Interview with Paper Boats: ‘What sets us apart is that each of us can play a couple of different instruments, it gives us more freedom’

Newcastle rock band Paper Boats have released their anthemic new single ‘Rendezvous’ with several new singles in the works.

The band comprises Charlie McLelland (vocals), Dexter Fischer (guitar), Jack Scorer (keys), Ben Mitchell (drums) and Nathan Payne (bass). Their name is a reference to the scene in ‘It’ by Stephen King, where Georgie and his brother make paper boats on that fateful day. ‘Me and Dexter had a mutual love of writing music,’ McLelland said. ‘I’ve known Jack for about 10 years.’

Earlier this month, they released their brilliantly infectious single ‘Rendezvous’, which blasts off with layers of jangly synths and guitars before McLelland comes in on vocals. Its melodic, progression-based structure and shimmering guitars with heavy reverb and chorus effects pull it along, as does its rhythmic bass line supported by a punching drum beat and McLelland’s warm, powerful vocals. It’s one of those tracks that builds and builds, with Mitchell upping the ante just under a minute in with drumming that becomes increasingly frenetic. It would be a perfect festival song.

‘It’s energetic, fast-paced indie rock,’ Fischer said. ‘I was watching football, I had my guitar in my hand (laughs) and it just came to me. I don’t think we’ve ever written a song that wasn’t by accident! That riff you hear at the start (C,F,G,F,G,F,C,F x 4), it repeats in the song. We played it in HMV yesterday, it went down all right!’ McLelland agrees: ‘The lyrics, they jump out to me, they’re very tight. The amount of times we’ve played anyone stuff and people try to jump around to it, that’s brilliant.’

‘I wrote it about Whitley Bay on the east coast of Newcastle’

‘Rendezvous’ turns out to have been inspired by a particular place: ‘I wrote it about Whitley Bay on the east coast of Newcastle,’ Fischer said. ‘There’s a cafe there called ‘Rendezvous’, it’s the place on the artwork. The song actually mentions two adjacent coffee shops. There’s one called ‘The Links’ right next to the ‘Rendezvous’. ‘The Links’ is the one with the pictures of the town inside, hence the line in the song “Pictures of our town in a coffee shop next to the ‘Rendezvous'”. The song’s about social media addiction. ‘Rendezvous’ is a metaphor for that, for the way that social media and companies manipulate people. I’d look at my mates’ screen time and it’s eight hours a day. You’re at the pub but everyone is on their phones.’ McLelland agrees: ‘There’s a line in it about the “toxins in your mind”, that’s what it means. Fischer weighs back in: ‘You can’t eliminate social media but you need to limit it. At the same time, as a band, that’s how you promote yourself, you can’t escape it.’

Sonic surprises are a constant presence in their songs and ‘Rendezvous’ features an unexpected dip just after two minutes in that they build up from to a gloriously rowdy outro before pulling back to just McLelland’s vocals and faint guitars right at the end: ‘We always have a break and build it back up,’ Fischer said. ‘We like a surprise in there, we already have the idea for that from the start.’

McLelland and Fischer are the main songwriters in the band but everyone pitches in: ‘We all put something down. They’re half written by me and half by Charlie but everyone adds their stuff.’ Interestingly, their songwriting has evolved a lot in the past couple of years, moving from formerly acoustic tracks to the more layered, rocky tracks we know today: ‘We’d had a couple of fast songs before ‘Rendezvous’ but we didn’t think we had enough in our set, that’s why we thought ‘Rendezvous’ was the perfect song for the time,’ Fischer said. ‘What we’ve always strived for is to have a good mix of tempos and styles.’ I say that it doesn’t come much faster than Mitchell’s drumming in ‘Rendezvous’ and they agree: ‘It’s about 165 beats per minute!,’ Fischer said. ‘He’s massive into Foo Fighters.’

‘The whole song is about sacrifice and what we all went through in the pandemic’

‘Martyr’ (2022) also opens with a jangly intro that has a slight 90’s vibe, really kicking off around one minute 20 into the song, with lyrics that are both poetic and reflective. It highlights different kinds of sacrifice, according to McLelland: ‘The whole song is about sacrifice and what we all went through in the pandemic,’ he said. ‘The time, rights and freedoms that we had to sacrifice. It talks about how stuff was changing. I wrote it just coming out of the pandemic. There’s the line “Do you feel the tide turning?” The whole song is a long metaphor. I personally felt that I struggled, there was a lot of resentment about it and the song is reflective of that. I tried not to reference it all too directly so that it’s open to people’s interpretations.’ Fischer agrees: ‘I like it not being too specific so that people can interpret it as they want,’ he said. McLelland is smiling: ‘I get the biggest kick out of people coming up to us and telling us how they’ve interpreted our songs,’ he said. I say that I love the line in ‘Martyr’ “This world was made for you” because it feels hopeful and uplifting and McLelland agrees: ‘I wanted to put that in because everyone was giving up on everything,’ he said. ‘It’s saying: “Take a minute”. When we do it live, I sing “This world was made for all of you” to the audience. It’s a nod to times getting better.’

As the track goes: “Oh Mother, is this all? ‘Cos I can see it in your face. And I see the writing on the wall. Oh Father, standing tall. Do you smile away the pain ‘cos the feathers from your wings shall fall?”

However, it is on the most pared back track ‘A Tale Once Told’ (2022) that you fully appreciate what a beautiful voice McLelland has. It has a solemn, hymnal beauty with his vocals soaring above the piano line. ‘We recorded it live, you can hear my footsteps crossing the room,’ Fischer quipped. McLelland laughs: ‘I was writing a lot of songs, going through a lot of family troubles, it writ itself.’ Mitchell interjects: ‘I always think it sounds like a fairytale story,’ he said. Fischer nods: ‘It’s a concoction of different lines of lyricism.’ McLelland jumps back in: ‘It’s cool in a sense, when Ben designed the rays of light artwork for ‘Martyr’ , I wanted it to reflect good and evil, to have the same duality as the song. ‘A Tale Once Told’ starts out sombre but progresses to something nicer. I play the piano myself as well. What I like about that one and ‘Ballad of the Gambler’ is that they can break up the set. What sets us apart is that each of us can play a couple of different instruments, it gives us more freedom.’ Fischer agrees: ‘Having two keys players sets us apart, our sound is defined by that.’ McLelland agrees: ‘The songs wouldn’t be the songs without the keys,’ he said.

‘It’s unrivalled, there’s so much variety in the music, each character had its own theme’

Scorer, for his part, has taken a lot of inspiration from film scores over the years: ‘John Williams, Howard Shore, he did the score for ‘Lord of the Rings’, my favourite film score of all time,’ he said. ‘It’s unrivalled, there’s so much variety in the music, each character had its own theme. The musical themes are so prominent and often have a memorable hook to them that you can often find yourself humming them, which is great as it makes the thing it represents stick with you. It also can relate to songwriting in general as a memorable hook in a piece of music will make it stick with someone.’

They have ‘an album’s worth of music to record’, according to McLelland and are mulling which single to release next. Fischer particularly likes ‘The Sand Dancer’: ‘It’s quite different, the whole feeling behind it, the groove,’ he said. McLelland favours ‘Love For Sale’: ‘It’s a slow ballad, I’d be most excited to record that,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘The string sections in it are reflective of Jack’s inspirations. It’s very cinematic and the bass is fantastic! ‘Love For Sale’ has got an almost Motown bass line.’

If they could go for a pint with anyone, Fischer is quick to say Dave Grohl: ‘I really love everything he stands for, I wouldn’t be doing music without him,’ he said. ‘The way he writes songs, plays multiple instruments and he seems like a good bloke. I think we’d get on!’ Scorer goes with Noel Gallagher: ‘He’d take the mick (laughs) but I wouldn’t mind, I’d even enjoy it for the rest of my life.’ McLelland has other ideas: ‘Chris Martin or Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan had more than just music on his shoulders. It might be a hard but interesting conversation.’ Payne has big plans: ‘Slash from Guns N’ Roses, I got into the guitar because of him. I even grew my hair out in primary school!’ Mitchell plumps for two legends: ‘Springsteen or Taylor Hawkins,’ he said. ‘Springsteen ‘cos I’ve liked his music all my life, he seems like an interesting fella and he’s famous for his lyrics. I started drumming because of Taylor Hawkins. You can instantly tell when he’s drumming on a song, not many people are like that. He’s got a class voice, too, he was pretty much the perfect human.’

(Photo from left to right: Dexter, Charlie, Jack, Nathan and Ben.