Sophie Stratford talks to lead vocalist, Jonathan Pierce from the USA’s finest new exports The Drums. Known as "New York's coolest new party band" they have got plenty of backing behind them. The Drums outline what pure, raw, original music is really about, not manufactured or planned, it is entirely their own work. Let's Go Surfing, their debut single, released on Moshi Moshi (who put out early records by Hot Chip, Florence and the Machine, Friendly Fires and Kate Nash), features New Order-style trebly, melodic bass, Ventures-esque guitar, and what many are calling "the most infectious whistling line since Peter, Bjorn and John." The Drums are hitting of 2010 by going on tour with The Big Pink, Bombay Bicycle Club and The Maccabees for the NME UK tour. They play in Newcastle on 4th Feb at the O2 Academy.

How do you feel about being hotly tipped for 2010? Well I think it’s a bit surprising for us, but we’re really grateful and excited about it, but we didn’t think anything like this would ever happen. We started the band just a year ago, we wrote our first song last December, it was just a selfish endeavour of something we were just planning on doing, you know for ourselves. We never even began to dream that it would become something like this. It’s just really surprising, it’s sort of a shock we are just trying to absorb it really. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not, some people may think that’s bad. (laughs) We almost feel like we’re trying to catch up with ourselves in a way, we didn’t think things would ever move this quickly. I think a lot of bands kind of figure everything out then work towards getting to a place like this and for some reason we kind of got there much quicker, before we had a chance to figure everything out so that’s why were just catching up with ourselves.

What’s your opinion on being part of the NME tour with bands such as The Maccabees? Well we don’t really know any of the bands on the bill that well with living in America, and they’re not as big over here as they are in the UK. I haven’t really heard much of any of them, however I know they are popular in Europe. We are excited to be part of the tour, I think for a couple of reasons; firstly we have never done a European tour before – we’ve played London and Manchester but we have never done a full blown tour before, and secondly we’re excited just to be able to showcase some of the new songs from the up and coming album.

Are you looking forward to it? Yeah, I mean it’s exciting because of all the unknown stuff, we are a very young band and we’ve just been playing shows together mostly in New York. So it’s a new experience because we haven’t done this that much, so to be on tour, they’ll be something sort of interesting about it, because we really don’t know what to expect.

How did the name “The Drums” come around? Well we wanted everything about this band to reflect sort of going back to the basics of what basic bands are like. Just four guys playing pop songs really excited us, the aim was to just simplify everything, and not be edgy and not be strange and weird. There are just so many bands being experimental and being overly cleaver about things now and we really just wanted to strip things down, like how The Smiths did it, and how The Strokes did it. It’s all really just about the song speaking for itself for us, we’re just going back to the basics. There are just so many bands out right now that have about 10 words in their name and names that are hard to remember. We went for something a little bit more classic and simple, when we thought of “the Drums” we just knew that that was the end of the conversation. It sounds like a band that has existed forever, but it hasn’t.

When did you first notice the buzz and excitement around the band? Well it first started early on, when we were in Florida recording the record, well we didn’t know it was going to be a record, we were just an unknown band recording music. We had written about 3 songs, very early on, and industry type people, PR people, managers and publicists started reaching out to us, and we were shocked because we thought no one even knew that we existed. By the time we went to New York and played our first show in late May – it was our first show and we were very nervous, we had just met our drummer and guitar player, and it was our first gig together, it was all very rushed. It was amazing though because the whole room was full to the back and I have to say we’re not very good at that sort of thing, like getting all of that attention, we’re not sure how to handle it. It’s an exciting thing, and another big moment was when we finally did go to London and we played in front of these really big crowds and all the kids were singing along to the songs, I think that was a key moment for us when we realised this could be something really special.

Where do you get your music influence from? I listen to a lot of music like The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order. Basically what interests us is two types of music, sincere and insincere. I feel like a lot of bands don’t really play their instruments very well they’re kind of off and clumsy, but I think that’s where charm comes from and that’s what people gravitate to. When we started off we had never really picked up and instrument before, on every single track there isn’t a single chord played it’s just one note at a time, because we don’t know how to play guitar, we were just white knuckling it. It took all day to play one bit, however over the course of the year we had got much better playing guitar and we can play it live now and all that.

How would you describe your music to someone that hasn't heard it? I just like to call it rock and roll but with pop at the core. Genre is not really that important to us, as melody, sincerity and truthfulness is. I think what we really try to portray is that sense of vulnerability, that’s why we chose to self produce, because we feel like over the past ten years, it’s all been about getting the right producer, getting the hottest producer, getting the right person featured on your track, and people have forgotten the song and the music! It became all about production and who could be featured on your album, and who could you mash the tracks up with and remix it with, it feels like music has lost its soul. So what we are trying to do is, and I’m not saying we’re doing it, but our goal is to, and as cliché and as cheesy as this sounds, is to really speak from the heart and wear our emotions on our sleeve. We’re really inspired by those cool girl groups from the 50s and 60s, whose songs were so striped down and simple and only 2 minutes and the subjects were really quite elementary, but I think when you have perfect lyrics and a perfect melody they both magnify each other and it’s not really something special.

What’s the best song to play live? Right now it’s Let’s Go surfing, I think it’s the song most people are familiar with plus it’s really fun to dance to and people have fun with it. My favourite song to play live is the first song we ever wrote and it’s called Best Friend and we usually start every set with that song too. It has a certain sentimental value.

Is there a hidden story behind that track then? Well Jacob Pierce (guitar) and I have been friends for about 15 years and we decided to write a song about us being Best Friends, but it kind of got boring just singing about being each other’s best friend so we decided to talk about one of us dying so it’s kind of made up and kind of true.

What exciting things have you got lined up for 2010? We are just going to be on tour all year long all over the globe. The most exciting thing is we’re going to be releasing the album in late Spring, we just finished that and we’re really thrilled at how it turned out so far.

What do you think the future holds for The Drums? I don’t know. I know that what were going to do is continue to stay true to our original decision which was writing pop songs and come what may, and if people are into us or people forget about us we always just want to continue doing the same thing, playing cool songs.

Sophie Stratford www.sophiestratford.com