Holiday Ghosts

Words by Mia Lambdin Photographs by Lizzie Clark-Norgaard

Holiday Ghosts are an alternative DIY rock band currently based in Brighton, who mix 70’s style vocals with jangly 80’s sounding guitars. As a follow up from their 2021 album ‘North Street Air’, I had a phone call with guitarist, singer and songwriter Sam Stacpoole, we chatted about everything ranging from the dissatisfaction of agency jobs to one of the latest music genres, egg-punk.

How did the band form?

I was doing it on my own, and then we went through different incarnations with various friends, it would be a different band every time I played a gig. I was playing with Charlie (Murphy) but when Kat (Rackin, drums and vocals) moved into my parents’ house we started playing together, and that’s how it formed. We’re based in Brighton, but we began in Falmouth and spent a lot of time as a band there so still have that kind of identity, but we’ve been here now for three years, maybe four years even – I lose count.

How did you get signed to FatCat Records?

We just emailed them – and they were like, ‘we’re interested, do you want to meet?’ We signed with them in the pandemic – they didn’t see the band until way after but I guess they were into what we sent them. We’re quite embedded in that label now, we have jobs with the label. Kat manages their social media, and I’ve just started vinyl operating with the machinery – the first thing we’re doing is cutting one of our seven-inches.

What’s it like being on an indie label, and how’s the community surrounding it?

They’re a very relaxed label, they don’t really want to take too much input into how we are mixed, recorded, whatever – they’ve always been quite sort of bypass as a label. I know of other labels, maybe more major ones, that have had some creative control in the sound of things, who they use to record what – so I’d say it works for us because we’ve always been a ‘done it yourself’ band so we wouldn’t want them to be taking any of that creative control – but they’re also really well established and a well-oiled machine. The community with FatCat isn’t exactly the same as what you’d classically consider an ‘indie label’ in that the genres and styles of music are wide, FatCat has classical, dance music, a lot of electronic stuff, it’s good. I don’t think we’ve ever wanted to be pigeonholed into a certain scene or style of music. Me and Kat have discovered quite a lot of classical stuff, and I can honestly say I’ve never through choice put classical music on, but now I found some stuff that’s contemporary and interesting to me.

You painted a backdrop of your EP cover art – is that a hobby you have outside the band?

I should probably say first that Kat is the illustrator of the band – she does our sleeves, except for North Street Air where we actually outsourced Joe Fenwick-Wilson to do that, he’s a great guy that we know from Margate. Kat does that kind of as a hobby, so she’s done all of our artwork at this point including that Credit Note EP, which was a multimedia collage/drawing. I’ve been involved loosely, I guess mainly the paintings on our video for ‘Mr Herendi’, and I’ve always done posters – I think we’re both good at it, I really like the stuff we do. It’s nice, we definitely want to consistently keep all of our record sleeves being illustrations by us, or by people we believe in. we don’t really want to use photographs, it’s kind of like a unique thing.

Would you label yourself as a punk band?

I could say that we’re a punk band but people would disagree, I think definitely the Credit Note EP is of a punk genre, and I think our live set is quite punk, but our records are more alternative rock and indie I would say – our albums span a lot of genres. We’re not in a scene – you know egg-punk? – egg-punk is an American phenomenon right now and that is a very defining scene in the same way as you could say UK post-punk is right now. I don’t think we’re part of a label that you could do that with, so I would reach for larger things like indie or alternative rock.

Who are your musical influences?

We listen to so much stuff – I would say the most constant music in my life since I was a kid is Bob Dylan, I still can’t stop listening to him. There’s
a record by this band called Lives of the Angels, which is a husband and wife in the eighties, and they made this really cool crossover between drum machine and synthesiser music, and guitar, sort of indie-punk, and I listen to that a lot in the band.

Kat has gone down a really piano-fluid thing right now – we love Nina Simone. I collect records and right now I listen to a lot of electronic punk music, but yeah I guess I don’t think Holiday Ghosts has a band that we are influenced by going forwards – we are a collective of people that listen to all kinds of things.

What is the inspiration behind your lyrics?

The ones that I feel happiest about normally just come out of direct experiences in my life, like working and real life things – like the lyrics for our latest single, I really like those and I wrote that like working alongside a load of dissatisfied minimum wage people. They’re all taken from conversation I had with those people and I was feeling the same – but for Kat, she’s like political in her writing and she writes a lot about herself, as well. I feel like our last few sets of lyrics have been quite political and in a sense that we’re commentating on a space and the system that we live in but I guess with a ‘lowercase p’ – it’s not like we’re using the word Tories in our lyrics, but it’s kind of a common thread at the moment, it’s hard not to write about it.

You said online your new single ‘B. Truck’ was about the frustrations of working full time in minimum wage jobs – can you tell me more about this?

At the time I was working agency jobs and the way that you meet people in those environments and just dissatisfaction from the way things come down from all fronts, like the agency, the actual corporate management – those kinds of jobs are tough, they don’t properly value you. It just felt like there were so many funny characters that I could illustrate that point with that I’d met along the way. I feel like I write better stuff when I have those experiences. I write with Kat as well, and we write about other things but the ones that come out of me, fully formed are the ones like that, and she is just like a lyric writing machine, they’re always great. I think when we moved to Brighton there was a lot more to write about than Falmouth, a big change of our environment, jumping into this new place.

What is in the future for Holiday Ghosts?

We’re releasing some singles up until April, we’re putting a new album out, we have those tours in April and May and we’ll be recording in the winter, so we’ll be doing what will end up being another album in the distant future – but we’re recording that in January. We like to keep going and keep the recording regular.