Daisy Casemore: vocals, piano, guitar
Roan Clawson: guitar
Jack Forshew: drums
Ronan Lenane: guitar
Oisin Rice: bass and saxophone
James Smith: trumpet
On the 24th of July at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, the historic venue’s low ceiling struggled to contain the cacophonous performance of an Edinburgh student band: Springhouse. Swaggering onto stage, dancing around their instruments a bit, then gesturing at the tech; the 6-piece band’s second gig begins. The multi-instrumentalist band’s theatrical renditions recall Black Country New Road with charm, without risk of seeming like a rip-off. The band themselves resembled the cast of Napoleon Dynamite, with trumpet-player James Smith even refusing to relinquish his tie, despite the sizzling live-room heat.
Daisy Casemore sings and shouts through ‘Mornings’, one of the bands many singles and embodies outrage in a cover of ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab.’ Such a full sound dressed with trumpet, saxophone and piano over the usual 5 piece would drown out any other voice, but Casemore echoes down like the voice of God. Casemore’s musical theatre background is evident, the accompanying instrumentals rising behind her, bolstering the zealous spoken-word lyricism.
Guitarist Ronan Lenane jeers and jests with his bandmates at any pause between songs, and it feels as though absolutely everyone is in on the joke, if not in competition with Casemore’s powerful presence.
In their train-clacking single ‘Cowboy Poetry,’ they exude confidence and an extreme case of the silliness. They are certainly in need of some refinement but ooze outrageous fun. Oisin Rice switches between bass and saxaphone on their brand new ‘Shelf song.’
Although true throughout, at this song we realise how hard it would be listening out of context. Seemingly aware of this, a harmonica instrumental that was planned for the opening has been shifted to the back third. They clearly know their context.
The rowdy and pleading ‘News’ ensures that no single player stands out too much, solidifying their confidence not only in themselves, but each other. Warranting a call for an encore, to which a double time of ‘Cowboy Poetry’ is jumped on, a clean ending eludes them.
After the show…
Sat on wet steps just down the street from King Tut’s, we gather the members of Springhouse. Videographer zooming in and friends of the band crowding round. The transcription of this interview was hard fought for with our phone recordings trying to cut through the friendly buzzing chat that surrounded us.
Taylor: So, this is only your second gig, you have such a great presence together, you’re very interactive, how did that happen so quickly?
Daisy: We’re all friends anyway.
Oisin: We all love each other.
Taylor: Do you practice together a lot?
Daisy: Yeah..?
Ronan: We won’t practice for four months then we’ll practice every day for two weeks.
Rosie: As you’re all at university together, how has such a time of personal growth and stressful periods affected the band, the music, and your relationships to each other?
Ronan: Music comes second, Reels come first, school comes very far down.
Rosie: You’ve spoken before about not wanting to write the same song twice, is there any set process for building a Springhouse song, initial idea to final piece?
Oisin: Daisy plays the same chord over a capo, moves the capo up and down
Daisy: except for when I’m writing on piano!
Ronan: it’s a vibes-based process… I don’t think we’ve found a process yet. Every song is different, songs that sound very different each time. And so the genre would be “we want the song to sound a certain way.”
Daisy: And also we’re really clever.
General agreement
Ronan: Incredibly funny…
Lists and lists of hyperbole and shouting over each other
Taylor: You are such a big band, have there been any fights in the delegation process?
They giggle and the videographer starts death staring and zooming in on Ronan…
Ronan: While not unwarranted, we all care about the creative process, we all want to have our input
Oisin: There was a time that Jack threw a cymbal at me
Daisy: You pushed Jack down the stairs!
Shouting and accusations continue…
Rosie: Although being such a new band, you seem very eager, and very confident, in marketing yourselves; reaching out to reviewers and active on Instagram. Have you always been aware of the business side of the band, are there any more grassroots plans to build your audience?
Daisy: Well, we’re all going away for a year. Jack’s going to Paris and I’m going to America. Hopefully we’ll come back together after that.
Oisin: There’s four other band members!
Ronan: The original marketing strategy was, you probably can’t put this in actually, when I put on a play and it wasn’t selling that many tickets on the day, so I was outside an English lecture and went up to people and said I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t buy tickets, and that actually worked really well, which is a bad thing for me to learn. But we truly love Instagram Reels, we just love them so much.
Daisy: But obviously we’ll have to slow down for a year… It’s really upsetting, these guys are the best. We’ve written some great songs in my opinion; I love hanging out with them. It’s really sad.
Taylor: We heard that you’ve been in the studio recently, have the songs transformed through the recording process?
As soon as this question was asked, the band seemed to sober for a moment. Their consensus was resounding.
James: None of us like the recording and we’re choosing to ignore it. We made no improvements, and we didn’t like it.
Ronan: We did an interview, talked about recording, and took the recording section out because we were just like “yeah recordings really hard actually” … we just sound like dimwits.
Rosie: Are you considering not releasing the recordings at all?
They all say yes immediately
James: We’re not only considering it, that’s the likely outcome.
We writers felt that this dissatisfaction made sense. Much of Springhouse’s lure is in the improvisational style of their performance, and that levity could easily be lost in the repetitive studio process.
Rosie: Well, are you happy with the show tonight?
Daisy: Thrilled, it was really special. It will be our last one for about a year unless we do a Christmas reunion show…Of course, King Tut’s is a really iconic venue and to share it with these guys is really an honour.
Rosie: How do you feel about the progress you’ve made in the past 6 months?
Daisy: Really proud.
Ronan: We really sped run the whole band thing.
Oisin: Luke Reynolds sat in on our practice two days ago and he said that the last two days we made a massive improvement. We’re much better than we were two days ago.
Ronan: We want to give a shout out to Luke Reynolds and Cameron Bislandy because they have genuinely encouraged us and supported us so much and I don’t know what we’d do without them.
We lost them then, the end of Ronan’s sentence rising to beat the chatter as it grew louder. Friends began to crowd in for goodbye hugs, their congratulations drowning out everything else.
The story of Springhouse is fleeting, volatile, but fairly blinding in their success. Their second gig, losing key members, and their recordings that may never make it to our Spotify playlists, reveals that night at King Tut’s as a snapshot of a band on the edge of it all. We are left with the question of where these talented musicians may go, and what may spirit the remaining members elsewhere?
Images by Rosie Hodgson Smith
