Bright For Your Right To Party

A very wise man once wrote that a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. Here to argue the opposite are The Sunshine Underground, who confess to being obsessed when it comes to choosing names for their songs.

“We spend crazy amounts of time over them,” begins frontman Craig Wellington, in Dublin at the start of their daunting 39-date tour. “I don’t know if it’s because they’re hard to come up with, or we’re rubbish at it.”
A great deal of thought went into the band’s name as well, he says.
“We eventually got the band name from a Chemical Brothers song,” interjects guitarist Stuart Jones. “It works well because the ‘sunshine’ bit describes that we’re upbeat, then you’ve got the ‘underground’ which is the dark undertones.”
He pauses to let the genius of it all sink in. “You see what we did there?”
Purveyors of hi-hat heavy indie-dance, The Sunshine Underground set out their stall on debut album Raise The Alarms. Since its release, the album has seen them tagged a leading members of the so-called Leeds scene – a subject close to the heart of bassist Daley Smith.
“It’s not like there’s a Leeds movement, which pushes music in one direction. There’s no one sound, like Bristol had trip-hop and Manchester had that baggy pants music.”
Stuart picks up: “Yeah, or the Sheffield sound with bands like Arctic Monkeys and Little Man Tate, and their down-the-chip-shop lyrics. In Leeds, no two bands are the same. On one end of the spectrum you’ve got Duels and on the other you have ¡Forward Russia!. You couldn’t get any more different than that.”
No thoughts on the Kaiser Chiefs?
“The music scene in Leeds is more based around the bands who are there and always playing,” Craig shrugs. So we don’t see the Kaiser Chiefs as part of the Leeds scene; they’re international now."
That’s the direction in which the Sunshine Underground seem to be headed – they recently played the MySpace festival in their capacity as a hotly-tipped band, though their lasting memory of it was the celebrity-filled aftershow.
”I didn’t have a very good night at the party,” shudders Craig. “It was very false. We took advantage of the free bar, and then we went home.”
Stuart grins. “Free bars are great. We went to Juliette Lewis’ party with Humanzi, who are good mates of ours. We drank the bar dry. The only thing they had left at the end of the night was tequila, and when we were drinking tequila and lemonade, we knew it was time to go home!”
“Who was that little one from Humanzi?” asks Craig, somewhat insensitively.
“That was Gary, the bass player,” replies Stuart.
“He can drink.”
What an inopportune time to be whisked to their soundcheck. Oi you – come back and dish the dirt!