Talking Shop: Screaming Lights

Watch Screaming Lights at Reading Festival on BBC Introducing

As shiny pop stars and the urban elite dominate the charts, new guitar bands are struggling to find a direction to lift indie music out of the landfill.

Liverpool five-piece Screaming Lights are in the leading pack, combining rock angst with clinical electronics.

Singer and songwriter Jay Treadell, who channels Thom Yorke and Kurt Cobain with his bleached hair, says guitar bands will rise again, people should not accept what they are given and that modern life is, basically, rubbish.

---

Is it difficult to get attention as a guitar band, given that guitars are out of fashion?

It is. We do use keyboards but we're definitely a band. We're not a drum machine with six keyboards and a woman with a painted face at the front.

I do find it frustrating because this is what people are getting given, and they will take what they're given. People don't look for music much any more. Things turn around, they always do. In a couple of years it will be guitar bands again.

One of the reasons guitar bands are struggling at the minute is that indie music had become so mainstream. The personal feel you'd get from an alternative band was murdered because they became mainstream and everyone got into it.

People are losing out on culture and real life and the pleasure of being themselves Jay Treadell

People I knew at school, people who were horrible scallies, were all of a sudden walking around with long hair and a Kings of Leon top on. It's been taken away from the real music fans. If we can survive through the time that keyboards and pop music are really prominent, then I think we'll be okay.

What are your songs about?

Growing up in the modern world, as it is now, is something I write about. Even though it's all I've ever known, it feels like a very strange, unnatural environment to me. It's the consumerism and being bombarded with things.

The media is backward because every day, it seems like something dreadful has happened that's never happened before. But if you were to go back 100 years, all these awful things happened. People wouldn't jump on the bandwagon and not let their kids play in the street or lock all their doors with three bolts on each one. There's such a big fear. That is something that runs through me daily.

The world feels a bit controlled, how there is a Carlsberg tap in every pub and every city centre is the same. But if you go anywhere in France, everywhere's different. People are losing out on culture and real life and the pleasure of being themselves.

If you could live in any era, what would you choose?

The obvious thing to go for is the 50s because it was the start of everything. But I also have a strange soft spot for 1977 to the early 80s where you had post-punk.

Who are your musical heroes?

Thom Yorke, David Byrne and Neil Young. When I was a kid, to my Dad, me listening to Neil Young was more important than me getting vegetables. It was always on.

Thom Yorke is a more recent thing - I couldn't believe a band like Radiohead exists. I just think everything about them is stunning. And David Byrne is just a pure artist and nothing else. That type of character inspires you to think it's possible to be like that.

Screaming Lights' album Like Angels is out in the UK on Monday. Jay Treadell was speaking to BBC News music reporter Ian Youngs.