This piece was originally featured in AM02 — Issue Two of Ascribe. Click here to read it alongside the rest of the issue.
What was the decision behind being a cover band?
PEEJ: Well, it just started off as a bit of fun, to be honest. The three of us originally started doing back in about 2014. None of us were in bands at the time. It was just something we started doing for a bit of fun on a Monday night. We would do a track, we’d put it up on YouTube, and about 10 or 12 views, and that’d be about it. It just kinda snowballed then a little bit as time went on, you know?
You guys certainly blew up on Tiktok which seems to be the perfect platform for covers. In fact, your cover of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has 4.2 million views on TikTok. When did you guys realize that there was some sort of potential in that?
During lockdown 2020, I mean obviously a lot of people suffered through that, but it actually did massive help to us. TikTok was just kicking off and obviously everyone was at home. It was a perfect opportunity really to get us in front of people. Let’s be honest, everyone was sat on their phones for a lot of the time, scrolling through TikTok. We had done the cover of “Just Can’t Wait to Be King” from Lion King. We put a cut of that up on TikTok and that video just blew up. It got like a million views in about 48 hours. We thought, “okay, well maybe we’ll do some more Disney.” We run with an idea and then it ended up right, we’ll do a Disney album. We realized that nobody had actually ever done a Disney Goes Punk album. I mean, we ended up doing that remotely, for the most of it because of obviously lockdowns and restrictions. I think because everyone was locked away, there was so many bands that weren’t able to tour or weren’t able to work. Which again, really worked in our favor because that’s pretty much how we managed to land all the guests off that album as well.
How exactly did you manage to get all of those features?
Jared from Bowling for Soup was following us on TikTok. He had just messaged us and said he loved what we were doing and we said “do you fancy jumping in on track with us?” He was all over that. Steve from Belvedere had also been in touch with us because he wanted to do a song with us. Originally he was gonna do some Enrique Iglesias, but yeah. It just kind of snowballed then. Obviously Jared knows everyone. We ended up in touch with a couple of other people through Jared and then they put us in touch with more people and all of a sudden we had pretty much a full album of guests. It was insane.
Spencer from Ice Nine Kills is a notable one.
We actually ended up supporting Ice Nine Kills for a few shows in Germany, just back last summer. They’re amazing. Spencer is such a nice guy. I know obviously Ice Nine Kills is probably a million miles away musically from what we do. But the thought process behind a lot of it is so similar to what we do. I love it. I think you could kind of see the potential in what we were doing.
How do you stay on top of TikTok and its finicky algorithm?
We do try. We don’t always succeed. The algorithm’s so difficult to keep up with on it. We’ll put a video up which can get a million views overnight, and then we can put something up that we think is gonna do just as well, and it’ll get about a thousand views in a week. It changes constantly, trying to keep on top of what people are doing. We analyze everything so much. We’re so analytical with everything we do. Like looking at numbers and even down to things like was it the way we shot the video? Did this one do well because the video was shot in a certain way or is it actually the track or is it the cut? Is it the part of the song we did? We’re constantly testing. So, when you go through, you’ll see that we’ll do a load of videos that are shot in the same format and then all of a sudden we’ve changed them to shoot them in a different format. We’ll do a section of a song and then we’ll do a different section of the same song. We’re constantly testing and constantly seeing what it is that’s working. But I mean, ultimately I think it’s just down to how popular the song is. We still haven’t got to the bottom of it, to be honest.
It seems like you have to jump on a song when it’s popularity is brand new and fresh in people’s minds. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a perfect example.
Yeah. Hundred percent. We did “Surface Pressure” and” Bruno” from Encanto. For “Surface Pressure” we managed to get Jessica Darrow to do a vocal on it for us. She filmed herself singing it and obviously we put that up and it got a bunch of views. That was huge. And then I think we did “Bruno” just after that one, I think. We got those two out right in the midst of the Encanto hype.
What’s a song that you guys feel like you maybe missed it on or were too slow with putting it out?
Oh, it happens all the time. With the new Miley Cyrus song “Flowers”, we tracked the section of that probably about a month or so ago. We’ve been so busy with the run up to tour and everything. We never did a video for it, and it’s kind of started to fizzle out now. We’ve definitely missed the boat on that one.
Speaking on Disney, it’s the perfect niche market to cater towards. It never occurred to me that no one else had done a Disney album like yours before.
I mean, there’s compilation albums and stuff, but there’s never been one band that’s done an entire album. I mean, I know that a band called Our Last Night have kind of jumped on it now, but they’ve done that since we did it. So, at the point that we did it, it wasn’t really done, which is pretty cool.
Most of the songs you cover aren’t really written for rock instrumentals. How do you guys go about putting a cover together?
We’re pretty anal with it. We want it to be as true to the original as possible, but as different to the original as we could possibly make it. For example, in “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana, there’s a woodwind part in the chorus. It was just a little run of it at some point and our guitarist picked that out and he made like an entire riff around that part of the song. There’s only a tiny bit and most people wouldn’t even notice it’s there. Inour version, it’s there and it’s up front and center in the chorus. We’ll try and pick parts out and build on them. We do have to adjust the keys of them most of the time just to be in the right vocal range for me. We try and stay as true, but we also try and make them our own. Do you know what I mean? Like that’s what we do. That’s what we like pride ourselves on a little bit. They’re perfectly recognizable as what they are, but we really do make them our own. We spend a lot of time working on them.
You have an album coming out called It’s Just a Stage We’re Going Through that is all songs from musical theater. Where did you guys even come up with doing that?
We’ve ended up going down the road of sort of themed albums now for a while. We did Disney, we did like TV themes and kids TV themes, 2000s alternatives. Musicals were one that we always wanted to get to eventually. And it’s one that was always suggested to us a lot on socials. It was something we definitely had to do. One of the main things for us is musical theater fans. You know, you’ve got the Disney fans and they are like staunch fans. The only thing that’s kind of close to that I think is musical theater. You’ve got the musical theater fans who love musicals. So if we can drill into that audience that’s a huge amount of people we maybe haven’t reached with Disney that’s gonna open up another huge audience for us potentially.
That’s super interesting. Does that mean you guys put a lot of care into it?
We really do. We really do. This is our passion. This is our full-time job now. We don’t do any other work aside from what we’re doing now. We want this to work and last as well as it possibly can.
What went into deciding each song from each musical?
It’s just us being super, super anal. With the musicals album, we looked at the biggest trend in musicals currently. And then we look at the soundtrack for each one, and we look at which songs from which musical are getting the most streams and the most views and the most plays. Whichever one is getting played the most is the most popular one so we’ll do that one. It’s very analytical. It’’s all a numbers game. If everyone’s listening to “Defying Gravity” over anything else from Wicked, then we do “Defying Gravity”.
Has there been a time where you guys have picked something that wasn’t as popular?
We definitely did some of that with the Disney stuff. We did a bunch of stuff on the Disney Two album that may not necessarily have been the biggest stuff, but it was a bit of a gamble. We did “Nobody Like U” from Turning Red because the movie was just out and we thought that had the potential to go big and to be honest, it didn’t do much on the album in terms of streams compared to the other songs that we’ve got out. It’s fairly low. That was a bit of a gamble just cause we figure we could we potentially catch something viral before it really goes viral? I mean it does, it does happen. We’ve definitely done it with a few. I do think Disney fans just love the Disney stuff regardless.
You picked a very interesting and perfect range of musicals. How did you do it?
I mean, to be honest with you, as a band, none of us are really big musical fans. We don’t really know that many musicals apart from the kind of obvious ones. Some of the ones that we ended up doing was stuff that we had never heard before. Even the musicals themselves. We’d never heard of Dear Evan Hansen. None of us had really watched any of the musicals really, apart from our guitarist whose got a certain love for them. We just really, enjoy ripping a song apart and then making it different. There is just something really satisfying with it. And like, do you know what? I think even more so when you don’t even know the song cause you haven’t caught that kind of emotional attachment to it. If you haven’t got that attachment to it, you can kind of rip it apart and make something new out of it, you know?
“You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton was an interesting choice. What was the decision behind choosing it?
Our drummer listening to some of the Hamilton ones and he just really wanted to go for it because it’s got this Green Day feel to it. If you think of songs like “Longview” and “Minority” by Green Day, they’ve got this rolling beat that’s constantly all the way through. It got almost got like a swing to it and it just fitted so well. Rather than it just being a kind of a flat out sort of pop punk track or a punk rock track, it kind of had this cool kind of swing to it that kind of loaned itself to being quite Green Day-esque. It;s a massive song. We found that quite a lot of people who were Hamiltons fans that it was one of their songs from the musical. We just had to go for that one. It just felt really good. I did quite a lot of vocal work with that one. The original, it’s obviously a vocal melody and there’s very little to it. I think I probably spent a couple of days on vocals just on that one track alone doing kind of multi-part harmonies. Between the four of us, it ended up being a bit of a masterpiece. It’s probably one of our favorites off the album.
Which one is your favorite?
The next single which is coming out now the 28th of February with a new video is “Defying Gravity”. That came out so well. I’m super, super proud of that one. We’ve actually started playing it live now on tour. It’s a banger. It’s such a good track. But surprisingly, the other one for me, which has taken us all by surprise, was one that none of us had ever heard of before. That’s “Waving Through a Window” from Dear Evan Hansen. When I heard the original though, I hated it. I really didn’t like it. As soon as we started building the music 84 up all of a sudden, it just became a different track. And we’ve got Jeff from Simple Plan playing guitar on that one which is pretty cool. So yeah, “Defying Gravity” and “Waving Through a Window” are probably my favorite tracks on the album. “Defying Gravity” was one that would come up on comments time and time and time again for us to do. We knew we had to do that one.
Is there a song that people have begged you guys for and you’ve decided not to do?
I think most of the stuff that people have asked for, we’ve done. Even if we don’t do it as a full track, we’ll do it as a TikTok. Even if we don’t go down the road of doing the whole thing, we’ll definitely do something with it. I would say 99% of what gets requested these days, we’ve either either done or is in the pipeline to be done.
How long does it take you to put together something if you’re only using it for one TikTok?
It doesn’t take that long. We’ve started working remotely a lot at the minute. We would go to the studio, all four of us, every day of the week. We would be in the studio and we’d be working on stuff, but we’ve kind of stepped back a little bit and started working more remotely now. Our drummer will do drum arrangements at home over the original track and then send it over. I’m basically in my living room with a microphone doing vocals over what they’ve done. I’d say within a day or so, we could potentially get like three or four sort of mini tracks done. We’re working really efficiently now.
How do you guys do the video aspect of it, then?
We get together one or two days a week at the studio. We always try and have a day just for live rehearsals. We’ll just spend like half a day we’ll just record in a space of a few hours or whatever. If you look at our TikTok, we’ll put a bunch of videos up and I’m wearing the same t-shirt in about five videos. And then the next five videos, I got a different t-shirt on is ‘cause those five were shot on one day, those five were shot on another day. We love what we do and we’ll never get bored of it. We just have so much fun with it. As much as it’s hard work, we always have that moment where we sit back and we just love it. We could be sat in an office doing a job we hate, you know?
You guys tend to DIY everything. “You’ll Be Back” is the first you use an actual crew. How did that go?
We wanted to step up for this new album. Everything we have done is DIY. We engineer the albums ourselves, our bassist does the final mix and mastering on them. Our drummer’s partner, Becky, she always does all our filming and all our photography, We’re very tight-knit and just a small team. With this album, we felt it had so much potential that we wanted to bring in an outside company to start making our videos. “You’ll Be Back” was the first one where we had a set built and full costumes. For “Defying Gravity” we used the same company called Sitcom Soldiers. That video is class. We’ve got the final edit back of that video now. It’s nothing to do with the musical but it is about defying gravity. It’s been filmed in an upside down house. It’s really cool.
How different was it to work with a team instead of just doing it yourself?
We’re very precious over everything because we’ve always done it ourselves so it’s difficult sometimes to let go of the reins a little bit. Especially when it comes back to the final edits of the videos and stuff. We’re probably their worst nightmare because they’ll send it over to how they want it to be. And then we’ll go “we don’t like that. Can you redo that?” And they get it and obviously we want it to be the way it we want it to be. But it came out amazing. We love it. And the quality the video is just next level now. They look so cinematic and amazing. But yeah, we’ve still gotta have some element of control.
What would you say is the biggest thing that you guys have learned from this process?
Sometimes you’ve just gotta sit on your hands or bite your tongue a little bit. It may not be exactly how we would’ve done it, but we’ve gotta sit there and watch it as a fan would. Rather than sitting there analyzing every little tiny detail of it. Someone who watches the video is just gonna sit back and watch it and listen to the song. Whereas we are sat there sort of analyzing every split second of a video or every edit, but nobody’s gonna really notice. We have to trust the process a little bit.
How do you keep yourself grounded with rapidly growing success and internet trolls?
We’re so humble and we’re so grateful for every view and every comment. We don’t take any of this for granted whatsoever. Some people are gonna like it. Some people are gonna hate it. You’ve gotta take the hate, to be honest with you. We have a good laugh a lot. We’ve got a group chat on WhatsApp and if a hate comment comes in, one of us is gonna screenshot it and put it in the group and then we laugh at ourselves on a daily basis. Some people are gonna hate it. We are playing Disney songs. Like, it’s gonna happen. You’re not going to please everyone. Like I said, we are so grateful for everything that has come our way that you kind of just gotta let the negative stuff pass by. The positive heavily outweighs the negative. It is what it is. You can’t take like some random idiot on his phone seriously. You can’t feed the trolls either. Sometimes, there’ll be a comment and one of us will come up with a brilliant comeback for it but we don’t say anything. There is no point. We just let them go.
You guys are currently on tour. Did you ever think that that was actually gonna happen?
The thought of it being a live band was something that was never, ever considered. We didn’t want to tour, to be honest. You know, when we first started doing this, it was never to play live. After the success of Disney, we were starting to get calls to do it live. Our first ever time we played live as Punk Rock Factory, was actually in front of about 8,0000 to 10,000 people at Bloodstock Festival in the UK. We were like “This is mental. This is ridiculous. We’re gonna get stuff thrown at us. This is gonna be horrific.” And we got onto the stage and we were one from the top on this stage. It was a tent but the tent capacity was 86 6,000 I think. And it was full from the front to the back and it was all spilling outside as well. You’ve got massive metalheads in denim jackets with patches all over them and huge beards. Just big, big Viking guys, singing along to Frozen and Moana songs and stuff. The crowd was going absolutely bonkers. We really ended up with the thirst of playing live off the back of that first show ever. It was unbelievable. That was in 2021 and then the end of 2021, then we did our first ever tour. I think it was about 15 or 17 shows we did over the space of three weeks. It just pumped us up. We loved every single minute of playing into crowds and just everyone loving it. It was so good.
We’re in the middle of the UK tour now. We’ve got another tour we’re going to be announcing soon which is going to be class. We’ve got the tour bug now. We love it. Absolutely love it. We’ve just done the first two shows of this tour. It’s twelve shows and they are all sold out. The venues range from about a 500 capacity up to a 2000 capacity. It’s all headlining stuff.
We do a lot of it ourselves and it’s all done inhouse. We’re very particular. We don’t need a record label as much as we could. We don’t need it. We’re essentially our own label now.
We’re building the business up around the band. Everything is ours and we’re trying to keep it as close to us as we possibly can.
