Shame: "If you don’t want your ego damaged, don’t start a guitar band"

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Every new year starts with the promise of new, exciting things. Shame aren’t hanging about in bringing us one of them, with quite probably the first great album of 2018.

Words: Jamie Muir. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It’s a bitterly cold Tuesday morning in South London, and Shame are recovering from a packed 2017, and an even busier end to it, incorporating some of their biggest headline shows to date, a blistering run across the US and a pogoing schedule of European trips. As morning breaks, frontman Charlie Steen and guitarist Eddie Green tell tales of only just returning to the UK late the night before, yet bustle with the rest of the band on adventures and the maddening rush of it all. For a band who, just over a year ago, were taking on sweat-stained pub nights across the capital, it’s an evolution and coming together that means something more, a destined reckoning that could be felt every time they took the stage. Wherever that stage may be.

“Remember that time we took the drum kit on a bus?” recalls guitarist Sean Coyle Smith, cueing raised smiles and laughter between themselves as they gather away from the cold in a local tiled cafe. “We got booked for this riverside festival in Richmond, and all we heard was the festival part of it. We turned up to children and old people in rows of white chairs, and I think we got paid with some cider and some Cumberland sausages.”

“That was so bleak,” continues Eddie, stirring away at the hot drink in front of him with a shake of his head. “The funniest part of that was when a guy came up to us at the side of the stage and said, ‘Look, guys, I’m not going to tell you again. There are kids here - can you please watch your language. There’s storytelling going on in the tent over there’.” This was all while they were playing a song called ‘Gone Fisting’.

“I think we were fined for being too loud as well,” notes frontman Steen. “It’s miraculous really. There were infinite points along the way where we should have stopped and said, ‘What are we doing?’ If we’d been any other age…”

There are many, many other examples that Shame can bring up for playing the weird and the wonderful (supporting folk duos at 7pm, bursting into Glastonbury and playing shows with no amps or working equipment) that has all led them to where they stand today. Thriving with chaos yet with a defining sound behind it all, they’ve taken the punches and never stopped - a burning ambition and a gang mentality that means they can take on anyone. Alongside bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes, they’ve managed to capture something that many bands search for years to find. All natural, authentic and immediate, Shame’s world doesn’t need to be a beacon of the future, but rooted in the here and now - learning how to deal with it and how we can all get better. Still finding out who they can be, the journey itself to that point is just as important.

“I don’t think any of us set out for anything,” notes Sean. “It was just there as a pipe dream…”

“It’s been a three-year existential crisis,” smiles Steen. “We never had some pivotal moment where we sat down and manufactured an image, or what we’d want to be perceived as or anything. It never happened. We’re sort of still clueless, still creating an idea of what we want to be. I don’t think we know what we want to be; we’re 20.”

Meeting at school, Shame experienced more in their younger years than many. From the beginning it was clear they were onto something different than the rest of their classmates, discovering life’s teenage speed bumps together. Josh was hooked on music from the moment he was given a copy of Sum 41’s ‘All Killer, No Filler’ at the age of three, he and Eddie would chat and listen to Nirvana together, while Eddie and Steen would take in their parents’ rich musical tastes that would go from the 70s right up to the modern day.

While they found a home within each other, that physical manifestation can be traced back to one place in particular: The Queen’s Head. Nestled down the road from Brixton Academy’s looming hall, it flows and spits with an attitude that would become a defining inspiration for everything Shame now represent - subconsciously informing that mentality where every challenge can be overcome, and the spirit it all signifies.

“The first time we went there was me, Forbes and Steen and a couple of our mates,” recalls Eddie, “and we went to see a gig there which was Childhood, King Krule, Jerkcurb and the Fat Whites.”

“Charlie [Forbes]’ dad got us in,” continues Steen, flashing back to a night that lit a fuse in him. “I had no idea of, or interest, in any music that was happening at that moment. I was still laying my head in the 1980s, wasn’t really thinking about the present. That was the first gig where something interesting happened in London with bands for me. You hear of those Iggy Pop and David Bowie gigs that you’d never be able to see. You won’t go see a gig like that, but I never thought I’d be able to see a gig that’s chaotic and in your face and has this type of music where people of our generation are interested. At that gig, that was where it all was in one place.”

“We didn’t even watch the Fat Whites that night. I remember - I was a little stoner kid - seeing a naked guy on stage and thinking, ‘Wooaaaaaaahhhh - wanna go McDonald’s?” he laughs. “I don’t think it properly had an impact until we came back to The Queen’s Head…”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row full_width="stretch_row