thistle. on the intricacies of juggling life and music
The Northampton trio have just signed to REX Records and are on tour with Glasgow’s Humour.
Photo: Lisa Ooijevaar
If you’re based in Northampton or thereabouts, the name ‘thistle.’ might have passed you by. The trio – Cameron Godfrey, Judwyn Rushton and Lewis O’Grady – have been quietly carving out a corner in the Northampton scene before uprooting their lives and moving their sound up North, to join the ever-growing scene in Manchester.
Debut EP, it’s nice to see you, stranger, marked their arrival, cementing them as one of the most exciting things to come out of Northampton since Sansa Stark, and the recent news of their signing to REX Records only further proves they’re about to become one of Britain’s most exciting young bands.
After our first interview didn’t record, the band kindly invited me to drummer Lewis’ parents’ home, where his sweet dog greeted me and his girlfriend, Cat, provided a friendly face to make me feel at ease. Cat proved integral to the interview – she, of all people, has had a front-row seat to the band for years now, and often captures them on film in a candid way only someone close to them could. When I ask about her favourite song, she smiles as she doesn’t choose a song – she can’t – but much rather reminisces about how nice it was to see Cameron’s brother crowdsurfing at a thistle. show, and how far they’ve come as a band.
If it shows anything, it’s that these are three friends who are as normal as you can get. Looking past the fact that I’m here to interview them and treating me like a friend instead, Judwyn picked me up from my parents’ home on his way from work (I’ll learn to drive at some point), and we discovered that we went to the same secondary school. Granted, this will most likely be the last time I interview anyone who has been to the same school as me, so I find it interesting that someone who practised in the same music rooms that I did found themselves in a good band.
When I sit down in Lewis’s back garden, it’s clear to me that these three love music, and they just want to play it. It’s really that simple. I could try and fancify it and use long words that you’d have to Google the meaning of, but we’re dealing with a band that are going to go far, simply because they are the two most important things: great musicians and kind people.
First of all – and most importantly – how did you meet?
Cameron: Me and Lewis met in school in year eight in music rooms. Years and years later, we started a band and we ended up playing at Silverstone. Judwyn happened to be playing the same show, on the Monster Energy stage. I remember drinking like five Monsters before going on stage and being really, really jittery, then Judwyn came up to us after the show and we traded Instagrams. We kicked our bassist out and then he joined the band… and then we started a new one because we didn’t like that one. That was years and years ago now.
Were you writing new music?
Judwyn: We were writing new music.
C: We were writing new music. It was sick. It was a punk band. We didn’t feel we were very angry anymore.
J: I’m so much more angry now.
Did you have the idea of making this EP before you started making it?
C: Yes. After we released the double single before bitebitebite and hesitate, we took ages to record the next project, which we wanted to be more of a conglomerate. Cohesive…? Yeah, a cohesive piece of something you can dig your teeth into. We’d only released double singles and triple singles before that. We took like a year to record it.
There were loads of things in the way, like with all of us working and family stuff and relationship stuff, and we were all recording it ourselves and working full time, so it was just finding the times to record each little bit and then messing up the recording on that little bit, and so having to rerecord it. Then you guys mixed it – it was all a kerfuffle.
J: Songs getting scrapped. There was a last-minute addition. The first single was super last-minute.
C: Oh, my God, yeah, that was the last one we recorded, and you were just like, ‘Oh, here, let’s just add it’.
J: The first song that was actually written for it, we wrote in December 2023, and then we started releasing, when? At the end of last year?
C: No, it was this year. It has all been really fast.
J: So long.
C: It feels like it’s been an eternity, but it’s been really helpful having the team behind us, with Ben and our lovely manager Tom, who hopped on just before we were planning – we were planning on releasing the EP quite soon, and then we got contacted by them and they were just like, ‘no, no, no, don’t release singles yet. You should finish the whole thing first’.
J: Yeah, you should do all of the work first. You should have cover art.
C: We were just like, ‘yeah, we’re going to release it in four weeks’. At least the first single in four weeks, because we had one of the singles mixed, which is a terrible idea. Thank God we didn’t do that, but yeah, they’re the best.
You just want to get it out sometimes instead of waiting. Where did the cover art inspiration come from? Who made it?
J: I made that one. How it looks and how it was planned to look are two different things, but I’m so happy with how it looks. It ended up being very different from the initial idea. I was trying to do something sort of filmic and nostalgic and sweet, and it ended up feeling a lot more striking and Lynchian. We went out with this curtain.
Lewis: We had two curtains.
C: We were going to do a photo shoot at first, for promo.
L: Yeah, we did that on our own. We set the camera up, set the timer to ten seconds, and then just ran over.
J: Yeah, we were trying to shoot ourselves. Took some press pics – that didn’t work. We were just out in some fields around the back of the house. There was a nice breeze, and it managed to fly really high, so I could shoot it without getting any of the surrounding stuff in. It just ended up being striking and nice, and it feels very reminiscent of the albums I was listening to in the 2010s, like Title Fight and Citizen and all that – Basement, that kind of stuff. Not that the music sounds like that, but I think there’s maybe a through line to this, and it’s nice that it’s not a super trendy looking thing. We put the curtain thing up behind us when we played our release show.
C: It’d be nice to do that at most headlines.
L: We should have done that in London.
J: Yeah, it would’ve been cool. No, but windows. We would have blocked the windows.
C: We would have blocked the windows. That was a really cool setup. Weird venue, but cool. Very little space. I can’t imagine how a band bigger than a three-piece could do that.
What has the evolution of your sound been like?
C: Our first single, which we don’t play anymore, tiletalk – we play it every now and then – it was like the transition to thistle. because, when we first released it, we were like, ‘Oh, if we release something that sounds a little bit like the old stuff with the old band, maybe fans from that band will get into this’. We go to play it just to practice it now to see if we’re going to play it at a gig. We’re just like, ‘I don’t understand how we wrote this’. I can’t play it. None of us can play it anymore, or not to how it was. I’m always like, ‘I wrote this?’. I would never write anything like this anymore.
J: I mean, in that period, there are a lot of songs that we wrote when we first started that we scrapped, like the vast majority. It was like two years of scrapping songs. Nothing that we wrote prior to the EP we’ve held on to. Except, you know, bitebitebite and close to my chest.
C: Even now, we write songs that just get scrapped. I would say 80 percent, 85 percent of the songs get scrapped. We tend to write a song every rehearsal. Not as of recently, but we do bits and bobs.
What’s your writing process like in that sense?
L: We stand.
C: Yeah, we stand in a room, and we get in the zone, man. One of us brings an idea, like a slight idea, and then, yeah, magic happens.
Who writes the most lyrics out of you three?
C: For the songs you sing, you’d write the lyrics and the songs I sing, whatever.
J: Some of the songs we’ve done more collaboratively. Yeah, like fleur rouge.
C: We wrote that together, and a new song that’s secret that we’ve written together.
J: Yeah, usually when it comes to the recording process, there will be small changes where it’s not like we’re necessarily writing it together. It would be like Cameron wrote it, and then there’ll be some editing so that it flows better or it comes across in a better way.
Have you written a song, Lewis?
L: Nope.
Would you ever write one?
L: Nope. No, I have, I’ve written bits.
C: You always help structure songs.
L: I’ve not really got into the flow of writing songs.
C: You’re always good at like telling me if there’s a chord change that you want happening. You go like ‘do it’.
L: To write a good song, I need to write at least 50 bad ones. I just need to do that. I haven’t done that. At some point, I shall write a good song.
J: He really struggles to write bad songs.
C: It annoys me because he’ll write a song and we’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, can we use that?’ and he’s just like, ‘No, I think it’s bad’.
Are you producing the songs yourself?
L: Yeah, me and Jud do it together, pretty much split. I mean, I’ll deal most with drums and guitar bits, and you do guitar bits and vocals.
J: Yeah, and additional production stuff. There’s like – hopefully you don’t hear it and it blends in pretty well – but there’s like quite a lot of synth stuff, actually… And just weird sound effects and shit.
C: I sit on the sidelines and tell them, ‘Hey, I want it to sound more splunky’. Then they’re like ‘uh, okay, Cameron’... and then do that.
J: It never ends up more splunky. We don’t know how.
L: We’ll become better producers.
C: I’ll have the odd comment, but I trust them.
J: You know how you want your vocals to sound all the time.
How do you feel the Tragic fans have taken to the new music?
C: I’m not sure, to be honest.
What about audience-wise, is it still similar people in the crowds?
J: I think so.
C: Yeah, less violent. Less moshing...
Did you get a lot of mosh pits?
C: For Northampton, there’s always a mosh pit, and at London shows, it’s just hard to get a mosh pit anyway, for anyone.
J: I do think that the music is maybe too dynamic because it will go from being really heavy, and then we’ll just start whispering down the mic. You might feel a bit stupid if you’re two-stepping and then suddenly it’s like a slip cord.
C: Someone was two-stepping to cobble/mud, but the mud part. The slow part. I was like, ‘What are you doing, man?’
What’s your favourite song on the EP to perform?
J: It is fleur rouge, for sure. The bass on that is really fun to play. It’s very melodic, and we get to move around. I get excited every time because we play it a little bit faster than the recording.
C: I always notice you start jumping around a little more when that song starts.
J: There’s something about it. Yeah, I don’t know. It moves me.
C: I like going straight into it’s nice to see you, stranger from that song. I always enjoyed that transition.
L: A lot of times where, because you go really hard at the end of the previous song, the strings are out of tune, and you start playing the next bit, and then you have to figure out when to tune them because there’s no stop.
C: I have to just stop playing guitar and let the bass carry it for a little bit late in the verse or something.
What’s your favourite gig you’ve been to?
C: Ovlov. I went with a load of friends from work, and we got really drunk on the train over there.
J: DIIV.
C: Is that the one we saw together?
J: Yeah. I didn’t get into them when I first heard them because I thought they were an instrumental band. I heard Doused, and I was like, ‘Oh, well, why am I going to listen to this?’. That’s what I thought for a really long time. I thought they were instrumental.
So, with the EP, did you have a live setting in mind when you wrote them?
J: We were jamming; it was always going to translate well, as that’s the way we wrote it.
C: A lot of the songs we played live before ever recording them. It’s always been in mind.
What obstacles did you face with the creation of the EP?
Ju: There are some songs that we had to, you know, rerecord a few times. There were some technical issues. There was plenty of personal stuff that was hard to get through around the time of recording it, like loss and whatever. All in all, given the circumstances that we found ourselves in, we managed to get on okay, but the next thing we do, we hope to be able to focus solely on it. Yeah, we don’t really want to go through the experience of making this EP again for the next thing that we do. It was a one-off thing; it was pretty draining.
I was going to say, do you have anything planned next?
C: The next project — that’s going to be this EP — would definitely be done within a certain amount of time rather than spaced over a year. If we’re going to do something like that – well, when we do something like that again, it would definitely be over the course of a week or two.
If you’re all moving in together, it’s easier that way too. You don’t have to worry about schedules as much.
C: Kind of. I mean, with work and stuff, we still need to work around it. Hopefully, some big old label comes along and gives us loads of money, and then we can do it all the time. That would be awesome. We’ll have endless music to release daily.
J: Yeah, daily stream.
What about a debut album? Have you thought that far ahead?
C: We’ve thought about it a lot, actually. We have plans for it. Well, not plans until later next year, going into 2027, probably. That’s like the estimate.
J: Not before 2027. First quarter of 2027. We’ll speak to the shareholders, and we’ll see what we can do. We shall see. There’s a lot of stuff. We’re writing. We’ve been writing a lot. For an EP, you want every song to be able to do pretty well individually. It’s almost like writing a bunch of singles for an album. It’d be interesting to do something a little bit more.
C: Get a bit more experimental with it.
J: But it’s not really a rush. We’re not rushing to do it. If we were to try and smash out an album, it would be a long EP. I don’t think it would be as meaningful as if we actually took the time to craft it.
C: It was on the cards to try do an album soon but then we decided it’s probably best if we wait a little longer until we have the time to sit in a room and focus on it for a month or a couple weeks and write it all at once, rather than what we have been doing with the EPs as a bunch of singles.
Especially with relocating to Manchester, I feel like you’ll want to play some shows there first.
C: We have quite a few friends in Manchester already. We’ve been very lucky to meet a lot of the bands up there. It would be nice to be able to play with them a lot more.
You mentioned somebody you knew in Manchester… Westside Cowboy?
C: So good. Oh, my god. I’ve been listening to that nonstop. Don’t tell them, though. I don’t want them to know I’m a fan.
Is there any other genre that you’d want to explore? You both have solo projects, too – Lewis, do you have a solo project?
L: Nope.
J: Secret solo stuff.
L: Secret solo stuff.
Any future plans to release anything solo?
L: No, not really.
C: He’s going to show us all up.
J: It’s pretty messed up. He’s shown us some stuff over the past couple [of] years.
What genre does your solo stuff fit into? Is it whatever you want to do?
J: Yeah, pretty much. There’s no real structure or plan for it. I have a bunch of demos that I wrote like a year ago, and I thought, ‘I don’t want these to just rot forever’. I’ve started to release some of those, and they’re good. There’s synths, there’s distorted guitar, and there’s Auto-Tune, and I like that a lot. I love Auto-Tune.
How about you, Cameron?
C: It started off as a fun project. It got serious for a little bit, and then I didn’t like it being serious, so I stopped being serious about it. So now it’s just something I do every now and then.
What genre would you say it is?
C: Oh, it’s a little bit of indie surf rock, mixed with bedroom lo-fi stuff. Every now and then, I do something else with it and add some random sounds.
J: We’ve got some secret songs.
Cameron: We’ve got some secret songs together.
Who have you been listening to?
J: I’ve been listening to a lot of Pavement recently.
L: You had the Police phase.
J: Yeah, I had a Police phase very recently. I said to Lewis, ‘You have got to play more drum fills’.
C: A lot of things recently. I’ve been listening to a lot of Frost Children. A lot of Pavement as well. Judwyn has inspired me to listen to them. A lot of bands from Philadelphia at the minute that are doing very awesome things, and Australian bands. Ty Segall, I’ve had a little revival recently.
L: Have you heard his new album? I think it’s very acoustic.
C: He has been going through an acoustic thing recently.
L: I’ve been listening to the Finn Wolfhard album.
Have you listened to Djo?
L: Djo’s pretty good as well.
C: I’ve been listening to a lot of 22° Halo. I’ve listened to their most recent album, Lily of the Valley, like twice a day for the past two months, honestly. It’s like one of the best albums I’ve ever heard in my entire life. So good. I love that album so much.
If you could soundtrack one movie, what would it be? Is it still The Incredibles?
L: I watched two gangster movies last night, so it might be one of them.
J: It’s such a hard question.
C: Some obscure French film?
J: Yeah, no… I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I think it would be really good to do a teenage coming of age. I think we could write a really yearning and hopeful song.
C: Something like Juno.
Are you writing the movie too?
J: Yeah, we’ll star in it. We’ll do all of it. I think we could soundtrack that.
C: I watched Juno recently. That was so good.
J: We’ll bust out the nylon string acoustic guitar and just play it really hard.
C: Bring out our inner Michael Cera.
L: I can’t think of a funny answer. I’d probably say Juno, too. Actually, no, I’m going back to my original answer – The Incredibles.
C: Batman?
L: The Lego Batman Movie. We should soundtrack that.
tied is out now via REX Records. Buy thistle.’s debut EP on vinyl via Bandcamp here.
