headboy Interview.

“What do you think of the movie?”

“It’s not an accurate representation. The 2001 VHS tape is a profound production, whereas the movie has reduced the chances of another London run of the show.”

“I’m sorry, but can you clear up what a jellicle is?”

“A jellicle cat is a jellicle cat.”

“This is what everybody says to me! They can’t elaborate further. No one can define ‘jellicle’.”

I’m in the foyer of a central London cinema with the members of headboy, a three-piece DIY band based here in the city. I’ve asked them all about their musical influences, and frontperson Mars is explaining the impact of the musical Cats. I’m not sure how we got here.

Formed during the pandemic, the trio consists of guitarist/bassist/vocalist Mars, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Jess, and drummer Oli. Their songs are tight and their sound is remarkably robust considering the modesty of their set-up. In just 18 months, the band has played just shy of 50 shows, and as a result, their profile has grown rapidly, with Steve Lamacq recently airing their single ‘Cement’ on his 6Music show. Their debut EP, Was It What You Thought, comes out in June.

The band members themselves suggested the cinema bar as a location for the interview. They tell me that they always host their band meetings in cinema bars, since they’re one of the few relatively empty places in central London of an evening. It’s a lifehack I’ll take with me going forward.

On their Instagram page, the band’s bio reads “case-sensitive”. As we sit down, I decide to ask them about their choice to stylise their name in lowercase. 

“I feel like it looks nice,” says Mars, “but if you wanted a read, I guess I like it because I’m dyslexic and I feel a bit like ‘Down with punctuation!’”

“That is how you text actually!” says Jess.

I mention that texting in lowercase once implied nonchalance, but now that you have to go into the settings on your phone and disable auto-capitalisation, it now betrays a performance of nonchalance.

“It’s softer,” says Oli.

“I guess that’s where the whole ‘case-sensitive’ thing comes in,” agrees Jess, “because we’re all sensitive people.”

I ask them how they landed on the band name itself. All three members are non-binary or trans-masculine, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether that influenced the decision to call themselves ‘headboy’.

“Do we share our old name?” Oli asks their bandmates, a little tentatively, before just coming out with it. “We started off as The Small Heads. But it didn’t hit right. So we played around and took the ‘head’ from there. Someone came up with ‘headboy’ and it’s very fitting because it’s playing with gender. None of us would have been Head Boy but we all wanna be Head Boy.”

“It happened during the pandemic, which is a time when all of us were thinking about gender a lot,” adds Jess. “I was happy with the name but also nervous because it is a bit of a statement.”

“This didn’t occur to me until several months later,” says Mars, “but it’s a really British thing. It geographically places us, which I didn’t actually think about at first.”

“It’s such a traditional thing from school, so it’s quite sarcastic in that way too,” Oli notes.

I tell the band that I really wanted to be Head Boy at school and that when I wasn’t picked, I stamped my feet and claimed that there was a conspiracy against me.

“I’m sure there was,” Oli reassures me.

I ask the band how they met, and how their dynamic has developed since.

“Me and Mars met at uni in Leeds,” Oli says, “and we started playing together once we came back to London and had a lot of time on our hands. Then we met Jess at a football team. Jess saw us from afar.”

“I thought they were dating,” Jess explains, “so I didn’t wanna crash the date.”

“We haven’t dated,” Mars quickly clarifies.

“Maybe leave that open!” says Jess, and I nod in agreement before telling them it’s good to leave it to the imagination, so that fans can do some ‘shipping’.

The conversation moves on to the song-writing process. The band explains that it works differently every time, but they tell me one story, about their song ‘Reservoir’.

“I remember Mars being excited about ‘Reservoir’ because we were at their aunt’s house and they played us a demo and I was like ‘I know what my part is already’”, drummer Oli recounts.

“It was that part of summer when we played a silly number of shows in a week,” Mars adds, “then I went back to my aunt’s, made the song at 3am on my laptop, and then showed it to you the next day”.

I’m interested in whether the limitations of being a three-piece have helped or hindered the band, and they seem to all agree that it hasn’t held them back.

“We’re all very conscious of how we can make the most presence out of our sound,” Mars explains, “I play guitar and bass in a different way to if I was playing with four or five different people. We each chuck in as much as one person can.”

“I guess in the recordings you can add a few more guitar parts,” adds Jess, “which is also quite nice because then the live show is different. We all like showing our individual parts and then coming together.”

“We want a Roland drum pad desperately but we don’t have the money,” Oli admits, and I ask if they’ve ever been tempted to play to a click, with additional instruments on a backing track.

“We’re too spontaneous,” says Oli. “I never know if Jess is gonna end up in the middle of the crowd.”

I’m keen to talk about the new EP, Was It What You Thought. I ask what it’s about.

“What isn’t it about?” Mars quips.

“It’s every emotion we’ve experienced in the last two years, in 14 minutes, but that’s the obnoxious way of putting it,” says Jess. “It’s a bit of an imprint of us and our relationships with each other and getting each other through dark places. And going to those places you want to avoid but you know you have to go to.”

“It’s your early 20s,” Mars summarises.

“That was beautiful,” says Oli.

In addition to their guitar, bass, and singing duties, Mars is also a graphic designer and creates all of the band’s album artwork. They explain how the visuals also tie into the EP’s themes.

“There’s a lot of slightly eery, empty satellite dishes, and flowers pointing in the same direction and stuff. If I were to try and look for an umbrella thing to say, then I’d say the EP is about communication and about stuff that kind of gets lost.”

I – perhaps facetiously – ask the band if they feel it’s a coincidence that they had their beginnings in lockdown and have written an EP about communication.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all,” says Mars. “I don’t think anyone has recovered from the pandemic. I’m back to socialising at a normal level. And I do think the EP is a lot about that. I think people have reduced down to the minimum level of socialising you can get away with without feeling awful. That’s an odd thing for humanity to have done in the space of two years.”

I ask the band if they’ve garnered a queer audience, and if that’s something they aimed for. It’s a question I’d perhaps be a little embarrassed to be asking if I wasn’t myself transgender. I’m eager to provide a space for the band to talk about being queer, without making it the headline.

“It’s not something we wanted to focus on at the start because we didn’t want queerness to be part of the band’s identity,” says Oli. “We’re all queer, but we didn’t want to be a queer band. But I go to a lot of queer gigs, because the music’s great, I feel comfortable there, and the community is something I feel safe and thrive in. It makes sense that queer people will connect with us because a lot of our identity and experiences will come through naturally in our music whether we want it to or not.”

Mars chips in: “There’s a strange balance of wanting to be visible, but then on the other side I think all queer and trans people have a right to not make that part of their work. I’ve settled on this place of…we’re honest about who we are. We’re not gonna pretend to not be who we are. We are who we are and to me that’s evident in the music we make. The music is about our experiences and the experiences we have are queer experiences. If people see that and enjoy it, then it’s lovely.”

Finally, I dig a little deeper about each member’s influences, and Oli tells me about their drum teacher.

“He was big into funk, and I loved it, hence I stayed with him. Now in this band, I’m always itching to play a funk beat. We definitely come in at different angles and merge it all together, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I might even be listening to drum n bass or electronic music and I can hear it’s not acoustic drums, but I take it anyway and I put it into a song.”

Mars on the other hand explains that they grew up exclusively listening to classical music (and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats), until one day when they were in a gymnastics class at the age of 10.

“I distinctly remember the routine we were doing was to ‘Uptown Girl’. And I was like…what is this crazy thing? I made my mum find it on a tape. In my mind, it was the only pop song. And then, some kid in my class gave me a Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD.

I joke about drawing a straight line between ‘Uptown Girl’, the Chillis, and the music of headboy, and Mars reassures me that there were other things in between. But Jess points out that actually, that journey makes a lot of sense.

There’s something playful about headboy. Honest, sensitive, vulnerable, but when it comes down to it – unapologetic. They were right to bin their original band name, ‘The Small Heads’, because while there may be only three of them, there’s nothing small about their sound whatsoever. There’s a reassuring symbiosis in the way they interact, whether that’s here in the cinema foyer or when they’re on stage performing. These are three people who just make sense – and with that in mind, it’s clear that Was It What You Thought is only the beginning of something properly exciting.