Social Media, their sound, Destiny’s Child and inspirational dead bodies are all uncovered in Cub Scouts’ Tim Nelson chat with Undercover.fm
We’re still working on it - we’ve got lots of songs recorded so we’ve got an albums worth already but I’m still writing a couple of new songs every week. We feel that they’re getting stronger. At the moment we’re thinking of putting together a second EP of the songs we already have recorded. And then we’ll go record more songs for the album, when we get back from the UK.
We’ve always had a kind of upbeat, happy sound to all our music. It still has that vibe to it but a lot of it is less ‘in your face’. With my writing I want to mix it up a little bit - there are a few styles that we haven’t explored before. It’ll be interesting to see how they evolve by the time we record them. But it is a little bit different to what we’ve done before - for an album we want a progression from what we’ve done before.
I’ve been listening to The Strokes and a bit of hip-hop - but I don’t know how exactly that relates into our songs but the listeners can see what they think.
They're busy on social media too
We’ve always referred to ourselves as the ‘Cubbies’, which started as a joke, but it’s caught on. And there’s a tumblr following that refer to us as ‘Babe Scouts’ which is kind of weird for me! I communicate a lot with the fans through social media and I make sure that I reply to everyone that contacts us so that people know that we do appreciate it. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep doing it. It’s weird for me that there’s a group of people who constantly call us ‘babes’ I think apart from that I can deal with it.
I feel that it’s important to us to portray the personality of the band. Although it is the music that we’re working with it gives people a better view as to where that music is coming from and the people behind it. We’re dedicated to staying on top of it.
Any upcoming shows your fans should know about?
We’re playing a DJ set at Track and Field in April - fans can expect quite a bit of Destiny’s Child and Mariah Carey and they I guess we’ve got to put some other songs in there as well to break it up.
Undecover wondered if they would they play an entire destiny’s child album?
If we could we would!
The EP 'Told You So' was a great succes on US college radio
We sent our EP to all the College Radios and they really got behind it. We were the second most added artists to college radio on the week that it went in - that was pretty amazing.
We’d love, we’ll see how things pan out. It’s definitely something we’re going to try and do before the end of the year.
How was touring with the likes of Ball Park Music?
It was awesome. We’d never toured before and last year we did five national tours. The Ball Park Music tour, which happened this time last year, was huge. We went to Western Australia and Tasmania - lots of places we’d never been before let alone as a band. Ball Park Music have an awesome following who came along to the shows early so we got to play to lots of their fans and I think that really helped us to develop our own following.
On Cub Scouts going overseas this year
We’re all so excited about it we’ve never been overseas as a band before. We all love Europe and the UK so to get the opportunity to play over there is going to be incredible. We’re playing at The Great Escape festival in towards the end of May. But at the start of the month at Liverpool Sound City and a couple shows in between that and the festival. And then we’re doing some shows in Asia on our way home as well. That should be quite an adventure! It’ll be a very busy month.
How did you feel when you won the Queensland Music Awards Song of the Year for their second single “Do You Hear”?
That was a nice surprise! We were up against Kate Miller-Heidke, The Jungle Giants and Busby Marou. When we won the Pop Award that was a huge shock and then we went on to win Song Of The Year! It was pretty crazy!
The track ‘Hands’ from their EP was inspired from an unlikely source - Tim’s day job at an orthodontic practice working in a lab came about from deferring his dentistry studies so he could spend more time with the band.
I wrote ‘Hands’ after I was in an anatomy lab and it was the first time we’d worked with cadavers and there was one girl there who didn’t seem bothered at all with getting right in there! Literally pulling the heart out of a chest - so I wrote the song about that. It’s very literal which I guess people wouldn’t expect!
You can see Cub Scouts on Thursday 28 March at Black Bear Lodge .
