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ChartBlog: Hello Roy, how're you doing?
Roy: Hello Fraser! Yeah, very good thanks.

ChartBlog: How's the Scouting For Girls plan for world dominaton coming along?
Roy: [spluttering] It's...it's...it's going pretty well at the moment. Y'know, the quest for Easter No.1!

ChartBlog: That's a big one!
Roy: Untapped market, that.

ChartBlog: Set the trend! And then next year there'll be Facebook campaign to keep the hallowed Easter No.1 free of your pernicious influence.
Roy: Well there's a Facebook thing at the moment asking us to get the Easter No.1.

ChartBlog: Really?
Roy: Yeah. 74 members. It's gonna happen.

ChartBlog: Nearly there!
Roy: I think it's our drummer who started the Facebook group. He's definitely joined it.

ChartBlog: Well you'd have to endorse the campaign. Even Rage Against The Machine's heads were turned by the Christmas No.1 thing.
Roy: Yeah I know! "We'll do a free gig!" They're regretting that now, aren't they...

ChartBlog: So, I've been reading your press-release, and it says you scrapped an album because of the Brit Awards? What happened? Was someone mean about 'Elvis Ain't Dead'?
Roy: [laughs] The MD of our record label said he didn't want to hear any of the demos until the Brit Awards. So we did a load of demos, and put them all together. Then on the day of the Brit Awards we gave him the CD. Had the party, great fun...messy, very messy, and I expected a call the next day to say "boys, you've cracked it. This is great."

And that call didn't come through the next day, and then no-one called the day after that...Thursday no-one there, Friday we got the call saying "y'know I just don't think there are any singles on these demos", and we were like "WHAT?" - there were 20-odd songs on there.

So we were partly going "no, this is amazing, we think this really good", and the other half of us were going "let's re-evaluate and see what we really like about these songs. And let's go and write some better ones." So we hammered out a load. We just tried to write the perfect pop single. It actually later turned out that the reason he said that is that we couldn't get into the studio at that time and he wanted to see what else we could come up with.

ChartBlog: [deep intake of breath] The cheeky monkey!
Roy: And the first song on that CD of demos - which didn't have any singles - was 'This Ain't A Love Song'. But what we got out of it was we did re-write a load of songs. We ditched some of what some people would call more urban tracks, and we tried to come up with an album which is literally ten singles, which is really what people want these days. In a time when everyone just downloads singles, there's no point buying an album unless every song is brilliant.

ChartBlog: Justin Bieber's album has 18 tracks on it. EIGHTEEN!
Roy: That's all to do with money.

ChartBlog: It's a different approach to yours, shall we say. I think the idea is; the more things there are with Justin Bieber's name on, the more people will buy.
Roy: We tried to...the quality control was pretty high. I think sometimes with second albums, if you have a very successful first album, people start becoming yes-men to you. You hand in your demos and everyone goes "aw, that's GREAT! It must be great cos the last album did really well." We don't have any of those yes-men. We're surrounded by no-men, and let's-think-about-this-men, and are-you-sure?-men.

But because we were friends before we were together in a band, nobody's afraid to say anything. We trust the opinions of everyone who works with us, so we were really happy and prepared to work really hard for this album.

ChartBlog: It doesn't strike me, particularly after reading a few things on the internet, that Scouting For Girls are a particularly fawned-over band...
Roy: [laughs] Well exactly! I think that's why people can get away with telling us...y'know... We really are a bit of a Marmite band. We have people who absolutely love us, and we have people who are not so keen. And it really spurred us on, cos we really believe in our music, and we believe in what we do.

What I really love with 'This Ain't A Love Song' is when people have said "do you know what, it's a bit of a guilty pleasure but I really like that Scouting For Girls song" or "I hate Scouting For Girls but that new song of theirs is really amazing".

THE END

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