I'm going to be honest. Spilt is a group that ended up being some of my favourite people I've met through this job. Funny, bubbly, friendly, the list just goes on. They didn't even complain when I made them trek all the way to a Starbucks, or laugh when I told them I'm a gold member there. It's safe to say they made an impression on me, at the very least, as did their music. Below is the chat we had (please read all non-bold bits in strong Scouse accents - it makes it more fun, and accurate).
ME: Where did the name SPILT come from?
SPILT: There was a band in the seventies called Split Lip but everybody had already been called that. My dad texted me and misspelled it as Spilt Lip and I thought, I'll have that, but the thing we don't like now is that everyone gets it the other way around and calls us SPLIT.
M: The vibe I was getting from the covers to your songs and photoshoots you guys have done is kind of typical sex, drugs, rock and roll, but in a good way. Was that done on purpose?
S: I think that's just what we do, our mate who does our photos likes us for that reason, it's not intentional but we just take drugs anyway and its fun to get naked together and take photos.
I think it works with the music, the musics a bit sexy and dark as well. So when we do the shoots we try to portray the creepiness but in a romanticized way.
M: There's a kind of difference between the vibes of your photos to the actual music, I can hear hints of seventies inspirations for example, do you pull from that era?
S: I was raised on soul and Motown, Pink Floyd and the Stones and all that and these lot are into grunge stuff and Nirvana and Nirvana was the only band when we were young young that we liked. The way I see it is you've got these guidelines in music, if I listen to one thing all the time, the riffs and all that are going to be rip offs of what's been done before. We wanna mix things together like potions, like sixties and seventies.
M: Although you're still kind of fresh to the scene you're already headline touring and have done a lot of performing before. How's it going so far?
S: When we were younger we were on a little rise and then covid happened. I was gunna leave the band but then we ended up getting this sexy bastard. We've gotten rid of all management in that time and we know we can do this. ourselves it's been going better since we've been doing that, more control.
With managers they get in their heads about what they want us to do.
There's no-one telling us how to do what we want to do.
And I don't like being told what to do.
We then went to talk about how they went social media free at first but realized it didn't do them any good. It lead to a discussion about TikTok music, how they find social media now, and the platforms they lead.
M: Acid Baby has over a million streams. Was there a point where you were like oh this is doing really well?
S: It was actually overnight with Acid Baby. It had been out for a year or two then one of our mates put it on Reddit and that was it, overnight it had just gained lots of traction. I think it makes us look bigger than we are.
Most of the streams are from America, but we're touring here, so we look like we have all these streams when it's only twenty percent from here. We nearly performed there but it was still COVID times.
M: So how did you all meet?
S: We kind of met in college (points to Mo).
We met him through people we knew at college (points to Ben, we dubbed the 'father' of the group, Mo being the child of the group). It was like a mutual band scene and he was a friend of a friend. But it was weird with Ben because it was like he was always there, like we always knew of him and he was around.
As soon as we needed a base player we knew to ask him.
They always said if anything happens we'll reach out. As soon as they rang me up I knew there was only one reason. I knew all the songs even if they. were unreleased cause I'd been around so that made it easier.
M: A year or two from now, where would you like the band to be?
S: To just be completely self sustainable, to be able to do what we're doing to just continue what we're doing and it actually work.
Not necessarily making it big but just getting all these albums out, I don't even know what I'd do if we don't get these albums out.
We have to get the albums out.
I don't wanna be thirty five singing about coke and banging girls, you know what I mean? We want to music to develop to speak to itself.
M: Can we look forward to any releases soon?
S: Yeah.
We've got a lot.
We've got like this electronic tune coming up, it's one of the weirdest things we've made, this one sounds evil. Within the summer, and we're excited cause its been fucking ages.
M: Did you know growing up you wanted to pursue music?
S: I didn't wanna be a musician really. I wanted to be a cartoonist. My dad thought it was a bit wet so he handed me a guitar. I was like alright, I've gotta do this now, At first it felt like he was living through me but then I was like wait no I'm actually good at this.
I started playing guitar when I was eight, I played bass in a band, there are pictures of me looking at this band in awe and I asked to be in it and they said no. But I was hellbent on being a musician. It's like an obsession, it's not a choice.
Me and Ben have the same influence, my mum knew the drummer of a band so I got into drums through being around that.
M: I like to end on a fun one - hypothetically if you could curate an audience to perform for who would be in that audience, dead, alive, famous, not famous?
S: Vikings
Dave Grohl because I'm obsessed with him.
Skid Row.
That Russian audience Metallica played to. I reckon I'd have my mum there.
M: So we've got mums, vikings, Dave Grohl and the whole of Skid Row and the Russian Metallica audience. Amazing.
