Adam Thompson, front man for the Scottish rock band, We Were Promised Jetpacks, recently developed a new trick for dealing with the often-unsettling post-show doldrums. As a touring band, Thompson and crew traveled a lot pre pandemic, often for upwards of six-to-eight months at a time. And after each show, the front man would often stay in his head sweating the small details that might have gone wrong on stage. This, though, he found, only compounded any actual issue. So, Thompson decided to visit the merch stand after gigs and talk to the people that came to see the band. The result, he says, has been night and day for Thompson, whose group released their latest EP, Out Of Interest, in June.
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“After shows I’ll go out to chat and that gives me so much enjoyment,” Thompson says. “Beforehand, I’d come off stage and analyze how I played and that just brought me down. It’s really nice to get to meet people who are into your music, it’s such a confidence boost, as well.”
For all intents and purposes, Thompson and his band mates have been professional musicians for their entire adult lives. We Were Promised Jetpacks, which formed in 2003, played its first gig at a Battle of the Bands in the members’ high school (complete with shoddy Mac Paint flyer with copy and pasted saxophone emblem for no reason). The band won and from then on, the group has been recording, releasing music and touring. The group, which generally plays 300-800-person rooms, has grown up under the light of public consumption. This can be challenging. But, as Thompson says, as the members mature, so does the focus of the mission.
“Talking to people after the show can make you forget you’ve just done a 10-hour journey that day,” he says. “Or your girlfriend is home and the signal is bad when you’re trying to talk. Or the gig the night before went terrible. But fans are just happy to see you and to talk to you, it’s made such a difference.”
The band’s latest release, which comes on the heels of their 2018 LP, The More I Sleep The Less I Dream, is emblematic of the group’s current moment in time. Recently, guitarist Michael Palmer, who had joined the band the day of their first open mic, amicably departed from the group. The remaining three members – Thompson, bassist Sean Smith and drummer Darren Lackie – produced Out Of Interest and while it showcases the group’s signature and stellar knack for big crescendos and waves of sound – as on the songs “Same Mistakes” and “Impossible” – Thompson says the band is also looking to deviate somewhat from what’s worked so well in the past to look toward soundscapes.
“When we first started as a scrappy indie band,” Thompson says, “we focused on dancey rock beats. But then over time, we moved toward a little bit heavier sound and we started to realize we could do these long builds. But it’s also something we’re trying to move away from some for our next record.”
Thompson, who says the new record is tentatively slated for 2021, first came to music at a relatively young young age. He says as a kid, he remembers seeing his father perform. He’d played in rock bands, bluegrass and in pubs, performing traditional Scottish dance, called cèilidh (pronounced “Kay-Lee”). As in the American South and Midwest, where country and folk music often reign supreme, the people of Scotland also love the down-home populist style of music. And as Thompson watched his father perform and lead the dance groups, he saw both musicianship and stage leader in action.
“He was the guy at the front who coordinates all the dancing,” says Thompson, whose mother was also a violist. . “Like, ‘Do-see-do, 1-2-3-4.”
At 13-years-old, Thompson started to hear rock music from his older sibling’s stereo through the walls. Not long after, Thompson picked up his first guitar and started working through a Beatles songbook. Music quickly stuck. Growing up in Edinburgh, Thompson was exposed to the town’s arts festival, the largest in the world, bringing some one million people to the region. Later, he went to college with three of the band members and the fourth attended school less than an hour away. Together, the quartet grew and would later tour all over the world.
As Thompson reflects on the current COVID-19 health pandemic and the time his band has had away from the stage, Thompson says he misses it. He loves the energy playing live – in fact, he says, when he thinks of any of his favorite We Were Promised Jetpacks songs, he thinks of them live, not recorded. He loves the waves of emotion, the swells and doing it all over again. It’s the magic elixir that makes the sacrifices and the worries and doubts all worth it.
“The thing I love most about music,” Thompson says, “I love writing tunes with my pals and then touring them. It doesn’t matter how many tours we do, I always love doing them. It’s my favorite thing – that feeling of writing a song, finishing it and brining people together.”
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