Neu SKATERS: ‘We Got Into One Of Those Drunken Start-A-Band Conversations’

Do you remember The Paddingtons? They blossomed during the famed era led by The Strokes and boosted by The Libertines, but times (and charts) have changed now, so ex Paddington Josh Hubbard got together with drummer Noah Rubin and singer Michael Ian Cummings (from The Dead Trees) and decided to make the music they wanted to listen to. They named this pop-punk trinity Skaters and shortly after the band started to play, they recorded and self-released an 5 songs EP entitled ‘Schemers’ which was made available for free on their website. Their lively and irreverent performances and their hip interpretation of punk and to a lesser extent new wave, all grabbed the attention of Warner Bros. Records.

We managed to catch Michael, frontman of Skaters, on his way to SXSW and after pausing the interview to sort himself a coffee, we discussed the band’s debut album plans, their extensive tour schedule for the summer and the drunken nights that resulted in the formation of a band.



You just finished recording your debut album, and you got a record deal! Which of the two are you more excited about?
Well we wouldn’t have been able to record this particular album, without the record deal. And it’s gonna be great to be able to release our music in all formats.

Where was it recorded?
We recorded it at Electric Lady in New York which is a studio that Jimi Hendrix built. And we were there for a while, we’re not exactly finished yet, but we were there for four weeks. We’re pretty close!

When you recorded the EP, did you have a plan? Did you think that far ahead?
Not at all, we recorded it in my apartment, with thoughts of starting a band, getting a real band together, playing some gigs in New York. We didn’t expect a mayor label to step up.

How did that happen? Did they went to see you?
Yeah! They just came, we were doing what we were doing and they showed up. It was kind of effortless. It’s a great feeling, it usually never works out that way.

Have you guys known each other for a long time?
Yes and no, the drummer Noah and I we kind of grew up together and we played in another band together. I met Josh in Los Angeles kind of randomly, I knew about him because he was dating a friend of mine but I never met him because when I was in LA he’d be in New York or the other way around, always. We finally met each other in LA, and we got into one of those late night drunken start-a-band conversations. And it actually came through.

When was the turning point?
Josh stayed in touch, we spoke via. email a lot and he said yeah maybe I’ll come by in November, and the next thing I heard on October 31st was ‘hey my plane is landing tomorrow, two o’clock.’ And I was like yeah, we’ll get together and play some music tomorrow. And he said ‘no I don’t wanna jam I wanna play shows.’ And then the next morning he came and we sorted out some gigs.

Is that the same way that the London gigs happened? You had just one gig scheduled…
We went there, no one thought we should but we did it and we had one gig scheduled and we ended up playing four.

How was it? Did you like it here?
We really liked it! It was a great experience, and we’re coming back now for a couple more shows in May.

Are you gonna stay over for the festival season?
Yeah we’re going to do a full month touring the UK, then we’re gonna go home for a little bit and then we’re coming back for all the festivals. We’ve got a lot of festivals, I’m not sure what they are yet but we’re playing a lot.

Have you ever played festivals in the UK with your other band?
I haven’t, we only came over to short tours here and there, but we never did the whole festival thing. I will be the first one.

Do you take things more or less seriously now that you’ve been in bands before and played already for a long time?
I think we take certain things very seriously that we wouldn’t have if we were younger, and the thing is that what you take seriously when you’re younger you don’t care about when you’re older! You just focus on unimportant stuff and everything else follows. I don’t focus too much of things that are out of my control now.

Tell me a bit about the April tour, you’re headlining a tour in the US too…
We have a stream of shows in the East and the West coast. It’ll be our first headlining tour playing all new songs, and the record won’t come out until the Summer so it would be interesting.

I’ve read somewhere that you describe your sound as ‘humblecore’, did you invent that word?
Yeah I think Josh actually came up with that! Not sure if it exists somewhere else, I thought we created it but maybe we didn’t.

How does that represent you?
It’s just about remembering to stay humble I think, so it’s not about the actual sound but how you feel about making music. I do feel that you should stay humble, but I don’t really feel there’s an actual sound that we could call that.

Have you all relocated to New York now?
Yes, I’ve been back in New York for years now.

What do you reckon people are listening to in New York?
There’s a band called The Drowners, my friend Zac who is our guitar player right now he’s playing there and I really like them. Another band call Caveman, they’re doing pretty well. In New York new bands come out all the time out of the blue and they do well.

So one last question for you before we let you go. What does releasing an album mean to you?
There’s a lot of hard work put into a record so releasing an album takes many different meanings, the industry kind of consumes singles now… It’s just as easy for a single to disappear than it is to come around. People like records, I mean, I like records, putting a whole album on, start to finish, and there much more to a band that just one song. There’s an attitude and energy that you can only sense with the whole album. That’s why it is pretty important for a rock band to release records that become iconic. Is an art form, and a really important one.

You can catch Skaters live the 13th of May at the Sebright Arms is London. The ‘Schemers’ EP is available on iTunes.