“I feel like we’re on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and I don’t always know the right answers,” explains Joey Arnold, vocalist and guitarist for The Mispers, exactly one year after their first ever live show. Since then, the band, named after a police term for a missing person, have played just nine headline shows, and each of them have sold out.
“We’ve been blown away by the amount of people coming to gigs,” Arnold continues. “It’s not often that you get that many people that are that like-minded and just up for having a party and getting out of their houses a bit more.”
“Everyone that came to the first gig seems to have just carried on coming, and people seem to know each other now. It’s become like a sort of hub,” intercepts the band’s violinist Hannah van den Brul. Although The Mispers’ sound clearly toes the line between indie-pop and folk, a strong punk characteristic is embraced with the DIY aesthetic that goes into the band’s own Missing Til Monday parties.
They emphasise the fact that they intend to carry on with their own parties as “a kind of thank you to all of the people that keep coming to the shows,” in advance of the release of the band’s second single, ‘Brother’.
“It’s a song that Jack (co-frontman) and I wrote out in Australia before the actual band came together,” explains Arnold. And it wasn’t until their return to the UK that they united forces with the remaining band members.
“The idea is just to expand as much as possible and play as many shows as possible; we love performing and the live shows are really important to us,” Joey concludes. “We want to play as many festivals as possible – we did one out in Germany over the summer and it was one of the best weekends we’ve ever had, so we want to get as many more of those as possible.”
And with a new single release and even more impressive live shows in the pipeline, it’s nigh on impossible to imagine this quintet going missing any time soon.
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Where: London
What: Boundary-breaking indie-pop qualifying as some kind of audial bliss
Get 3 Songs: ‘Coasts’ (above), ‘Brother’, ‘Emilie’
Fact: Band members Joey and Jack met each other while busking, unsuccessfully, in Camden.
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Words: Jonathan Hatchman
Photo: Hayley Louisa Brown