Motel Thieves talk 'Falling through our world' and landing on their feet.
Written by: Brooke Eboule
"I never planned on playing music.”
It’s one of the first things Motel Thieves bassist Zak Halimi tells me, matter-of-factly, when he joins the video call with me and his bandmates. Despite growing up with a dad who is a bassist in a band of his own, Zak says he didn’t play the instrument much growing up. He knew one of the band’s guitarists, Sam Ellis, from playing basketball together. Somehow, when the opportunity to join Motel Thieves came up right as he finished secondary school, it was just a case of the right people at the right time. Now, Zak says, “I think it was meant to be, to be honest.”
Fair enough. The very existence of the Welsh indie-psychedelic five-piece seems to come down to either simple fate or a great twist of chance marked by talent and hard work, yes, but also multiple changes of course and paths converging where and when they did.
“I was sort of a late bloomer with all the music stuff,” says singer and lyricist, Cal – Callum – Lipscombe. Both he and guitarist Jake Roberts started off intending to pursue other subjects and career paths (science and automotives, respectively) before they eventually made U-turns to study music. Drummer Matt Davies didn’t even really have an interest in music until he found his way to the kit six years ago, not long before the band initially formed.
According to Cal, it wasn’t until around the time Zak joined the band, going on three years ago, that they started to take things a bit more seriously. “We changed up the music a lot, went in a bit of a different direction,” he says. Sam later clarifies, “I wouldn't say that we changed our sound. I’d say that we discovered it.”
These days, the band has to fit in writing, rehearsing, recording, and gigging around busy university schedules and largely unremarkable jobs that are nevertheless essential to pay for the hobby-that-is-also-a-dream, all while living in three separate cities. Cal is working on a Master's in popular and commercial music in Cardiff. Jake is in his second year, same area of study. Sam is studying music and sound production at university in Bristol. Still a bit of a wild card, Zak is in his 3rd year of aerospace engineering in Swansea.
“It gets a bit stressful,” admits Cal. “But if there’s something you want to do, you’ve got to juggle a lot of things. That’s just the way it is.” Jake agrees: “You’ve got to be in it to win it,” he says. “Even though we know it’s hard, there’s no point in not trying. We’ve got a good mentality within the band.” In the five or so years they’ve been at it, they’ve “been through every phase of trying to get somewhere,” adds Matt. “I think right now we’re in the right phase of it all.” Now, they’re keen to have people join in and “come along for the journey,” says Sam. “We haven’t really started yet,” he explains. “I mean, we have, but we’ve taken about 10 steps. We want to start running and we want people to start running with us.”
At the end of September, the band released their debut EP, Compos Mentis, featuring summer singles ‘Purple’ and ‘All You Do Is Rain’, as well as ‘Falling Through Our World’ and ‘Left At Stake’. Much like how the band itself came together, the four-track EP wasn’t initially intended to be a cohesive collection. The guys started off writing the songs individually, delving into topics of dreams, paranoia, euphoria, and longing, before it became clear to them that the songs “gravitated together and merged into a bona fide body of work.” One well worth checking out!
Read on for more insights from my recent conversation with the band.
NW: It seems as though there’s been more talent emerging from Wales as of late. How much do you think where you all come from influences who you are as musicians and what you write about?
Sam: You’ve got bands from South Wales like Stereophonics, however, there hasn’t been a really big band to emerge out of South Wales in the last 20 years. I do think it has a pretty big influence, especially with lyric writing as well. I think we have a lot of references that come back to Swansea. That’s where our home is, where the heart is. It’s where we practice.”
Cal: We don’t shy away from that either. We’re proud to be a Swansea band, a Welsh band.
Matt: I think you need to have that sort of authenticity to you as well.
NW: Your sound has evolved with psychedelic-infused soundscapes and flavors of grunge. What drew you to the sounds of the 60s and 90s, specifically?
Jake: I think we can all say that our fathers or family members possibly have got us in that direction of liking that sort of music. Just having that influence, I’ve got to take my hat off to my dad cause if it wasn’t for him and his music that he liked when I was growing up, I wouldn’t think I’d have an interest in music as much as I do.
Matt: It’s always down to the upbringing.
Cal: You’re so used to listening to all these songs when you were younger, and you could hear a song that your dad had played in the car when you were, like five, and you hadn’t heard it since then, but it’s the nostalgia of it.
NW: You said before that the pandemic was a weird time for you as a band. Tell me more about how it impacted you and your sound.
Sam: I’ll be honest, it nearly didn’t happen, did it, boys? None of us really knew what was going to happen. Coming out, we started to jam more, listen to different kinds of music, and all of a sudden what we had started with morphed into what it is today. Without COVID, I don’t know that we’d be where we are today, which is a strange thing to say.
Cal: The excitement came back as well. Going into that lockdown we just didn’t have the spark that was there when we first started. Zak had just joined the band, so we didn’t have any time to properly gel with him. So, when we came out, and we could actually start to write songs together, we started to find our feet a little bit then.
Jake: Even though that time being in lockdown was hard and it was all up in the air, it did kind of help us as well because we sat down together and we chatted about what we wanted to do in the future. I think if it wasn’t for those days and months of hard work, we’d not be where we are right now. I kind of take it as a blessing in disguise.
Zak: Yeah, it was like a refresh.
NW: Sam emphasized earlier that you didn’t so much change your sound as discover it. You were so young when you all got together, it makes sense that you didn’t know exactly where you were going musically right from the jump. How do you own your sound now? How present are your influences?
Cal: Young and naive, I think.
Sam: We’re still young and naive, but who
cares.
Cal: Yes, but we’ve got our heads screwed on a little bit now.
Jake: We’ve had periods where we kind of wanted to be similar to another band, but the older we’ve gotten, the more that we’ve matured together, the more that we’ve realized that the only way to work is to be unique and be yourselves. I’d rather have a sound that no one has heard of than sound like another band.
Sam: We write the tunes, the music that we like. We can be in a session sometimes, and in practice, and nothing will work. We’ll jam for two hours, and we’ll get nothing out of it. However, some days we’ll jam for two hours, for one hour, and all of a sudden we’ve got two new songs. And we’re just blown away and we think they’ll be hits. Whether they will be or not, that’s a different question, but it’s just staying true to ourselves. If we like it, we think other people will as well."
Cal: We wear our influences on our sleeves. You can hear the bands that we grew up on and rediscovered as we sort of changed our sound. But they’re just influences to us. We just like to listen to more music, expand on what we’ve been listening to, and take that and use it in our own unique way.
NW: That exploration of new genres and styles and combining them in new ways was a hallmark of the 60’s music revolution. Do you think there is any of that kind of energy happening in today’s music landscape? Would you consider yourself a part of that?
Matt: I feel like nowadays it kind of lacks that because people are often following the crowd.
Jake: But being in Cardiff and even going to Bristol, and being in our 20’s you can see that there’s some sort of new revolution mixing, coming around, and I think a lot more people are going in depth of psychedelia and having a taste of it. There hasn’t been an actual massive psychedelia revival, but I feel like it’s brewing.
Cal: It’s a 30-year cycle with a lot of things as well. Fashion, music. 60’s to 90s, 90’s to 2020’s. We’re due for it. We don’t only want to be part of that. We want to be spearheading that. We think we can. We believe in the music that we write. It’s just getting it to the right people now.
NW: It sounds like you rely a lot on experimentation as you’re crafting tunes. Do you have that same approach to live performances, or do you prefer more structure?
Sam: I think it’s unstructured structure for us. We have our way. We rehearse like hell. We play to strict BPMs, and we go on stage knowing exactly what’s about to happen. We’re not the type of band to be unprepared and just go for it. But you can sort of feel that authenticity that sometimes when we’re playing live there will be moments of inspiration where Matt will do a little drum fill or change the drums up. I’ll do a little something different on guitar. So will Jake. So will Cal. We’re all constantly changing our songs as such, but in little ways. Experimenting in that sense of just being free with the music, however, still quite strict to the core of the actual song itself.
Cal: I remember reading something that Damon Albarn [Blur frontman and co-creator of Gorillaz] said about live music, that he never likes to sing the same song the same. He always sings it differently, even if it’s just a little imperfection on the melody. He’s always trying to change it up a little bit every now and again. I think that’s a good ethos to have.
NW: I imagine even little adjustments in a live setting require you to be really in tune with each other as a band. What do you think it is about your group dynamic that allows that to happen organically?
Matt: We’re mates as well. Some bands don’t have that.
Cal: We don’t really mind stepping on each other's toes. We are complete equals. Anybody can be wrong, anybody can be right about anything when it comes to Motel Thieves.
Jake: Some people say, ah, do you argue in the band or is there someone who is a leader? But it’s never like that. We’ve got a good chemistry and relationship inside and outside of the band. If we clash heads on something, we’ll come to a conclusion that is beneficial for both of us instead of just one person.
Sam: To a certain extent, I suppose you could say we’re mates first, and band mates second. That’s why the dynamic of us works so well because we can get on. It’s a mix of creative minds in the right situation that can come together and really click. We’re all good lads. We’ve all got good ideas. We all try and bring that together and I think at the moment we’re doing a really good job of it. On stage, I think that actually comes through.
NW: ‘Compos mentis’ refers to complete control, or mastery over one’s mind. Do you think that’s truly possible – or even entirely desirable?
Cal: Good question. A lot of the themes here are about dreaming and what sort of person you are in your dreams because you can be anybody in your dreams. You can have any control. For me, a lot of the lyrics are about lucid dreaming because I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, even since I was a kid. So, having that control on a sub-conscious level compared to just even on a conscious level.
Sam: One could argue that compos mentis is achieved in that dream state. That’s when you have the full control because anything can happen. But it’s about trying to connect with that when you’re in a conscious state.
NW: There’s a really poetic quality to your lyrics, particularly in ‘All You Do Is Rain’ and ‘Left At Stake’. Is that level of composition something you’re consciously seeking, or is that just what flows naturally?
Cal: With those two tracks most importantly, I was massively into The Verve at the time. Still am. Especially “A Storm in Heaven”. A lot of the stuff that [songwriter Richard] Ashcroft was on was based around poetry and the lyricism of that first album, I’ve always been a fan of. You could say that directly inspired some of the lyrics going on [in these tracks].
Sam: You probably wrote ‘em on the bus, didn’t you, Cal? He writes all his tunes on the bus.
NW: When I think about your lyric “we’re all just passing time” that is actually one of the most depressing thoughts. I appreciate that not only can one song have different meanings to different people, but often we can come back to songs again and again over the years, having had different experiences and a new perspective, and it means something different. Have you had that happen with any of your own songs?
Cal: Yeah, with All You Do is Rain. Now that, obviously, I’m past that breakup and I’m very good friends with that person now, I can listen back to those lyrics and they don’t cut through as much as they did when I first wrote them. Cause I remember showing Matt in the car on the way back from practice or something. I just had the chorus lyrics and he knew straight away what it was about. Now I’m past that and all the stuff that was happening at that time, it sort of does mean different things to me. And it will mean different things to the people who will listen to it. That’s sort of the beauty of songwriting, you know. It’s always going to have a different effect on people.
NW: Do you have any other talents that you think people would find surprising?
Zak: I’m a Rubik’s cube god. 3X3, 4X4, 5X5. That was my thing for like a year. I could blast out a Rubik’s cube in under a minute.
Cal: Yeah, Zak’s the brains. He controls all the money and finances. He’s our baby daddy. Jake’s a barman.
Jake: I’m a professional cocktail maker. Whatever you want, I can make. I’ll have it all up in the air, three at
once.
NW: If you were to make a gig wish list, what artist or band would you like to see play? Is there any particular venue you’d like to play?
Jake: The Beta band. Very, very experimental. Cal and I have had a few nights where we just stuck one of their albums on and got lost in it. For venues, I’d love to play at an actual full-capacity venue in London, like an O2. Sam will probably say that his dream is just to have a tour bus.
Sam: I’ve always said I won’t stop until I spend a tour on a tour bus. The band I’d want to see is Supergrass. I’m well into them. I was into them quite a few years ago but recently listened back-to-front to every album, and they’re blowing my mind. For a venue, it would be Ally Pally in London – Alexander Palace. To sell that out would be a dream. Supergrass, Ally Pally, and a tour bus, and I’m sorted. Everything else doesn’t matter.
Cal: I’d have to say, and this is a bit of an odd one, or unexpected, I’d have liked to see Nick Drake in a little intimate venue, like a 50 capacity venue or an old little theater. Jeff Buckley as well. The thing with Nick Drake is that there’s no footage of him, ever. So you’ve just got the records. Venue, I would say the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in LA. You see it a bit in the Brian Jones documentary, a bit in Supersonic, the Oasis documentary. Any good music documentary, really. Jim Morrison, I’m sure he got arrested in Whiskey-A-Go-Go.
Zak: I don’t know about venues, to be honest, but a band, Rush. Deftones. I’d like to see the Foo Fighters, too.
—---
The guys had recording time in early October and have been working on two new songs. “Look out for a release from us within the first few months of 2024,” says Sam. Meanwhile, the guys still have a couple more stops on the tour supporting their new EP. They play at the Bunkhouse in Swansea on November 4 and The Finsbury in London on November 25. You can find them on X and Instagram @motelthieves.