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Interview: Saint PHNX ahead of debut gig at Nice ‘N’ Sleazy

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Saint PHNX are an ambitious and enigmatic duo made up of two brothers, vocalist & multi-instrumentalist Stevie Jukes and drummer Alan Jukes. They are from Wishaw but grew up playing in bands in Glasgow and are currently prodigiously producing music from a self-made studio in the West End.

Their debut track Reload is filled with soaring hooks and has a catchy, rousing chorus. It has picked up support from Spotify, BBC Introducing and Q Magazine.

Having emerged as Saint PHNX in January, this year has been a whirlwind of activity and achievement. This week marks another milestone as they play their debut show at Nice ‘N’ Sleazy on Thursday.

Ahead of the gig, we spoke to Stevie and Alan on the phone and talked about their music, performance and plans for the future.

Glasgowist: This is your first gig in Glasgow as Saint PHNX, but you’ve played in Glasgow before right?

Stevie: Yeah, me an Al have been in a band for as long as we can remember. The last band we were in for a number of years and we played everywhere in Glasgow: Nice ‘N’ Sleazy, The Barrowlands, ABC, The Academy. Glasgow’s our home town.

Presumably then, it was quite a deliberate decision to branch out on your own and perform as a two-piece band?

It was just, being in a band for the last eight years with a group of five guys, when you are putting songs together people want to do things different creatively.

Our own group was something we tried organically, we put some demos together, put some songs together and everything just clicked. From there, it went very quickly.

When it comes to songwriting, is it a collaborative experience on every element or do you each take responsibility for different parts of the process?

It’s a bit of both really, I’ll come up with the melody and Alan will come up with the drums and different song titles and things that we want to sing about.

The first single, Reload, what was the background to that, how quickly did it come together?

I was sitting watching the news one day and headline after headline was about some war in a different part of the world. It just struck me that throughout history there has always been some sort of war and man doesn’t really learn from its mistakes, we just reload. That was the whole topic of the song.

We travelled down to Liverpool to meet our management and started putting together some melodies and some lyrics on the way down. By the time we got there we had a song. We then recorded it, put it all together and that was it. It was a quick process.

You are working on an album at the moment, where are you on that? Do you have a lot of songs ready?

We’ve certainly got an album worth of material at the moment. Every day we are recording, writing and rehearsing.
Putting out new things.

We’ve only started since January so the response we have been having is overwhelming and a wee bit amazing. We’re just building up the song bank and the repertoire every day.

Have you been spending a lot of time pondering over what tracks should make the album?

We’re concentrating on releasing stuff and building a bit of traction with people liking it. The response, numbers-wise, has been amazing. From Spotify, from YouTube, the show on Thursday will be a sell-out.

Everything’s been crazy. Behind-the-scenes with writing and recording, everything just seems to be clicking. We’ve just started but we’ve hit a purple patch already in terms of songs.

Every idea we get, we turn it into a song and we go and record it, then it’s just another one to choose from when it comes to putting the album together.

For a young band, how important is it to actually produce an album as compared to just getting songs out there on digital channels and playing in live venues?

It depends what you want to do, it depends what type of band you are in. From our experience, people always want to hear more and you have got to have those songs behind you to become as big as possible. We put out a song, people will listen to it and judge it, but if you want to grow you have to keep feeding it.

We’re all about getting as many songs as possible together that we are proud of and putting out an album. That’s how we are working it just now.

I remember I interviewed The Stereophonics a long time ago, just after they had released their first single. They had just rented some kind of camper van and were playing every dive bar and stage they could find for the next six weeks to let people know what they are all about. These days you have ever platform imaginable to distribute your music, but is it still important to go out there, stand on a stage and perform?

I think when it comes down to it, it’s all about two brothers in a band playing music. The live element of Saint PHNX is paramount and we have been rehearsing like mad, every day for the past month.

We’ve been working on it so we can make it different, distinct and as big as possible. That’s going to be something we can’t wait to get our teeth sunk into.

We’ve got some tour news coming up very soon that we’re so excited to announce, but we need to wait a couple of weeks until we can do that. The live aspect is going to be massive for us.

Is there a music scene in Glasgow that you want to explore, is there enough to keep you in Glasgow?

Obviously in Glasgow, we love it, we’ve been in the Glasgow scene but we’re looking at things on a bigger platform, certainly since we released Reload.

It’s opened our eyes to see how big and far we can go – getting on the American new music Spotify playlist, the Apple new music playlist. These are worldwide things with millions of followers. Getting on that let’s us know that there’s more to it than just Scotland and the UK.

Glasgow will always be our home. We love to play Glasgow. But we’re just looking to get as big as possible.

I suppose that’s the thing about the connectivity in the modern world. It is possible for you to put something together, load it on the internet and it ends up being played by some online radio station in Tokyo and things like that.

It’s absolutely insane the platform you’ve got nowadays in terms of putting new music up, if you push all the right channels and it’s good enough.

We’ve had a bizarre thing, there’s been an amazing response from people in Mexico to the video, there’s Croatian, Serbian, Italian comments.

We’re in the West End, in a studio on the top of a trade union building making a song, you put it out and people all over the world are responding to it.

For us it’s just so exciting and we can’t wait to push more out.

In terms of influences and bands that appeal to you, who would you like to mention?

We’re influenced by different things. In terms of song-writing and story-telling there’s Bruce Springsteen and Ryan Adams. If your’re talking about the sound and the style, there’s Kasabian, Imagine Dragons, X Ambassadors.

In terms of the melodies, how universal they are and where we want to take them, you look at Coldplay, U2. With the sound of the drums it’s Dr Dre, Kanye West, Kendrick Lemar and hip hop.

So, there’s all different elements there. It all comes down to big pop hooks with hip hop drums.

What can we expect from your show on Thursday?

Alan is saying nightvision… If you can picture a nightvision camera, that’s Alan’s description.

You really need to see it to understand it. Expect something loud, energetic and very raw.

Follow Saint Phnx on Twitter @saintphnx, find them on Facebook and listen to their debut track Reload on Spotify.