Cinematic Drama: The Orchestra (For Now) Interviewed

If you’ve been flirting with London’s live music circuit over the past year or so, odds are you will have come across the name The Orchestra (For Now). Don’t let their title mislead you, this is not your standard classical ensemble. 

Comprised of seven members – Joseph Scarisbrick (vocals/piano), Lingling Bao-Smith (violin), Charlie Hancock (drums), Erin Snape (cello), Isobel Nisbett (bass), Neil Thomson (guitar) and Bill Bickerstaff (guitar) – the band is one of the latest must-see acts to emerge from The Windmill scene. Gaining further acclaim as winners of the Green Man Rising competition in 2024, they have asserted themselves as an indispensable force within the next wave of musical talent to come from the capital. 

Just ahead of their headline return to The Windmill during Independent Venue Week, CLASH caught up with founding members Joe, Neil and Charlie for a chat about becoming The Orchestra (For Now), new music, and ultimately preserving as a band despite being pretty scared. 

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How did you come together to form The Orchestra (For Now)? 

Charlie: Mostly, Joe and Neil started playing together many years ago. 

Joe: Three years ago. We were in a band just after sixth form.

Neil: We were in a band together in sixth form and then we came to London together. [Joe: With our guitars]. With our guitars on our backs. [Joe: And dreams]. And dreams in our pockets, smiles on our faces. We did an electronic music project which we eventually scrapped, and decided to start a proper live ensemble. And then we built it from the ground up by reaching out to people.

Joe: I e-mailed people on my school’s intranet. I had one class with Lingling, but she doesn’t talk that much. A person of very few words. But she was joking around and was very funny, so I sent her an e-mail that night, really formally saying: “Hello, I’m just starting a new band, would you please like to join?” Then I got an e-mail like: “Dear Joe, sounds great! Best wishes.” Then she joined, and it was great. And Charlie was a friend’s younger brother [Charlie: Yeah, and there was a call-out for drummers]. 

So you guys started an electronic project as a duo, then decided to expand. What was that transition like?

Neil: We never really discussed it, it just felt like we needed to move forward in some way. To be fair, when we first got Charlie on board, we hadn’t even discussed that there wouldn’t be electronics in it.

Joe: In my head there were still definitely going to be electronics. 

Charlie: In the first couple of rehearsals there were still weird things going on.

Joe: The whole thing was this weird thing with backing tracks that I’d make. But then we saw how good this guy [Charlie] was and I was like, fuck it, we can’t make him play to a click. Right, that’s stupid.

Neil: We were just looking at expanding, really. It’s partly a visual thing to have lots of people on the stage and we wanted to incorporate different instruments. So we thought it would be really cool to have a drummer and a live bassist, but we envisaged it as still keeping the electronics as well. Eventually we realised that it’s not quite gelling, but we’ve got something good going on with these new elements.

Joe: We accidentally found ourselves in the genre. We didn’t choose to be. I wanted anything but this genre, not that I can even say what the genre is. 

Neil: No, it’s true. We never said that we’re going to make a certain type of music. We’re trying to play to our strengths I guess. 

Joe: We’re working on new material that’s a lot more electronic, in a way. Even using just experimentally different guitar pedals and stuff. [Charlie: Yeah, or laptop stuff]. Laptop stuff. Lots of crazy weird modulation.

It sounds like a promising return to your musical roots, a full-circle moment. 

Joe: It’s probably quite a few years down the line because we should tour this music. Although I do have a habit of jumping ship. 

What does that suggest for the future of the band?

Joe: Ah, well, we’ve had our blips. 

Charlie: Yeah, we have. 

Joe: I did leave the band momentarily over the summer. It was purely because things were going really well, and I think I just got a bit scared. And that was it.

Charlie: I mean, to credit you, you were doing all of the managerial stuff, most of the songwriting and booking gigs for us. It seemed to me to be a burnout. 

Joe: It was a complete burnout. And I needed a dramatic night. I got my dramatic night, and then the next day I was back in. And that was right before Green Man, our biggest show ever. I messaged Charlie at like, 3 A.M. 

Charlie: I was still up and it was a bunch of paragraphs like, “I can’t do this shit anymore, seriously, I don’t know, no one’s stepping up and I need them to.”

Joe: We have management now but we’re still independent, so we still have to do a lot ourselves. I kind of don’t want to lose that. Obviously not to where it brings anyone to the point that I was at. That’s like doing it yourself and also doing yourself in. I think we always want to keep some aspects of control over what we do in that way.

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You’ve spoken a bit about not being able to identify with a particular genre. How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard your music?

Charlie: Quite eclectic. 

Joe: Imagine your favourite magician… [Charlie: No, not really] I think just pure anxiety, but with quite a lot of people who are very tight. 

Neil: It’s cinematic drama. Cinematic highs and lows of emotion:

Joe: I think also an attempt to make music that doesn’t repeat itself too much. That wants to always do the next thing. Fidgety, I guess. 

Charlie: I think in a lot of our songs we try to strike a good balance of tension and release in the anxiety. So, having a little spacey groove-led section and then something that really makes you grit your teeth a little bit. 

Joe: Fundamentally it’s just rock music that we’re trying to make really interesting. You can call it art-rock or whatever but it is just guitar-led music in which we try to instill interest in every bit. 

Neil: Rock with an expanded sonic palette. 

Do you have any key influences for the sound of the band? 

Charlie: I would say that we all do. We all have our own key influences. But I mean, I have very little music taste in common with anyone else in the band. I really like jazz and rap, and we like to listen to some country sometimes.

Joe: We listen to country all the time. Well that’s the thing, we’re playing tonight at The Windmill and Tim Perry opened my mind. He was like, if you’re going to have two genres left in the world that you could only ever listen to, the two genres you’d pick are country music and rap music. That’s all you need. You don’t need anything else. That’s where Charlie and I find ourselves. And I don’t like his jazz music at all.

Charlie: Yeah no, and I don’t like his [Joe’s]… Whatever vocal shit. 

Neil: You would struggle to find any artist that everyone in the band loves. There’s probably Carly Rae Jepsen. We all love Carly. 

Joe: Even the fucking Beach Boys we can’t agree on. But I thought that’d be the most middle of the road opinion, like, of course they’re great. 

Your point of contention – so where do you all stand on The Beach Boys?

Joe: I love The Beach Boys! ‘Surf’s Up’ is banging. It’s such a good record. 

Charlie: I’m anti what they stand for, really. [Joe: Being happy in California?] Yeah, the sand in your toes. 

Can you name any jazz, country or rap artists who have inspired you throughout your musical journeys?

Joe: John Prine. My favourite country musician, probably.

Charlie: Makaya McCraven, an amazing jazz drummer. Herbie Hancock, obviously. 

Joe: I mean, I did grow up on jazz. Bill Evans was the reason I wanted to play piano. It was important, I just don’t like it anymore. 

Neil: I’m a big folk music fan, a big folk music advocate. [Joe: I was on Fleet Foxes on the way here!] Fleet Foxes is one of my favourites. And also Big Thief. I do a lot of fingerstyle guitar and that’s where I got that from. That’s a good example of how one person in the band will have a very specific influence for their own style, but it’s not really influencing the songwriting or the overall sound in a massive way. It’s just one corner of it.

What is your songwriting process like? With so many members, does one person take the lead or do you all pitch in?

Joe: It’s changing. I mean, when we started, it was mostly me. It’s progressing, it’s slowly becoming what it was always meant to be, which is a very even spread of ideas which are then patched together in interesting ways. Initially, Neil came forward with an entire song which is now on the record. Or I’d come in with basically a semi-finished song apart from the arrangement. I think those days are kind of gone. Now it’s like, there’s an idea floating here and we jam it out. We could do this, but we’ve got a catalogue of things. It’s very much becoming like patchwork. 

Charlie: The sessions are usually three to four people when we’re writing. We try not to write with too many people because it muddies the water. [Joe: Two to four is perfect]. Two to four is perfect, year. 

Neil: We’ll come forward with an idea that we need help with a lot of the time. We’ll come and say “I’ve got this thing, I’m really confident in it, but I don’t know where to take it next”. And then try to get input from other people, getting other people to unstick us. 

Joe: We use a lot of whiteboards. We’ve actually recently discovered mind maps. We were mapping out the album. 

Neil: I think ‘Wake Robin’ was the first time we used a whiteboard because it was so much more complicated than the songs we’d done before that. There would have been no other way of remembering the structure from the offset, especially when it was written very collaboratively. We needed to map it out.

Joe: Have we made that joke before? That the whiteboard is the eighth member? [Charlie & Neil: Yeah, yeah]. 

Sometimes you really do need to be able to visualise things in order for them to stick in your mind. 

Charlie: One hundred percent. Especially when we’re trying to rehearse the things that we’re writing and often our songs go on for several minutes. So we’ll write something and five minutes later have to play the full six minute song. It’s very good to have a visual aid. 

Joe: And the music is getting more and more complicated. Even just for your [Charlie’s] sake, for counting bars. Is that becoming increasingly tricky?

Charlie: Yeah, it is. It’s true. 

Neil: Because we don’t have a method to how we write songs, so much of the time is just hitting our heads against the wall and giving it time. 

Joe: It’s just pure inspiration. [Neil: It just flows through us!]. It’s just magic, actually! You go in that room and it’s just pure fucking gold. 

Neil: There was one approach that we’ve had for a couple of songs recently where we’ll have a cool piece of music, but realise that it’s really overcomplicated. So we’ll strip it back to its most basic components to get something that’s more functional but really boring. And then we try to find a middle ground by reintroducing some of the more complicated elements that we took out for the sake of finding something functional. 

Joe: I think we write songs in two ways. Either it’s instant or we bang our heads across the wall. Getting a song in place is the hard part. 

Neil: There are also songs that we’ve had to abandon or leave indefinitely even if there’s an idea in them that we really think is strong. There are some ideas that we’ve had for ages that we all think are strong but we just haven’t gotten them into a song. It’s become a joke with some of them, we try them with other ideas and they never match. 

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Are they ideas that you would revisit in a different frame of mind, or do you feel that it’s best to leave them where they’re at?

Charlie: Potentially, but we also seem to just kind of fart out ideas quite often. So, even if it is a strong idea that’s left in the past, I’m not too hung up on it. There are better things coming in the future, for sure. Especially as we’re growing as songwriters together. 

Neil: It’s good to have stuff on the back burner as well, because it might be that eventually we have another idea and they do just completely click. The new idea may go perfectly with an old one we’ve had for ages, or it might never come to anything. 

Going back to your mention of Green Man, Green Man Rising must have been a pivotal point for the band. What was that experience like, and how do you go about translating your ideas live?

Joe: They’re all made for the stage. We’ve been joking about how we want to be a studio band in the future, but at the moment, everything is for the stage. And that was quite a big stage, actually. We played to more people in that one show than we ever had.

Neil: If you added up all the people we played to as The Orchestra (For Now) before that show, it probably would have been less than the number of people we were playing to at the festival. [Joe: It was a bit nuts, really]. A lot of people come up to us at gigs we’ve done since then and tell us that they saw us at Green Man, so it’s obviously gone a long way. Especially in branching outside of London, because at one point we had a very good London fan base, but it was time to branch out. Hitting festivals seemed like a really good start.

Establishing yourself as a live band from the start must set a good precedent for preparing for festivals. Did you find it daunting expanding from venues to larger open stages? 

Joe: I had a moment of weakness and I told the sound tech “I’m a bit nervous about this”. And he was like: “Well, it’s basically just a medium-sized room next to a massive field. So just look at the room.” We’ve played rooms as big as the stage, so just ignore the field. 

Your debut EP ‘Plan 75’ is due for release in March. Can you tell me about what inspired some of the themes across the songs?

Joe: I don’t think any of us wanted to do an EP. In our heads it was going to be an album first, but it didn’t make sense to do an album straight away. As for an EP, it’s basically a mini album and it should be treated as that. It is thematic, and we tried to make it as consistent as possible. I think what’s been emerging recently is how it details the band itself in a way. It’s about the formation of the band and the personal sacrifice from everyone. I think everyone can relate to that in a way, and the anxiety of even trying to do something this stupid. It’s quite intense. That’s what it’s reaching for. Which maybe isn’t even that interesting, but it’s also about itself. Even musically, constantly trying to talk to ourselves. 

Neil: It is a snapshot in time of what we’ve done in that first phase of us as a band, and doing that together. We were never writing it as an EP, but we felt that we had a collection of sounds that can work as that.

Charlie: They are a conducive body of work together. 

Joe: Just took some editing.

Neil: And there are a lot of albums I really like that are just a snapshot of time and there are no overarching concepts. But you can find that concept as you work out what’s going into it.

Joe: There was definitely an emergence. The meaning itself was emergent. I actually do want to write top down for this next thing we’re doing, ‘Plan 75’ just bubbled up out of the stuff that we were making. It wasn’t pre-planned.

Neil: I think the consistency also comes from the production on it, the ideas that our producer Balázs brought forward. We didn’t really change anything when we went into recording it. We tightened up some of the arrangements that we had, but the aim was still to get the best live performance that we could. And then the extra studio magic that’s in there is all stuff that our producer came up with, but there are sonic ideas scattered across the album that do link it all together. 

Joe: And also, that musical instrument that sounds like a frog, there’s one of those. He puts that in every record he makes. Everyone’s gotta look out for that. And then look through all of his entire discography. 

Neil: It’s actually quite exposed. I hadn’t even bothered looking for it because I thought it would just be mixed in really low somewhere, but it is very exposed, just within a lot of effects.

Joe: It’s important thematically as well, that frog. It recontextualizes the whole listening experience!

Neil: When we were  mixing it, I asked him if he could cut out that sound. I was like, “oh, there’s this weird clicky sound, can you cut that?” And he was like “oh no, I think that’s really good.” 

With such an elaborate sound – now including hidden effects – how did you guys navigate establishing your identity as a band? 

Joe: Many many hours spent in dark rooms. In basements. 

Neil: In a way, the crowd established it. Once we did stuff that could attract an audience, we wanted to tap into that more. Joe and I have been doing music for years [Joe: And the whole thing was anti-audience]. Exactly, the music we’d done before was so alienating. The thing was to alienate the audience almost [Joe: It was like MGMT but with no good bits]. Without the hooks and the cheeky little synth thing. [Joe: I thought it was sick, I still stand by it]. So then we started doing something that was a bit more palatable. And because we started to build a following from that, we thought to lean into it more. 

Charlie: The sound that we have now came after we wrote ‘Wake Robin’ and we realised that that is the sound. Before we were doing a lot of power ballads and stuff like that, but the kind of dark and anxious sound with nice groovy sections came from beating the shit out of ‘Wake Robin’ for so long and trying to make different sections.

Neil: I remember when we wrote ‘Wake Robin’, Charlie specifically said “this is much more up my street” compared to the stuff that we’d been doing. We felt like it played specifically to Charlie’s strengths. It kind of brings out some of your [Charlie’s] insane drumming chops a lot more than stuff we had before. But it was also the fact that we had it in us to write that kind of song, that became part of the baseline. 

Joe: Ambition. We became ambitious overnight. 

Neil: Can you say about the groove in ‘Wake Robin’, like where the groove comes from? Because I think that’s such a cool thing.

Charlie: It’s a mix of John Bonham’s groove on ‘Immigrant Song’ and then the groove from the drummer on The Sidewinder by Lee Morgan. It’s a mixture of those two grooves. 

Neil: And this is in the middle section, the big bassy buildup. 

Charlie: The big breakdown groove.

Speaking about the singles, the second track from the EP, ‘Skins’ will be shared tomorrow. To address the question that’s bound to be on everyone’s mind – have you really never seen Skins?

All: I’ve never seen Skins.

Joe: However, it’s interesting because one of the lines in that song is about a car going into the sea. And someone came up to me, and they were like, “oh, you’re being so clever because you say you’ve never seen Skins, and then you reference a big thing in Skins.” But I had no clue! 

Neil: A moment of serendipity!

How do ‘Skins’ and ‘Wake Robin’ coexist with one another within the EP? Do they work together?

Neil: They were written pretty close together. I think ‘Skins’ we wrote after ‘Wake Robin’ in that vein about using ‘Wake Robin’ as a baseline. We wanted it to be angsty and edgy, exciting with a push and pull between the energetic, frantic sections and then stuff that is much more slow and pretty. 

Joe: I think they definitely do work together. I guess they kind of reinforce each other. I think most of that first batch of songs reinforce each other. 

Charlie: They’re all siblings, really. 

Joe: Thematically and lyrically they all operate in the same world, in a way. 

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What should we expect next from The Orchestra (For Now) at this stage?

Joe & Charlie: World domination. 

Neil: The unexpected. 

Joe: There is a desire to do things differently. I think we’ve accepted that this year is a live year. Writing an album, recording an album, it’s a band year. But we do have future ambitions beyond writing music for albums and playing live, but I think there’s more to it. Everyone has things they want to push for.

Neil: We’d love to score a film one day. 

What existing films would you have wanted to score?

Joe: Suspiria, the original one. 

Neil: I love Vertigo. 

Charlie: Uncut Gems.

Joe: I want to do Ocean’s Eleven. And twelve, and thirteen.

Neil: So, if there’s an Ocean’s Fourteen coming…

Is there anything that you’d like to say to your listeners? 

Joe: Enjoy it. Enjoy it while it lasts. These things are super hard to do and we’re constantly scared. And constantly pushing ourselves to stupid levels. 

Charlie: Yeah, we are much more scared than you would think.

Neil: Come and say hi to me after a show! I love chatting to people.

Joe: Just say hello to Neil. I’m massively introverted. I think most of the band is massively introverted. But Neil is waving that extroverted flag. 

Neil: I’m putting it out there, guys. I’m ready to chat. [Joe: And he’s not single!] Come at me with your best one-liner. Come up to me after a gig and give me your best one-line joke. Unless I’m visibly upset or frustrated.

Charlie: Or bleeding. 

All: Read the room! 

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The Orchestra (For Now) will release their debut EP ‘Plan 75’ on March 28th.

Words: Kayla Sandiford

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