An interview with Shanghai Treason

An interview with Shanghai Treason

What inspired the name of the band? What are your influences?

The band name is a play on the term ‘High Treason’, but like you fucked it up so you ‘Shanghai’d’ it – hence Shanghai Treason. Plus apparently there’s a million bands already called High Treason so don’t want to make life any harder for ourselves than it already is.

As individuals we have a varied range of influences though there is a common ground of most of it sitting somewhere in the punk world, or at least adjacent to it. As a band we take pretty clear influence from a lot of the big Celtic Punk bands – Dropkick Murphy’s, Flogging Molly, The Real McKenzie’s to name a few! But I don’t think we sound exactly like any of those bands, and when those clear influences and our individual (possibly more subtle) influences meet in the middle, that’s where we get our own take on the genre and that’s where our best stuff comes from!

How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?

We tend to base our songs around a riff on one the folkier instruments – banjo, accordion, bouzouki etc. – that’s definitely the centrepiece in our sound. Our multi instrumentalist Hardy normally writes this first then we help grow the song into a harder hitting full band version in the room together. I think the main goal instrumentally is to make the kind of songs that we’re gonna love playing live and the crowd are going to go crazy for, we’re definitely that kind of fun, live energy focused band. Once the instrumental details are ironed out our Sam (vocalist) writes his lyrics and vocal part and throws them on the track. I’m only the drummer – I just hit things at the back, so I can’t speak to his intentions 100%, but to me our lyrics tend to tell a story, that seems to be the focus to his lyrics to me. Sometimes it could be political, sometimes it could be personal, it could just be about the music itself, but I think the story to go along with each song makes things a bit more interesting and gives you a bit more to delve into than it just solely being a big dumb song to get drunk to.

How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?

We tend to base our songs around a riff on one the folkier instruments – banjo, accordion, bouzouki etc. – that’s definitely the centrepiece in our sound. Our multi instrumentalist Hardy normally writes this first then we help grow the song into a harder hitting full band version in the room together. I think the main goal instrumentally is to make the kind of songs that we’re gonna love playing live and the crowd are going to go crazy for, we’re definitely that kind of fun, live energy focused band. Once the instrumental details are ironed out our Sam (vocalist) writes his lyrics and vocal part and throws them on the track. I’m only the drummer – I just hit things at the back, so I can’t speak to his intentions 100%, but to me our lyrics tend to tell a story, that seems to be the focus to his lyrics to me. Sometimes it could be political, sometimes it could be personal, it could just be about the music itself, but I think the story to go along with each song makes things a bit more interesting and gives you a bit more to delve into than it just solely being a big dumb song to get drunk to.

Why do you write the sort of music that you do?

I think the fact you don’t see too many people doing this genre, particularly where we’re from, that drew us to it. Like if we were five guys playing like average indie or pop punk or something I don’t think we’d stand out at all. The minute you’ve got a banjo and an accordion on stage you stand out and you can do a lot of different things musically by bringing in these less traditionally punk/rock elements! And having a guy in your band who can play those instruments to the standard he does, we’d have to be idiots not to take advantage of that!

What we didn’t necessarily know was that there was a really passionate, supportive community based around this music, and that’s helped us so much starting out and growing the band to where it is now as quickly as we have! I guess when the market isn’t completely over saturated with people doing the exact same thing as you, there’s a level of demand for what you’re supplying. Who knew?

How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?

We tend to choose the songs that are gonna get people moving and singing along, we want the shows to be a fun, high energy experience for everyone involved, and some songs just serve that purpose better than others! We definitely want a balance and a bit of variety in the set though, for there to be peaks and troughs and everything not just at 100% the whole time! Also we haven’t played a gig in a while and we’ve probably all got incredibly unfit over the past year of lockdown so we’ll probably need a break too. So yeah, we’ll throw a couple of curveballs in there to balance things out but generally, it’s the big, anthemic, energetic songs in there we want to be playing and I’m sure that’s what people want to hear.

How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?

We tend to choose the songs that are gonna get people moving and singing along, we want the shows to be a fun, high energy experience for everyone involved, and some songs just serve that purpose better than others! We definitely want a balance and a bit of variety in the set though, for there to be peaks and troughs and everything not just at 100% the whole time! Also we haven’t played a gig in a while and we’ve probably all got incredibly unfit over the past year of lockdown so we’ll probably need a break too. So yeah, we’ll throw a couple of curveballs in there to balance things out but generally, it’s the big, anthemic, energetic songs in there we want to be playing and I’m sure that’s what people want to hear.

What plans do you have for the future?

We’re releasing our debut full length album at some point in the relatively near future, coming out on Black Dingo Productions, and I can’t wait for people to hear it! We’ve released 3 singles off of that so far, and they’ll keep coming pretty regularly up to its release! We’ve worked with Dan Booth (Ferocious Dog) and Luca (The Rumjacks/Black Dingo Productions) producing it so it’s cool to have that kind of link to bands doing a similar thing but who’ve been doing it a lot longer, and it’s been invaluable to us having them on board!

We’re also playing a few festivals over summer, and we just announced a UK tour supporting The Rumjacks early next year, which will be our biggest, longest tour yet, and it’s a pretty huge deal for us getting our first tour back after this mess of a year with such an established, well loved band in the genre! I can’t wait to get out there and play these songs and meet everyone who’s shown us so much support online, it’s gonna be a blast!