Courting talk about new EP 'Grand National', writing music and headlining Glastonbury

How have you found the response to ‘Popshop’?

I think people seem to be really liking it. People were waiting for us to release it, because it’s the only song on the EP that we’ve actually played live, in its current form, so it felt really good to finally put it out.

EP 1, ‘Grand National is out on the 9th of April, What can we expect from it?

I’d say it’s completely different! There are songs on there that are completely different, but there’s one on there that does sound like us so far, but a better version of us. I know a lot of musicians say this about their new music, but its at least 20 times better than anything we’ve ever done, 100 times better! We’ve taken what we’ve been doing, and then we’ve pushed it as far as we can go. There’s 808, there’s distorted tracks, there’s detuned vocals, there’s violins, there’s loads of synths, there’s lots of percussion and there’s even an agogo solo.

That sounds really interesting, excited to hear it! Talk us through the writing process of it, how did it all come together?

We wrote the sketch for most of the songs, pre-lockdown, but Popshop was finished a year and a half ago. ‘Slow Burner’ the closing track, we did that a while back but we’ve completely changed how it was as a live song. ‘Crass’ and ‘Grand National’ are kind of new, that we wrote during lockdown.

It took us a long time to write the lyrics, they’ve been in work since last September, or even August because we take our lyrics quite seriously. Then we had a week in the studio and just powered it out and we’re really proud of it!

‘Popshop’ and ‘David Byrne’s Badside’ have quite a different sound to the heavier, more rocky ‘Football’ and ‘Not Yr Man’. What, if anything caused this change in sound?

I think the main change in sound was between ‘Not Yr Man’ and everything else. I’m not sure if everything else sounds similar, but they kind of came from a similar place, at least in our minds.

I can definitely see the lyrical similarities with ‘Football´ and the other tracks.

It’s not that we’re trying to push in a certain direction, we just release songs that we think are good. If we write something that is more punk and it’s good, we’ll release that. If we write something more pop sounding and it’s good, then we’ll release that. We don’t want to go, “oh we only release pop music or we only make punk music, we just release what we think is good.

What we you listening to around the time of writing the EP?

We were listening to a fair bit of Project X, Jockstrap and that sort of thing, and there’s definitely an influence from those bands in the EP.

There’s actually a playlist with the bands I was listening to at the time. Blur, Country Teasers, Pavement, LCD Soundsystem, Guided by voices, Girl band, The bats, Lazarus Kane… there’s a lot!

You can definitely already hear the influence of those bands in your music! Your music reminds me personally of Pavement and Parquet Courts mainly, but who would you say are your biggest influences in your music?

Right now, we try not to pull from one box, we try to collage things together. When we wrote ‘David Byrne’s Badside’ we didn’t intend to write something more catchy, people have categorised it as Britpop, which is interesting, but what we mixed together kind of came out that way which is quite interesting.

We pull from a wide variety of things, like noise rock experimental type stuff and also the post-punk side of things, with a bit of dance punk thrown in, and some earlier dance stuff too. When we mixed it all together, it kind of turns into genres we didn’t know we were pushing towards.

Since people labelled us as Britpop, we’ve definitely listened to a lot more Blur. It’s interesting how a band that did such interesting things, at the time, got labelled so quickly as a Britpop band.

For sure, some Blur albums are completely different, but they’re all bundled into the same label.

Exactly, especially ‘13’. The fact that this band has the range of doing ‘Country House’ and ‘Girls and Boys’ but they can also do songs like ‘Bugman’ and ‘Trimm Trabb’. The sheer level of experimentation that they did for a band that is considered a pop band is really interesting.

Tell us the story of how Courting started?

Sure, but it’s really uninteresting, we all just met through college and we’ve been playing together for two years now. Everyone asks us that, and I feel like so many bands have interesting backstories, and ours just isn’t!

You’ve started to amass almost a cult following of fans, especially on twitter, what do you think it is about you guys that has made people such big fans?

I think we try really hard to try and get to know our fans and try to keep them a part of what we’re doing. I think there’s two stances, there’s bands that don’t utilise social media at all, and they act like ‘we make music, you can consume the music, it’s not our job to be marketing men’. Then there’s bands who kind of put as much focus into their marketing as they do their music, being successful on TikTok or something.

For us, we try to focus on making good music, and we don’t want marketing to detract from that, but we think as artists, a key part is making sure you know the people listening to your music. Just before we spoke, we’ve just finished writing about 100 postcards to the people who have bought t-shirts from us, it takes a while, but we think people will appreciate little gestures like that.

As for twitter, we just like to take the piss a bit, we don’t try and be too serious, we don’t want to be one of those bands that are a super serious political band, here to change the world. We’re just trying to have a laugh.

How have you spent your quarantine other than writing music, is there anything else in the locker other than ‘Grand National’

Yeah we’ve been working really slowly, we’ve got an interesting way of writing. I can’t say too much and I’m hoping after Christmas I can do some more work on that and collect our ideas and start getting some stuff ready.

Can you talk us through this writing process?

It takes us a long time to write and I think that’s just what we do, we don’t just write a song and finish it there and the. One month we’ll have an idea, then we will work on it for a period of time and it will evolve with us. I almost collage things, that I’ve picked up from random pieces from the media, we write down things we see on bus adverts and books, in movies, TV shows, anything I think is interesting.

We collate these and sort them into ideas and themes, then when it comes to writing a song, I’ve got books worth of things I can write about or expand on. Then we get into a room together and try our best to make it the best form it can possibly be, rather than pumping out bad singles one after the other.

We’ve definitely done this with ‘Grand National’ and we see it as almost a small album rather than an EP. A lot of bands use Eps as a way to build hype while getting rid of songs that won’t make the album, whereas every song on this could be n album track and is good in its own way. They show us growing in different directions and it’s a real statement of intent.

A lot of people and journalists have put Courting into the post punk genre, who are your favourite other artists in this scene?

It’s hard because I always feel bad, in case we miss someone out so I’ve got a list. Home Counties, Yard Act, The Lounge Society, Black Country New Road, Jockstrap, Lazarus Kane, PVA, Blanketman, Do Nothing, Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, Sprints, Malady, Panic Shack, TV Priest, Talk Show, Loose Articles, Legs, we’ve got a lot and I’m probably forgetting a lot there too. I think this is the best time to be an interesting British band since the 70s.

Who is your favourite band that you’ve played with live?

We’re quite good friends with FEET, that was really fun would love to do that again. Playing wit Sports Team, mainly because their fans are scary! Since playing that gig, that gained us a lot of our current fans that are also scary, they enjoyed that gig, and have stuck to us and I really appreciate that.

Aside from the high energy, mosh pit ready nature of your music, I love the lyrics and they have some really interesting tongue-in-cheek commentaries on British life, where does the inspiration for that come from?

It’s all observational, we’re not trying to make it too deep or say too much we write what we see, and collate it into portraits of things that are happening. The word collage really does suit the process, a collage of different things we see, from different perspectives melded together.

A lot of the themes that we write about aren’t things you have to look for to see, they’re things that are on the news, or that you see on the street.

Your lyrics have an almost political attitude at times, have the political state of Britain and the world impacted your music at all, and would you call yourselves a political band?

I’m going to say no. I think we care about politics and we are political people, but I don’t think the way to solve the state of things is by writing overly political songs. If we call ourselves political, then we put ourselves in a box and can’t write things that aren’t political. The point of what we’re writing is that you can take it how you want it. If you want to look at ‘David Byrne’s Bad Side’ and take the more observational message behind it you can, or you can think its funny they name dropped David Byrne in a song, or that its funny that they shout Football for two minutes. It can do a bit of both.

You say you see a political nature of football, yet there are videos of people on TikTok, using it as a sound over them playing football. It does seem to be something that can be taken to be a nice song about football or take it in a political view at the same time.

We believe the idea that whoever consumes the music, decides whether you want to take it seriously or not, that’s up to you.

I find it interesting, to see a song observing certain negative aspects of football, to be taken up by football fans.

Yeah, it’s interesting, when I wrote it its an observation of lad culture and the pressure that is put on people especially where we’re from in Liverpool. You see a lot of kids who may not want to play football get pushed into it by parents who had unsuccessful dreams of playing. You see parents disappointed on the side lines when a 5-year-old doesn’t score a goal. Does it really matter?

At the same time, it’s a real appreciation of the community that football causes. It’s a huge football city and people most days will talk about football, and its nice that people have that common ground bringing them together.

Despite having a better 2020 than most people, in terms of music, being on the Radio 6 playlist and even getting Radio 1 airplay, what effect do you think COVID-19 is going to have on Courting?

I think we would have been more successful if this hadn’t have happened. As a band, the main attraction isn’t radio play, or if we get featured in a magazine, its about gigs, and that’s the most fun part too. In a normal year, when we start to pick up this hype, people will come to a show and that’s what decides if someone really like your band. The fact that we can’t do that is really upsetting because we’ve made that first step in getting people interested in us, Dork, DIY, So Young, Steve Lamacq and we’re really appreciative, but we can’t do anything about it. Hopefully next year, all these people who have heard our songs on the radio or heard about it in a magazine will come to see us.

This year, we played our first shows outside of Liverpool, and it was great, but then a few weeks later we were locked down. We were gaining some momentum playing gigs but that came to a halt.

Where do you see yourselves in 5 year’s time?

Headlining Glastonbury! As long as we keep making decent music, and people want to listen to it, I’m not really arsed. I think it would be ideal, but when was the last time a new band headlined anything that big?

Our goal as a band, I think is to take styles of music that are more underground and experimental, and turn them into things they can make TikToks over when they play football with their dog.

Courting's debut EP 'Grand National' is out 9th April.