大象传媒

Photo: Gilly Maddison

Tired of hearing the same old cover versions during nights out in their home town, five friends in Ipswich decided to form The Novasouls.

Their initial sets may have been built using other people's songs, but they took pleasure in updating the source material by a good 20 years.

"In the pubs we used to go into in the centre of town there were a lot of cover bands, playing songs we didn't really care about," bassist and songwriter Chris Waters says.

"They'd be doing the classic cover sets - with every song you could imagine from a disco. We wanted to play songs we'd listen to at home and, being the age we are and having grown up in the Oasis era, it meant them, The Libertines, The Strokes...any band beginning with The.

"We used to fill a lot of venues, just because no-one else was playing the kind of songs we were. This success was off the back of covers though so we weren't disillusioned by it - it was just good fun. A party atmosphere rather than anything else."

Buoyed by the strong response, the band took the step of introducing their own songs into the sets and eventually phased out the covers.

"We started with one song amongst 20 odd covers, and then five, then it progressed to 10. A couple of years went by and we then thought 'this isn't much fun anymore', as the real fun came from playing and recording our own stuff.

"It stopped being about packing a venue out and more about enjoying it. We thought our songs were good enough anyway."

For lyrical inspiration The Novasouls looked no further than their own lives, which at the time consisted of counting down the hours of the working week before embarking on two days of debauchery.

"You write about what you know. I don't know an awful lot about abstract art, so I'm not going to write about abstract art.

Chris and Danny Woolard

"I do know a fair bit about going down the pub though and the things that can happen.

"It's not meant to pretentious or art school, it's just that's what we used to do every weekend."

Debut album Pipe Dreams and Bravado was released in the summer of 2007 and drew comparisons to The Pigeon Detectives, Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines. The beautifully shot cover of the Orwell Bridge reaffirmed that this was an album honing in on the intricacies of life in Ipswich.

A year later and the band have turned their back on retailers iTunes and co and opted to make their new songs available to download for free.

The first fruit of this labour sees The Novasouls leave the pub for the sanctuary of an old corner shop.

"We took on board a lot of the comments about Pipe Dreams and Bravado. Some people said it was perhaps too visceral, it was too much of the moment and perhaps there's more to life than going out and drinking - and yes there is.

"Frank's Shop was written about a shop I used to work in. The shop's still technically there but it's different. It was bought out and is now part of a big chain.

"The lyric "now all these streets look the same as every other" was kind of stolen from Bill Bryson, who said when he grew up the shops were owned by characters who were part of the shop.

"The streets were full of these different stores with different characters and different personalities. Now everything's a chain so every high street looks the same as another.

"I hate to say it but perhaps the newer stuff is more mature, as all second albums are. We just wanted to write about something different."