Ghouls of hard knocks

If there’s a place in everyone’s heart for the accolade ‘The Best Band You’ve Never Heard Of’, then Ghosts are making a beeline for it.
Anyone with the slightest affection for classic guitar pop will find the London-based four-piece and their supremely catchy efforts endearing. Lush melodies, soaring choruses and an innate understanding of pop dynamics suggests that the band’s debut album, due in spring, is one to look forward to.
The only question, then, is why a band that formed in Surrey around 10 years ago took so long to deliver? Frontman Si Pettigrew admits that signing to Atlantic Records last year came as something of a shock to them.
“We were sort of signed out of the blue," he says. "We had a number of close calls before which we’d gotten worked up over, but we’d forgotten about all that and were just concentrating on making music. Then we got this publishing deal which allowed us to quit our jobs for a while, so we headed off to Sweden for a couple of months and worked really hard on a set of songs.”
The circuitous route Ghosts took to their not-so-overnight success is perhaps explained by the various different musical avenues the band have explored during their 10-year career.
“We played all sorts of styles down through the years, from big beat DJ Shadow type stuff to icy electronica soundscapes,” explains Si. “We ran the whole gamut, but finally we ended up sounding like ourselves and less like other people. We realised we wanted to ditch the eight-minute epics, and instead write pop songs. It’s like we’ve gone through our experimental stage as a band already and emerged sounding like we do.”
The benefits of this long period of gestation can be heard in the music – songs like ‘Stay The Night’ and ‘Musical Chairs’ offer up a smart hybrid of everything spanning Elton John’s old sunshine melodies, to Guillemots’ new jazzy pop leanings. There's something reassuring about hearing a band with such an unerring confidence in their sound. Si acknowledges that the band’s early failings were all part of this ripening process.
“We all thought we’d get picked up ages ago. When you’re 20, 21, you just think it’s going to happen any minute. But the truth is we weren’t good enough. Luckily we stuck at it and now we’re really grateful to be in the position of putting our record out.”
10 years together as a band has not only given Ghosts' music a maturity, but also helped nurture a close bond between the four members. They are comfortable in their own skin, and unlikely to implode under the strain of new found success.
“We’ve been together for so long now that we’ve had the fights and the arguments, we’ve had the disastrous tours and the fallouts. We know each other inside and out. Plus we have friends in bands that’ve done the whole thing before, so we’re familiar with the workings of the industry and not really overawed by the whole thing”
There's a similar mature approach to the band’s musical appreciation. Si professes a love for all things pop, and is reassuringly not hamstrung by what is deigned ‘cool’ by the self-anointed tastemakers.
“We listen to everyone from old Fleetwood Mac to Girls Aloud. There's a period you go through when you think these things are not cool to like, and in my formative years I stuck to Nirvana and rejected the ‘pop’ stuff. It was almost overnight that I realised how amazing a lot of my Dad’s old records like Elton John and Talk Talk were. It was the music I remember hearing in the back of the car, which suddenly came flooding back.”
See www.ghostsmusic.com for details of upcoming releases