done by a girl called Katie (@_katiesmith_illustration_ on Instagram). The whole thing started from the idea for ‘Duvet Thief’. We knew we wanted to do this old school, sort of like a classic horror movie poster. Hence, it’s stylized like we’re credits in the movie. Chris put a blast out on social media and trolled through all these different profiles. She’s unbelievably talented. It’s crazy. She’ll draw up the first draft and you’ll look at it and go “Holy shit, this is really cool” and then she’ll send you the finished thing and it’s like “What the fuck, this is five times more detailed! Woah”! We’re quite big on the whole kind of packaging thing. It’s really nice to be able to work with other people who are extremely talented at what they do.
Next Wave: Anything on the horizon for 2024 that you can share?
Jamie: Obviously, at some point we’ll be releasing more music. Even I am not entirely sure when that’s going to be yet. There will, of course, be another tour. Thinking back pre-COVID we had conversations about setting goals and if you look at those goals now it’s just like, my god, we’ve completely annihilated what we ever expected to do. There’s all sorts of stuff in the pipeline. We’ll be back and we’ll be doing bigger, better, more. At the minute, for the medium or short term at least, our big goal is to try and play the role of support band as much as possible. So, if Coldplay or Catfish and the Bottlemen are reading this, please let us on your tour. We’ll do a good job, I swear. And we’ll be nice. We’ll not spit on you or anything. God, that’s a terrible bar to set.
Author’s note: It bears mentioning that Jamie said this before it was revealed that Catfish and the Bottlemen were indeed staging a comeback in 2024, so either he was trading on insider information, or he may have some mad manifestation skills to combine with all that good luck he’s been talking about.
Next Wave: Ok, I like to close things off with a few kinds of just for fun questions inspired by song titles or lyrics. So, you’re a ‘Memory Chaser’ and you’ve got a time machine that will take you back to a better time. Where and when are you going? Why?
Jamie: There’s a part of me that wants to go way back just so I can see what dinosaurs look like or something. But then the practical side of me says, I’ll just go back to the 1980s, buy a house and be a millionaire. It’s a very bleak answer. I sound really greedy now.
Next Wave: Or just very representative of this age bracket that are quite disillusioned by the reality of life.
Jamie: We were promised a lot and very little was delivered.
Next Wave: Great time to be a ‘Big Dreamer’ – what’s your big dream for yourself outside of music?
Jamie: That’s really hard because pretty much all of my dreams are music. I won’t lie. I’m a big fan of making stuff. Just before this I was panic-cleaning behind me because I was doing DIY. I love it. I really get a kick out of just making stuff. So this guitar [picks up black guitar with white hand-painted design previously sitting on a stand behind him], I built from scratch and it was painted by my partner. If I had another dream, it would be to make a bunch of guitars and have people that want to buy them.
Next Wave: So, you guys have a song called ‘Modern Rapunzel’, but who is your favorite Disney princess? Why?
Jamie: Bizarrely, I think one of my favorites is actually just Rapunzel. Her and Flynn Rider are great characters and Tangled is very entertaining.
Next Wave: ‘Duvet Thief’ kind of sounds like one of those oddly specific nicknames that girls give guys that they’re seeing when talking to their girlfriends, rather than using given names. What would each of the band members’ nicknames be?
Jamie: The first one that immediately occurs to me is Matt Hewlett. We already call him “Grandpa Hewlett” because he’s terrible with technology. I don’t know if that would be a good one. It’s not very sexy. What would Chris’ be? I feel like I’m going to end up doing him dirty here. This is a tough question. Chris is in his single phase, so I think it might just be “Tinder Boy 3” or something like that. Just write him off, dehumanize him, whatever. The hardest one to do is yourself cause either I’m going to be really harsh or massively egotistical. Either way, it doesn’t look great. I’m a big softie and I’ve never done singledom super well. Maybe just go with “Weirdo J”. I’m a strange dude. Then, Matt Buckley, he falls in love at the drop of a hat, so “Loverboy”. Why not?