A Chat with Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine (25.07.24)
With mischievous twinkling eyes, cheeky grins, and a simmering sense of impish “oh hell, what are they up to”, you can’t help but feel an intriguing fondness for quintet Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine. Flooding vintage post-punk with psychedelic swirls, the UK-based group are known for their boundary-breaking push against musical conventionalism. We speak with band members Smudge and Seamus about their EP A Good Way TO Get Yourself Killed, being trustworthy, live shows and much more.
OSR: How did Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine come about? What drew each of you to music and each other?
Smudge: I knew most of the members individually and decided to ask them if they wanted to start working on a project that ended up sounding nothing like what I had in mind and I’m pretty glad it’s taken a natural course to the unknown.
Seamus: Me and Smudge have known each other for 12 years and we went to BIMM in Bristol together so that’s how we first met. We were in separate bands for several years before our bands gradually fell by the wayside and then Smudge called me out of the blue one day and said we should jam sometime. We had said jam and the rest is history.
OSR: You recently released your debut EP A Good Way To Get Yourself Killed. What can you tell us about it? Any backstories or themes?
Smudge: The overall theme of the EP is about living your life in extreme ways, whether that is fighting people through an understanding of mixed martial arts or the love of driving ridiculously growly V8 engine cars at top speed. We all felt these songs reflected A Good Way to Get Yourself Killed.
OSR: This is your first EP, but you’ve released several singles since 2020. What challenges did you face when producing a compilation of songs instead of a single one? Was it more trying, and how did you cope with the stress (if any)?
Seamus: Well it takes more time to organise which means you have to spend more time with one another, which means we spend more time taking the piss out of one another and having a laugh. We’re pretty organised before we go into the studio so we’re fairly relaxed about it.
Smudge: I think we have been incredibly lucky in the making of AGWTGYK, our producer Alfie Tyson-Brown is very good at what he does and has a good working relationship with us. This definitely helped reduce any worries we had about making the EP. The biggest challenge was sitting on them for a while and then later when Cam joined the band he added his parts a few months later to make them sound highly energetic.
OSR: On your Spotify, you mention that you “generate fans through unpredictable live shows”. What is your most memorable gig to date and why that show?
Smudge: If you haven’t been to a live show it’s definitely worth coming down to say hi. We’ve definitely had a few memorable shows but when we played Glastonbury in 2022 I got some used underwear thrown at me and the crowd was electric that day. It’s really difficult to pin down one show even at our EP launch party. It was a pretty wild event and we ended the set with a cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ and most of the crowd moshed to the metal. All I can say is no gig is the same for us and that is something that we are excited by when we go to play in grassroots venues across the country.
Seamus: Yeah agree with Smudge here. Glastonbury was a highlight. Our EP launch the other night in Bristol was also top-notch!
OSR: What do you hope people take from your music?
Smudge: I would love it if a first-time listener or a current fan listens to our songs and reacts in a way akin to ‘Blimey, that’s a bit of fun!’ I don’t know what more anyone can ask for from our audience when listening to our music.
Seamus: If you love it, that’s cool. If you hate it, that’s also cool. Obviously, we like it more if people like our music but we also do get a laugh out of any shade thrown our way.
OSR: What makes Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine unique?
Smudge: We mess about with a lot of different genres from time to time, when writing I definitely try and have something within a song that is obscure whether it’s a tonal bit of instrumentation or structurally a bit weird.
Seamus: Maybe what our songs are about? We have songs about hating seagulls, modes of transport like E-scooters and mixed martial arts being advertised on walls. I guess that’s fairly random/unique innit?
OSR: If you had to recommend a single song to someone who had never heard your music before, which song would you recommend and why?
Smudge: If I was going to recommend one song it would be ‘BJJ MMA TFF.B K1’. This song is a bit mad in lots of different ways. It changes genre enough times that I lose count and then the outro is a bit metal with a synth line underneath that sounds like it should be in a grime track. Nothing is off-limits with us.
OSR: Do you consider yourself a trustworthy person?
Smudge: I’m trustworthy, nothing worse than an untrustworthy person slithering around your hemisphere.
Seamus: You can’t trust me at all. I am a sneaky little man who will steal your chips when you’re not looking.
OSR: What is the strangest food you have eaten?
Smudge: A mate of mine came back from travelling once and got me some of those grasshoppers. They didn’t really taste of anything. You’re only here once so try as much as you can innit.
Seamus: I ate a BBQ’d Scorpion in Ghana once. Was actually pretty tasty.
OSR: What can we expect from Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine in the future?
Smudge: Things to expect from WWRS:-
More shows
More music releases
Physical releases
Pyrotechnics at shows
Music videos
Maximum rock
Maximum roll
Pure banter
Seaumus: Lots more music in the near future! It’s recorded and ready to go so we just need to figure out our schedules so we can make a good release of it.
OSR: Do you have any message for our readers?
Smudge: If you are reading this you are a beautiful human being, you know exactly what is next on your list of things to do. Listen to our music, come to a show. Say Hi and we can become friends and rock together ❤️
Seamus: Be wary of the Gull.
Many thanks to Smudge and Seamus for speaking with us. Find out more about Wakey Wakey Rise & Shine on Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.
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