Opening The City With The Plastics

Interview || Stereo Kids With The Plastics 

The Plastics began in 2008 as an evolution of punk band, Hoax. It’s now its own thing. Completely.

The band has been likened to a lot of things, worked with a lot of people and made a lot of friends.

Words to describe their music, experiences and work ethic include “innovative”, “Earl Grey”, “guerrilla”, “disco SOMETHING”, “retro rock” and “melody”, amongst others. That’s not a joke.

Along with a cult following that tends to turn their sentences into acronyms and get the dance floor riled up, The Plastics set out to take over the world, or at least play some pretty damn good gigs along the way.

The band likes to do things differently. They’ve had friends in gorilla suits running down streets.

Hello, Guys thanks for taking time out to do this interview with us. It’s such a huge pleasure: )

How are you doing today and how have you guys been celebrating spring fever?

Emerging from hibernation by soaking up the sun but, at the same time, preparing to hibernate in the studio working on our upcoming album.

1.      To start of can you tell us a little about who each of you are on a non-musical front?

We’ve got two brothers in the band – Sash being the older one and a sound engineer/producer and is a big dreamer.  Scal is the more practical one and also has his own studio, composing songs both for Plastics, his own solo vibes and for no-one, just for the sake of writing.  Emile grew up in Durban and  recently moved from Cape Town and shares a love of Liverpool FC with Karl and also writes his own solo music. 

2.      How did The Plastics come to be? How did all of you meet and what’s the story behind the name?

Sash and Scal, being bro’s, met at Scal’s birth.  Karl met through a mutual friend (who was actually the original Plastics guitarist) at UCT.  Much bonding happened over much partying and mutual music appreciation.  Emile joined in 2013 and moved down from Durban to join us (all very romantic).  The name references the movie Mean Girls.

3.      How did you guys break into the music scene?

We just started playing, simple as that.  It’s easy to get gigs and be involved in the music scene at first.  It’s taking that next step to becoming a touring band that’s a bit more challenging.  We’re just in love with playing music so have consistently written songs and progressed our sound to this point.  It certainly helped us at first giving all our music away for free.  It was try before you buy.

4.      Do any of you have any musical training if so tell us more?

Karl has had the most extensive, having studied classical guitar in school.  The others have all taken lessons at various points but a lot of the training has been “on the job,” based upon figuring things out as we’ve gone along.

5.      What’s the typical process for making a track, who does what and where do you guys draw inspiration from?

We’ve learned to work in a few different ways.  Often it’s Scal bringing in the bones of a song and then we all put the meat on and form the features and add the extra pieces of beauty that makes up a fully-fledged song.  We freestyle jam quite a lot and sometimes something memorable emerges and gets used either as a part in a song or becomes the seed for a new one.  We’re all adept at writing on our computers as well so a lot of the new stuff has been created layer-by-layer in the box.

6.      How would describe your sound?

It’s evolved from album to album.  Shark was us playing the songs all live with very few overdubs.  Raw, rough and ready.  Some of the songs had a punky kind of edge to an indie sound with some dollops of 60’s and 70’s colour.  On Pyramid the sound was a bit more refined and we did a bit more preproduction to round the songs out.  I would describe it as indie retro rock.  The new album is us developing our sound into a few new areas – there’s some dreamy and psychedelic sounds in there and Emile has brought in a pretty, washy, melodic sound to the mix.

7.      This year you’re playing could be opening up the city at Vodacom in the City, what would it mean to The Plastics if you win?

It would be amazing if we got to play this show!  Being the only local band, playing to a big crowd of Joburgers we dig so much!  And the chance to play on the same stage and meet MGMT would be dreamball!

8.      What was your reaction when you heard you made it to the top 4?

We were all really happy but also motivated straight away to do everything we could to win the spot. 

9.      What is the one thing about In the City that stands out for you?

Being from Cape Town, we’ve never been so I can only comment on the photos I saw from last year.  The enthusiasm and joy in the crowd excites us.

10.  Do you have a crazy In the City story to share?

At the Open the City gig, all the finalist bands had quite the party.  We ended up at a kwaito party and Karl almost missed the flight home!

11.  Which local acts do you guys look up to and why?

Taxi Violence have always stuck true to their nature and managed to get where they are all by themselves.  Great guys as well!  Johnny Clegg is an obvious one as well, being a cultural icon in promoting unity within the country.

12.  Which international artists are you most looking forward to sharing the stage with at this year’s event if you win?

MGMT are one of our favourite bands so definitely them!  We filmed a cover of their song “Congratulations” recently:

13.  Sell yourselves in a creative way and tell fans why they should vote for you?

For every 5 votes for us, we’re donating R5 to DARG, a fantastic place of sanctuary for so many animals, in Hout Bay.  They let us film some scenes for our Occasional Lies video in their cattery so we have some good history together and want to repay the karma.  So, if you need even more of a reason to vote for us, do it for the cats and dogs without a home!  Post the screenshot of your 5 smses on our Facebook page