Ryan Murphy, James Madden, Callum McFadden and Harry Chalmers make up Hooton Tennis Club, one of the most exciting bands to come out of the ‘Paradise Peninsula’. Their shoegaze, lo-fi style would be the perfect soundtrack to a desert indie film and has gained them some serious airtime on the likes of BBC6 Music. Despite there being such a buzz around the old school friends, they’re still seem incredulous that anyone is paying attention to them. We spoke to lead singer Ryan about how the band started out and defacing their own name.

 

How did Hooton Tennis Club start?

We’re friends from school, and we were all into music and playing different instruments. We wanted to be like the Foo Fighters, or Red Hot Chilli Peppers; we’d look at these bands saying ‘we could do this too’.

In our first band at school there were about six or seven of us and we were all guitarists, so we had to thin it out. Over the years it just got smaller until it was just the four of us.

 

Do you see yourselves as a Wirral band or a Liverpool band?

I’d say we’re a Wirral band, we’re all from Chester and Ellesmere Port. A few of us are still based in Wirral. I recently moved into a big house called the Garlic Mansion in Liverpool. It’s got a long history and I’m not sure why it’s called that, but there are about 30 people living there and it’s a creative hub.

 

How would you describe your music to people who haven’t heard of you?

We’ve been describing it as ‘indie landfill’ which is rather negative. It’s hard to say indie rock anymore because it’s overused, everyone is in an indie rock band, so we say indie landfill; just more songs to add to the pile of indie songs that get made every day.

We’re always quite limited in equipment, time and money so there is a bedroom, lo-fi thing in there too. It’s good that we have an interest in that music already, so it’s not too forced.

 

Do you have jobs alongside being in the band?

Callum does, he’s working on the docks at the moment. He’s a marine surveyor; he goes out on the boats and then he sends sonar waves down to the bottom to see the build-up of algae and waste. If it’s not safe for the ships to come in to the docks because of the algae that has built up, then they have to report it. It’s really interesting, and he’s out on a boat all day to check that it’s safe for all these Nike trainers to be delivered.

At the moment I’m helping out with puppeteering with some people from the house, working on things like Chinese dragons. I’m doing a bit of that, here and there. It wasn’t me until recently and now I’m like ‘yeah get me in the dragon again’! It’s good fun.

 

You’ve been working with Bill Ryder-Jones in his studio recently. Have you started working on your debut album?

Yeah, we’ve been working with Bill. Working on an album is really weird, I haven’t even got over the stage of ‘our song is on the radio’ yet. It’s so overwhelming, but it’s nice and I’m really grateful. All the people we’ve worked with so far have been really enthusiastic and patient, very helpful and interested in what we’re doing, especially Bill, he’s a great guy. He’s really helped form this album so far and he’s been a really good producer, we’d definitely work with him again.

 

Everyone talks about how close-knit the music community is in Liverpool. Have you found that?

Definitely. Becky the keyboard player from Steeling Sheep lives next door to me and she was saying how she went for lunch with Bill the other day. Everyone’s good friends and in each other’s bands and things, helping each other out.

 

It’s great to have an unusual name, but do you get annoyed when people keep asking you if you play tennis at Hooton Tennis Club?

It’s not annoying yet, it’s just funny because no one of us are really interested in tennis. We seem to be lumbered now with this name.

People ask ‘what does it mean?’, ‘where is Hooton?’, ‘Is it after Peter Hooton because you and The Farm were friends?’, or ‘is it because you all like tennis?’, ‘is it a club because you’re all indie’. We’re like oh no, what have we done!

We were at a show in Hebden Bridge for the Heavenly Records weekend [Hooton Tennis Club’s record label], and there were posters up with our name. Stealing Sheep and Kid Wave were on there too, and we went round the venue and scribbled out ‘tennis’ and wrote ‘rubbish’ instead. When we came on stage everyone was like ‘who is this Hooton Rubbish Club?’. We defaced ourselves!

 

You’ve been announced for a lot of festivals this year, including Liverpool Sound City.

Yeah, I haven’t read much about the new Sound City stages but it sounds really cool. I went to the last few when they were in the city centre. They do go big in Liverpool.

I love festivals. I worked at Festival No.6 the first year on the Carling bar and I’ve still got the t-shirt. I was working there with the other singer, James. We were looking at the line-up and saw Stealing Sheep and James was like ‘I’ve heard of these guys, they’re a band that someone from my college is in’. We both decided to jump off the bar and run down to the stage to watch them, and we nearly got fired for it.

This is our first year doing loads of festivals, like Field Day. We’ve got lots of shows coming up and we’re working on some new releases too.

 

Keep up to date with Hooton Tennis Club and all their forthcoming shows at www.facebook.com/HootonTennisClub or by following the band on Twitter @hootontennisclb