Scorpio Leisure had me transfixed from the minute I first heard their music, this was courtesy of their bass player Coco sharing an enigmatic video clip of their hypnotic song Driving. The band had an air of mystery about them at the time, other than Coco, I had very little knowledge of the who was in the band. The one thing I knew was they had the potential to be one of my new musical obsessions.
And so it transpired, trying to see the band as often as life and work permits, having been wowed by the first time I saw them in The Rum Shack – even heading out East to catch gigs in Sneaky Pete’s and La Belle Angele, I don’t do that for just any band. So, before they took to the stage for what was to be their 14th gig, the band took some of their precious time out to chat to me about the band, their music and their upcoming debut album in the somewhat daunting surroundings of the GUU boardroom with the alumni from several decades watching from around the walls…
Origins
TGQ: Let’s start at the beginning, tell me about how you started the band. Because obviously when I look back on some of the original stuff, it wasn’t just you four? There were names like Malcolm Ross and stuff involved as well.
Hettie: It was just Coco and Russell at first, I think they were being naughty through COVID and having secret meetups …
Coco: Yeah. Edinburgh has got Arthur’s Seat, Russell stays just off of there, so we just took an amp, speaker, a guitar and drum tracks, just doing lots of work on tunes and ideas that have been bouncing around for a while really.
Hettie: And then I met Russell next to some bins one day. and he said he was doing music again. I said, I miss music, I’d like to do some music again, so he said, well come and do some music so I was in…
Russell: …But I’m moving to Dundee…
Hettie: (laughs) yeah, I moved to Dundee! So, he sent me some tunes over, and I put some words to them, and then it just kept on growing arms and legs.
Russell: I had been sending Mungo tracks before this, he got his head round a couple of them, Hettie had joined us… and then Ricky appeared from Mars through a friend of Coco’s.
Coco: A mate of mine, Mole, who I’ve known for years, went to San Francisco about 1991and met this guy, the two of them bonded over music and it turned out to be Ricky who he comes over here a lot. I played on some stuff with an Edinburgh band, Shattered Family, who Mole played with. Their singer/guitarist was doing a solo thing and I played bass on some of that. It wasn’t until Ricky was actually over here playing with us, that I found out we both played on it. When I looked back, right enough, Mole had mentioned a Ricky from San Francisco. That was about 30 years ago, but then Ricky was coming to Edinburgh, and he wanted to pop in and see Rusty because he wanted to talk to him about Win and The Fire Engines. I’d been sending Mole some of the stuff as well because he was a long-distance lorry driver at the time and I was just sending him a soundtrack for the drive to, just some bizarre stuff. Then when Ricky come over to visit Mole, he brought him down to the studio and before we knew what was happening, he was playing guitar in the band.
Hettie: And people like Malcolm Ross, they’ll just come in and do stuff now and again, if we want some steel guitar or something. And we’ve had George T, Gareth Sager…
Russell: … He’s on Give Us Some Space. He’ll do stuff for us, and I’ll do the same for him. I’ll send him tracks, he’ll put his headphones on and then just play piano or whatever…
Hettie: If anyone wants to join us, it’s a kind of collective!
TGQ: Yeah. I remember when I saw the list of names on Bandcamp against Give Us Some Space I was like, wow!
Hettie: (laughs) like 17 people or something, yeah, we’re not precious. We’re like, oh yes. You can bring another element into the band…
Russell: Gareth sends me stuff and gets Davie Henderson to sing on his music so he’s returning the favour.
Hettie: And now we’ve got Mike doing all the backing.
Russell: Mike, yeah, the 5th Beatle.
Hettie: We just keep him in the corner though.
Mungo: There’s been a couple of recent additions, Mike doing the technical side of things, like in-house engineer, essentially the setup with the backing tracks, it’s all a bit complex.
Russell: This is the way we’re doing it now which is better. Now we’ve got separate tracks, drums, keyboards, backing.
Mungo: And then we’ve just taken on Colin to look after us.
Hettie: As a manager. I mean, who knows where the fuck he is? What did you say earlier? Polishing his Cuban heels?
TGQ: So has this been a conscious progression or has it just been a natural step?
Hettie: We’re shit at promoting ourselves. We need somebody to do all that stuff.
Mungo: That’s it. Realising we can do the music, but we need someone else to do all the other stuff.
Hettie: Yeah. We just like being in Russell’s little cave, being creative, and then all the other bullshit is, well, totally bullshit to us, it really makes it really hard.
Mungo: We’re busy people, we all have other jobs. It doesn’t seem like a compromise to bring in more folks, you know, I mean. You have a six-piece band, you only get paid, say, £15 each anyway.
Russell: It’s good because I’ve got my recording studio, so the recording costs us nothing.
TGQ: It must be a nightmare negotiating the music industry in the 21st century. Or should I say, the listening preferences of younger music fans, unless you’re Taylor Swift or someone like that, you’re not making any money from streaming. It’s like a million streams to earn a penny or whatever.
For Your Audio Pleasure…
Back to the forming of the band and the name Scorpio Leisure, obviously I know where that’s come from, but for the unacquainted, for people that don’t know the Leith area and around the Hibs Stadium in particular, why did you pick Scorpio Leisure as your name?
Hettie: Because it’s a cool as fuck name really. Yes, we all know it was a brothel.
Mungo: The timing of it was pretty good because I think, probably to the month, as the band was born, the sign was coming down, so we kind of took on the moniker. And the establishment has kind of given us their blessing.
Hettie: And I had a piece of artwork named Scorpio Leisure years ago. It had, like, black leather gloves and a scorpion. So, I’ve always loved the name Scorpio Leisure. It’s just as a cool as fuck name. And it works for us because we are all a bit dark and sleazy.
Mungo: It’s funny as well, obviously the music’s a bit sexy, but the songs are also very witty and humorous. So, it’s a perfect name.
Hettie: Certainly, some of our newer songs that have not even been heard yet. Totally.
Mungo: It’s funny. If you get it, you get it. And if you don’t, it’s still a cool name.
Creative Process
TGQ: In terms of the creative process then, you’ve talked a bit about how you all contribute to the music, Hettie, is it you that writes all the lyrics?
Hettie: Yeah, mostly. The guys actually have a couple of songs they’ve sent me that already a wee chorus bit put in. But I don’t think any of the ones that been out yet. Yeah, I’ve written all of the lyrics on them so far.
Coco: Maybe Russell or I’ll have an idea. Very, very small to start with, but then maybe we find the drum beat that goes with it, then something that goes here and there and we work on that. The more we play about with it, it develops and then record it and just keep playing it back. Then I’ll have another idea that goes on top of it, or Russell will find a keyboard sound that sounds great and put it on it. Mungo will then come in and go “I like that bit – hold on…” and it’ll just build from there.
Hettie: And then they send me about 25 songs. There you go. There’s your homework for next week. I’m like, alright, no pressure.
Russell: We get the electronic base, and then Mungo comes in and puts melodies and his guitar parts on top of It. We’re an equal unit of writers, because it be nothing without each other.
Mungo: Russell & Coco will just churn them out en-masse, but they’re quite often a kind of mental structure. It’s like they don’t follow a conventional song structure.
Hettie: I go in and go, right, guys, you need to have a verse chorus verse. What is this?
Mungo: I see that too, I’ll come in and just be like, right, this is 18 minutes of amazing tunes, but this is actually three songs, and we do a bit of cut and paste. Me and Ricky would go, that’s a hook, that needs a bit of guitar, or a middle eight.
Russell: It’s a great way to work, it develops the music organically. And for me, it’s unexpected. You don’t know what’s coming back.
Genre Fluid
TGQ: I think that’s one of the things I like about your music. What drew me to it. It’s really hard to pigeonhole, like there’s not a specific genre. It’s something that just kinda hits you. And before you know it, you get sucked into it. Is that intentional, not to be genre specific?
Coco: It wasn’t specifically written to say, right, let’s be freaking real smartarses and show how fucking great creatively we are. say do a bit of this, do a bit of that, how about a bit of rockabilly, throw that in… We just play it, and it just comes and gives you that feeling. Or you hear something, and that reminds you of something else. And by time you peel that out of your memory bank, you’re not playing what you thought it was at all, it’s your interpretation and it sounds pretty good, then you bang some disco drumbeat on it and then it’s totally different again.
Hettie: They send me some really good tunes, but sometimes no words spring to mind, then I can go back to them, maybe a month later and the words will spring to mind. Other times I’ll listen to music in the car where normally I do all my writing and straight away, I’ll get a feeling or a vibe that will create a story in my brain. But it is just kind of like, you just don’t know. So, they maybe send me four tunes, and one really jumps out and other ones I go back to.
Mungo: That’s the nice thing, none of us are especially precious, and no-one’s over intellectualising the writing process, so we’ll have an idea and just roll with it, there’s no second guessing. Because it goes through so many phases, the turnover is so rapid that we don’t really have time to think, maybe that’s not good enough, maybe that could be better.
Hettie: As you say, we don’t stick to genres. We don’t think., we need to do all of them this way or… that’s too disco…We’ll just go with however it feels.
Mungo: It’s nice to have that body of work. I mean, obviously fine tuning does happen, for example with the album and the EP,so there is the production side of things we spend hours trying to get it sound first class. But in terms of the writing process, there’s never been a point where we all sit around the table together, painstakingly trying to come up with the next line, it just doesn’t work like that.
Hettie: There is no problem with us creating. If we went away for a weekend, we’d have about 10 tunes, but then you’d have to do your editing afterwards.
Russell: There’s a certain consistently to the Scorpio Leisure sound, then if you get someone else in, it can add a different element to the sound. We just keep adding to that library of tunes.
TGQ: I think the first song that I came across of yours was posted on Instagram, it was Driving and that was just so mysterious. It was like I was bought in immediately. I don’t know if it was by design or by accident but at the time it was really hard to find anything about the band. But I liked that the hypnotic nature of the song and the mysteriousness just made me more intrigued and wanting more, it hooked me into the music.
The Album
Obviously since then you’ve had more singles out, you’ve got the Apology EP out, and you’ve got the album coming out this year. So, what can we expect from the album, are there songs that Scorpio Leisure followers will be familiar with on the album, or is it all new songs?
Mungo: I think that a lot of them on the album are in the live set, but there are a couple that we’ve not played live yet. If you’re familiar with the live set, you’ll know a lot of the songs.
Coco: These songs are over a year old now, there are other ones we’ve introduced into the live set, like Rain & Sweet Harmony, which were written way after the ones on the album, and they have a totally different sound almost, a different approach or a different vibe, like you said, difficult to pigeonhole.
Hettie: Yeah, we’ve got like 2 more albums worth of songs already.
Russell: I think we’ve improved, it’s more structured just because we’ve become a unit, and things are happening for us.
Mungo: There are two tunes that we’re playing in this set today, that aren’t on the last EP, aren’t on the album that I think are probably gonna come out as maybe a single… A side and B side.
TGQ: Are there any songs you particularly enjoy playing live?
Hettie: The two newer ones that will be playing in the set, Sweet Harmony and Rain I suppose because they are newer, they’re more exciting to play because we don’t know them as well. So, there’s a certain nervous energy. They’re quite good to play and as we are generally improving, structurally, they’re maybe more exciting to play.
Coco: All of them, I enjoy playing all of them, but there’s one that I’ve played before, and I keep fucking up the same bit of the song. I really need to do more rehearsals and just really get on it and learn this particular song that I’m not going to mention…
Hettie: He’s gonna be looking for it now!
Coco: Other people who don’t know the song, they probably think it’s meant to be like that anyway because the songs have that off the wall feel about them. It’s not as if you can just programme a drum machine,120 beats, 180 beats, and put it on and just play every song to it because there’s so many different things happening.
Mungo: I think that’s about the wacky arrangements that have that off kilter music quality.
Russell: Mungo does “the wonky”…
Mungo: I just come in and do the Robert Quine muso thing
Hettie: Most normal songs go 1,2,3,4… ours go 1,2,3,4 … and a half… What’s the half for? Just to make everything really hard?
Russell: I did a record with Creation, Piefinger, and every song has odd changes, and I couldn’t get anybody to pay it live! It was more of an experimental thing but just trying to get a band together to do it…
Coco: Yeah, as long as you know there’s a change coming up here, a surprise change, lots of surprise changes. Normally, naturally, you’ll feel changes coming, no matter what is. When you’re playing music, you can hear it, you know what a change is gonna come. But not with Rusty’s fuckin’ Piefinger. Is there a change supposed to be happening here? What happened to that, oh, its fuckin’ changed already…
Hettie: Yeah, so our music’s probably quirky because Russell’s offbeat sounds keep us on our toes.
TGQ: How does it feel playing a gig in the afternoon?
Hettie: Weird.
TGQ: Especially with the type of music you play…it’s light outside, your music is often dark and seedy.
Hettie: It kind of feels kinda naughty at this time and I’m definitely having one drink just to calm the bloody nerves because yeah, it’s just weird, it’s light outside. I’m totally sober. I’m drinking water. What is going on?
Album Release
TGQ: As we said you’ve got the album coming out later in the year, have you got any other gigs planned for the album release?
Coco: Colin is arranging that, he is looking for suitable venues. He was looking at the Jazz Bar, a nice wee basement bar, but it just closed yesterday.
Hettie: We want to do something a wee bit special, maybe have some piano, maybe have some of my burlesque dancer friends or something. Something a wee bit different.
Mungo: We did quite a fun thing for Christmas with Callum Easter…
Hettie: Yeah, we’re looking for something a wee bit classier than that I think for our album release. If you know somewhere with a piano, let us know. I fancy doing something by the candelabra.
Mungo: Play up to our theatrical side, there are always interesting costumes from Heather…
Coco: It’d be nice to try to make it an event and keep your attention visually as well.
Hettie: I was just thinking because we have people like Malcolm Ross on stuff, have him in playing a little bit. There’s a song I really want banjo on, so we could get Mike in to do the banjo on it. Then I was thinking, steel guitar, piano, the double bass or something, we could have all these guest people coming up. Anyway, that’s my fantasy.
TGQ: You do realise I’m expecting this to happen now.
Hettie: (laughing) I don’t know if anyone will give us the space, I don’t know if we can afford to actually pay any of these people to come on or whatever, but yeah, in my head, we’ll have all these guests and people coming on. And we’re all wearing suits and shit. This is the stuff I dream of…
TGQ: the big question is, have you got back-up shakers for today!
Hettie: Yes, I ordered a new big metal shaker, but it never appeared, I do have a new tambourine though.
Russell: I had a collection of fragile vintage shakers, all broken!
TGQ: Any surprises for this afternoon, other than it being daylight outside?
Hettie: Hopefully not! We’re all nervous.
Russell: Ask Mike, any surprises Mike?
Hettie: We’ve got one new tune that we haven’t played live, Sleazy from the EP
Mungo: And we’re bringing back an old one for the intro, Seeker.
Hettie: We want to play a load of new songs, and we always say we’ll get loads of practices in, but I live in Dundee, Mungo in Glasgow and the other two in Edinburgh, and we all work too so it’s difficult to get together. Hopefully in the future we’ll play gigs with loads of new songs. We can all record separately with Russell but its hard to all get together to rehearse.
A huge thanks to Hettie, Mungo, Russell and Coco for giving up their time to chat to me.
The Gig…
I retired to the Debating Chamber, escaping the torrential rain to enjoy the bands appearing in the afternoon session for the LNFG Weekender, including a stunning debut performance from the formidable Quad 90, definitely in my ones to watch list, and already with a swathe of quality singles under their belts, an acoustic storytelling set from Marco Rossi and the unique talents of theaudience founder Billy Reeves, closing with his version of the bands breakthrough hit A Pessimist is Never Disappointed.
It was then the turn of my interviewees Scorpio Leisure to take to the GUU Debating Chamber stage. I’ll admit it did feel strange to see them on this stage at this time of day, there is something about the band and their music that is more befitting of a dark, low ceilinged smoky basement venue. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen concerts in the venue before, thinking particularly of the stunning Bathers concert last year, the venue was absolutely perfect for that set.
However, despite my pessimism, I most definitely wasn’t disappointed. Hettie’s opening salvo was “welcome to the school disco” as the lights in the hall were switched off for the band’s set. Yes, there may have been no atmospheric lighting, and her comment rang true, but ultimately, did it impact my enjoyment of the band’s set? Absolutely not. As with every time I’ve seen this extraordinary band, I was hooked from the off, from the opening bars of set opener, all the way through to the closing salvo of Sweet Harmony and Rain. There is something quite mesmerising about their music that galvanises and invigorates me, the repetitive rhythm of songs like Running on the Spot and that mysterious almost ominous surreal feeling that you get from Driving. Before breaking into the subsonic almost reggae groove of Give Us Some Space, not quite having me break out into that whole dance like no-ones watching vibe, it was a Saturday afternoon and I was on the soda water and lime, but there was certainly some foot movement, swaying and bobbing of the head…
Sleazy suitably lived up to its title, Hettie not allowing the mid afternoon set to restrain her, that feeling bleeding through to the thinly veiled seething loathing of Apology and on into Candyfloss and Gin. It’s hard to pick a favourite Scorpio Leisure song, but Parasite always hits the mark, as do the lyrics spat out with venom by Hettie… “we all know one” she said as she “dedicated” the song to the person who influenced it, from the city in which they were playing.
As the aforementioned duo of Sweet Harmony and Rain closed out the afternoon’s entertainment, ironically the rain outside had cleared and the sun was splitting the sky, so I was able to walk back to the car bathing in the afterglow of the Scorpio Leisure set, as well as bathing in the glow of the late afternoon sun.
I now look forward to the album release extravaganza… no pressure Hettie, and getting my sticky mitts on my their debut album, safe in the knowledge that the Scorpio Leisure writing machine is in overdrive with loads of new music to come.
Scorpio Leisure – Facebook – Instagram – LNFG
The core quartet of Scorpio Leisure is:
Coco Whitson – Bass
Russell Burn – Drums/Programming
Mungo Carswell – Guitar
Hettie Noir – Vocals
also with Ricky Maymi – Guitars
and a cast of countless others, now including Mike and Colin.