Interview with Indie Street Club: ‘I wrote the lyrics to ‘Tomorrow Comes Too Soon’ watching Friends the night before we recorded it!’

Carlisle-based band Indie Street Club released their single ‘Tomorrow Comes Too Soon’ last month, a beautiful and wistful track about on-off relationships, according to their frontman Ryan Davidson.

‘It’s about these relationships where people are together, then they break up, they might even be with other people for a bit, but then they’re back to the person they started with. A lot of relationships are like that, so that sort of thing comes to mind when I write a lot of songs. I find it hard to write about other stuff but it’s something that a lot of people can relate to,’ he said.

The lyrics really bring that home: ‘And I don’t wanna talk about it, I just wanna make this worse, I’m so fed up of this love affair, the rivers you cry ignite me, got this feeling running through my bones, i don’t wanna let go.’

In addition to Davidson, the band comprises Alex de Freitas (guitar), Connor McDermott (drums) and Daniel Kelton (bass).

The song itself was something of a lucky accident. ‘We were supposed to be doing Kendall Calling but that got cancelled,’ Davidson said. ‘We were going to record another track but the week before we were supposed to go to the studio, I came up with the melody for ‘Tomorrow Comes Too Soon’. I wrote the words the night before we recorded it when I was watching Friends!’

Indie Street Club is hoping to release the song that they switched out, with a provisional working title of ‘Runaway’ later this year, according to Davidson, who said it’s essentially a song about getting away from your problems. ‘It start off with just guitars and vocals but the more the song goes on, the bigger it gets!,’ he laughed.

He acknowledges that songwriting on lockdown has been hard. ‘I was off work for six weeks. Sometimes I’d sit in the garden with a guitar and try and force myself to write something. It’s strange, though, when you’re trying to force stuff to come. It’s hard when you write a song, the way that you find out if it’s good is to play it live, but we can’t do that now.’

As an unsigned band, they also have to tread a fine line between putting enough tracks out to keep fans interested but not so many that they have a big back catalogue before they’re signed. ‘There’s not a big music scene in Carlisle, not compared to somewhere like Manchester,’ he said.

Davidson is a huge fan of bands such as Stereophonics, Oasis, The Stone Roses, The Libertines and Richard Ashcroft. If they could collaborate with anyone, Connor goes for Liam Gallagher. Davidson, for his part, picks John Lennon and Noel Gallagher. ‘The Beatles were years and years ahead of their time,’ he said. ‘You can still hear The Beatles in so many bands today. I’d pick Noel over Liam because now they’ve split up, you can see what they’re like on their own and for me, Noel’s a better songwriter.’

However, he only has good things to say about Liam Gallagher. ‘I was going to one of their gigs with my dad and we saw the others in the band but when Liam arrived, my dad’s camera wouldn’t work…Liam came back afterwards, put his arm around me and said: ‘Shall we take a picture then?’ He didn’t have to do that.’

(Photo left to right: Alex, Connor, Ryan and Daniel)