Summer Camp

Summer Camp are a London duo, tenuously and lazily lumped in with something called 'chillwave'. Try not to spew... Summer Camp basically make beautifully sweet, nostalgic pop music; drawing more from beaten up VHS copies of John Hughes movies as any actual music. Initial blog excitement focussed on their mysterious personas, only for it to be revealed that Summer Camp were made up of music journalist Elizabeth Sankey and singer-songwriter Jeremy Walmsley. Anyway... none of this really matters.

Summer Camp are great and they play the Deaf Institute on 5th October with Frankie & The Heartstrings and Spectrals.

You can buy tickets HERE

So 'Summer Camp'...why has no-one ever used that name before? Tell us some of the lame names you came up with first...or was it always gonna be 'Summer Camp'?

Well we never planned to be a band, we did the cover of 'Only Have Eyes For You' purely for our own amusement, and then set up a myspace on a whim so that we could go back to it in ten years time and cringe. 'Summer Camp' came from when we were required to put in our 'About Me' guff, and we thought we'd say that we'd met at Summer Camp when we were 14. Then Jeremy said, "Let's call ourselves Summer Camp as well", so we did. Yeah, we know. GREAT story.

I'm completely guilty of this, but why do people our age seem to fetishize America? Was growing up in the UK sooo bad? I still slightly hate my parents for not moving to America like the rest of my extended family.

I don't think it's that there's anything wrong with the UK - we freaking love this place, but America is the place we see in movies, old photos, hear about in songs. So it's kind of aspirational and romantic. While England is the safe and solid marriage, America is the flirty affair, and you can pick and choose what you like from it. In our case - Disneyland, Bruce Springsteen, and John Hughes.

You're band's songs sound like Super 8 looks...does that make sense... is that something you were going for?

We never really had a plan for the sound, but we listen to a lot of old music, and we like pop that's a bit melancholy. The sort of bittersweet longing you have when you're a teenager, when it always seems like summer, and you fall in love with some idiot who you think is James Dean, but really he's more Jimmy Saville.

What other bands should we be listening to?

Fleetwood Mac, Take That and Fennesz.

DOWNLOAD Ghost Train by Summer Camp