Drug Store Romeos come out of their bedrooms and into Pie & Vinyl, Southsea

There’s something rather off-kilter about the world of Drug Store Romeos.
Drug Store Romeos are performing an in-store for Pie & Vinyl on August 10, 2021. Picture by Neelam Khan VelaDrug Store Romeos are performing an in-store for Pie & Vinyl on August 10, 2021. Picture by Neelam Khan Vela
Drug Store Romeos are performing an in-store for Pie & Vinyl on August 10, 2021. Picture by Neelam Khan Vela

Even without the wonky quality of our Zoom connection lending our chat a slightly otherworldly feel, one only has to listen to their acclaimed debut album, The World Within Our Bedrooms, to hear that this is a band operating in its own bubble.

The trio formed in Fleet after childhood friends and bandmates Jonny Gilbert and Charlie Henderson pinned an ad on their college noticeboard looking for a bassist.

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Sarah Downie replied, and when her talents as a vocalist soon became apparent a shuffle was in order with Charlie switching to bass and Charlie on the drums.

Drawing on musical influences such as Stereolab and Broadcast, they’re also inspired by Dadaism and the cut-up technique as pioneered by writers like Tristan Tzara and later popularised by The Beats.

Growing up in a small town most famous for having a motorway service station also had an impact on their collective psyche.

‘The only time I'd go to the service station was as a kid, you'd sneak off and there was this fence you could get under, from Elvetham Heath to the service station, and people would just go to the service station to hang out,’ says Charlie. ‘For some reason you'd hang out in this place that was more expensive than everywhere else – why? I don't know!’

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As Jonny wryly notes: ‘New Yorkers have the Statue of Liberty, Parisians have the Eiffel Tower. We have Fleet Services...’

When they found each other through the ad, it almost felt like fate, as Sarah notes: ‘It felt quite perfect.

‘It is weird that three people who have such esoteric music tastes in such a sleepy town like Fleet were living five minutes from each other.’

When it came to putting the album together, their desire to escape suburbia loomed large.

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‘We wanted to have intimations of suburbia in there without using the actual word.

‘We wanted it be a homage to our roots and growing up. A big influence on our sound was our mindset at the time, and you do get quite isolated, and need that sense of isolationism, when you 're in a small town like the one we grew up in.

‘We would spend a lot of our lives isolated in either my bedroom, or Jonny's rehearsal room.

‘That's what it was – the sound is within our bedroom, and this sound is this world we were creating and escaping within.’

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Charlie also relates another possible meaning to the album’s title.

‘Internet culture is such a big thing, and I would just spend hours and hours diving into all these different cultures throughout time and finding things that interested me. I found real life so boring...

‘Being on the internet was a great way of trying to find things that interested me, and that turned out to be music.’ He pauses and laughs: ‘I don't want to say this album is all about having internet access in your bedroom, though!’

For Sarah, writing the album was informed by her decision to drop out of college during her second year to focus on music.

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‘I just couldn't do it (college) any more. I knew what I wanted to do and if I was going to do music, I had to drop out and concentrate on that, so I did.

‘I love education, I love learning – just not what someone puts in front of my and I have to pretend to be interested in it when it's not really something that sparks me.’

She would listen to online lectures for hours, which led her to Dadaism.

‘O didn't know what it was, so I started learning about that, and then I started learning about art history and Tristan Tzara – he would take a magazine, cut out a sentence, cut up the words, put them in a bag, then pull them out one by one and create a whole new meaning.

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‘I would do it in a different way, I became really into collaging - inspired by Dada. I would get these 1960s magazines from eBay with amazing graphics, and gossip magazines from the 1980s, and I was using a lot of that visually for inspiration.’

For Sarah she says it’s all about ‘reducing friction’ between her thoughts and the creative process – creating associations between patterns and words.

‘I like to get to a place when I'm writing where I'm not really thinking – well, I'm thinking, but I've lost awareness.

‘The unconscious is very exciting to me – I like to enter that unconscious state – it's just a tool for doing that.’

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The band are appearing at Pie and Vinyl as part of a record store tour before a headline tour in autumn, which includes a date at Southampton’s Heartbreakers on November 23.

They’ve played here in Portsmouth several times, but Charlie recalls one particularly disastrous gig.

‘Jonny couldn't make it because he was working at Sainsbury's, so Sarah and I came down with some guitars and a rug, and did a duo set on the floor to about six people who were moderately into it and then missed our last train home. We had to get a bus at 3am which dropped us off at Basingstoke at 4am and then we tried to sleep in this bus shelter – it was in winter and it was awful!

Sarah adds: ‘We were in this bus shelter for so long, and it was raining, we couldn't sleep. So we made this weird game trying to make shapes out of the rain.’

Let's hope this visit goes rather better.

Drug Store ROMEOS

Pie & Vinyl, Southsea

Tuesday, August 10, 1pm

Heartbreakers, Southampton

Tuesday November, 23

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