It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon in Glasgow, it’s chilly but at least the sun is shining. There are those who are relaxing and those who are indulging in typical Sunday pastimes, such as washing their car or reading the Sunday papers. Yet, there are others who are working hard and among them there is also a young local band, His Girl Friday. Kevin Boyle (guitar, vocals), Nicky Ecob (guitar), Amanda Shields (bass) and Gurudarshan Somayaji AKA Guru (drums), are indeed in a rehearsal room, playing new and old songs, preparing to record their new EP.

The bands’ first EP, “Thwart My Little Fingered Fate”,came out in 2003. Recorded at The Foundry in Glasgow, the EP contained seven tracks, all a sort of mixture of ethereal soundscapes a la Sigur Ros and Múm laced with dark guitars. But since 2003 many things have changed for this young band: a new drummer arrived, directly from India, the band found a new sound, a more confident approach to music and a more mature attitude.

His Girl Friday formed from the ashes of another band, Merchant City, in which Kevin and Nicky were playing, Amanda joined them in February 2003, “That was the first time we really felt happy about our sound,“ Nicky remembers while we sit in the 13th Note, “we were confident we were getting somewhere, but then Barry Thomas, our previous drummer, left, so we had to start looking for a new drummer. Since then we found one and wrote new stuff.”

The band is at present working on their next EP, “Nuclear Winter”, which should be out pretty soon, their plan is to record two songs at a time, get them out as singles, and then do an EP. In the meantime, HGF are concentrating on gigs: they recently played at Glasgow’s Stereo (where they presented old classics such as “Ik” and “Implosion of Mako” and introduced the audience to their new tracks, among the others, “Winters Notice”, “Sins” and “Your So Novel”), and soon they will play at another local venue, The Barfly, “It feels a bit frustrating to have an EP which is a year and a half long,” Nicky states, “but we know that we can reach higher, we honestly think that each new song we write is better than the previous one.”

His Girl Friday are, like many other young bands, unsigned, yet, they wish they will soon find the record label they are looking for, “Preferably one that would let us do what we like to do,” Amanda claims, “somebody who would enable us to do what we want, who would give us the opportunity to do music full time and make a living at it.”

Though these are still hard times for the band, the fact that they are in Glasgow, a city where the music scene is quite alive and kicking might help them and inspire them as well. Glasgow has spawned great bands in the past, while more recently it produced Franz Ferdinand, globally considered as one of the best bands around. “You can live in Glasgow and establish yourself on the music scene without having to go to London,” Nicky explains, “indeed nowadays you have a lot of A&R people who come to Glasgow to find the next Franz Ferdinand, the next Travis, and so on, people are looking at Glasgow, so maybe we have a good chance to make it. In Glasgow a lot of bands don’t feel like ‘it’s us against the rest of the world’, they feel part of a band, part of a big family of bands that help each other out. The best thing about Glasgow is that you don’t ever have to feel the pressure that you have to fit in a sort of genre: here what you need to be respected for is just for being what you want to be.” His Girl Friday claim that even though they live in Glasgow, they are not part of the local scene, at least not yet, “A lot of the Glasgow bands are very much influenced by other Glasgow bands, like Belle & Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub and so on,” Kevin says, “If you look up at bands such as My Latest Novel, you realise that they have the distinctive sound of Belle & Sebastian, but I think that, even though our influences are very Glasgwegian because we are surrounded by other local bands, we have different influences that range from My Bloody Valentine to the Pixies, from the Smashing Pumpkins to Sigur Ros. We have totally different influences, but similar interests. There is a lot of variation in the dynamics of our band. We don’t really feel like part of the local community of musicians, because we haven’t put ourselves in that position. We go to gigs and see bands collaborating together, and that’s great, that shows how these bands are a community, but we’re not part of that community yet.” The band also has a huge respect for the Glasgow bands who made it, like Franz Ferdinand, “They built up a fanbase in Glasgow before they even got signed, they created their own venue and proved they were dedicated, they really worked hard to succeed,” Nicky says about the band that conquered the world in 2004, “They first established themselves in Glasgow and that was already an achievement. Bands such as Franz Ferdinand, Snow Patrol and Biffy Clyro are great exports for the Glasgow music industry, they’re really ambassadors for the Scottish music industry.”

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