Welsh culture often seems to conglomerate around Cardiff, the city’s array of venues and rehearsal rooms supporting a bustling music scene. Yet there’s a huge amount to be said for North Wales – over the years, a number of fantastic bands, songwriters, producers, even rappers have emerged from the country’s northern half.
Take The Royston Club. The indie risers formed in Wrexham, and a string of biting singles have seen them amass a devoted audience. Debut album ‘Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars’ is packed with guitar pop bands, and might just steam into the actual UK charts this week.
Wrexham is of course in the news of late, with a high profile Hollywood intervention pushing the local football team to fresh heights.
We invited The Royston Club to chat about their home city…
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While Cardiff has always seemed to be the centre of musical culture in Wales and quite often deservedly so, as a band from Wrexham it’s amazing to see some brilliant bands coming out of North Wales. Our debut album ‘Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars’ is out now, and is in contention for a Top 20 finish in the official charts which is crazy and would be huge for us.
We’re not ones to focus on ourselves too much though, and instead want to show what makes our town of Wrexham so incredible, from artists to venues and promoters.
Seazoo
We first heard of these guys with their tune ‘The Pleasure’ which is the first song off their album ‘Joy’. We all thought it was a very cool, laidback, summery kind of tune tune and were an even bigger fan of the music video which inspired us for one of our early music videos we made for our song ‘Kerosene’.
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The Joy Formidable
The Joy Formidable are one of the more well known bands in North Wales and for good reason.
Their massive indie rock tunes have taken them to main stages all over the place so its cool knowing they’re from the same place as us, and we even share the same sound engineer (a lovely French dude called Seb) who was the first person to really introduce us to their music.
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Cara Hammond
We first met Cara Hammond in Austin, Texas of all places at SXSW. As Focus Wales had a stage at the festival, we played on the same bill as her one night and couldn’t believe how good she was. She had an absolutely angelic voice and some really pretty songs. She also managed to keep professional and keep playing through one of the biggest scraps we’ve seen at a gig between a bouncer and random punter so kudos to her for that.
PROMOTERS:
We can’t say enough good things about Focus Wales as a promoter. They’ve supported us from the early days, and always given us amazing opportunities on their Focus Wales Festival stages. Andy at Focus was a huge support in getting us out to SXSW last year, where we played the Focus showcase in Austin. They will be promoting our headline show at William Aston Hall in Wrexham later this year, which is a huge moment for us as a band and a real full circle moment.
VENUES
There are some amazing venues in Wrexham, from small pub venues to bigger touring venues. We started off playing amazing little places like Saith Seren and The Parish, and we’ve just announced our biggest ever hometown headline show at the famous William Aston Hall in November.
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‘Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars’ is out now.
