Sunderland 5-piece Athletes in Paris are not particularly notable athletes, neither do they have any huge links with Paris, which is a bit disappointing. What they do have, however, are addictive 80s style pop-rock songs, as well as impressively thick accents, which have had them winning over crowds across the British Isles. IP1 caught up with the group before their ‘Tour de Freshers’ gig at the Grinning Rat to talk creative busking and broken hands….

Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
We are Athletes in Paris and we play a nice blend of indie pop rock. We’re from the North East of England, but people call us Geordies anyway.

I really like the name, how did it come about?
Matt’s dad had a band in the 80s with the same name, so it came from him really. They played very different music to us, but we thought it sounded quite current, plus it was by far the best idea for a name we had. We’re lazy as fuck, basically!

You’re getting pretty well known for the very think accents that you sing in. Is this an intentional thing, or something that developed over time?
It’s a bit of both. When I (Matt) was younger I used to sing with an American tinge, which wasn’t very cool looking back on it. But when I was growing up I remember reading articles on the bands I was listening to- like The Futureheads and Maximo Park- and they were all talking about how you should be singing in your own accent. So, gradually over the years as I wrote more songs over the years, I started to sing more naturally.

You’ve just kicked off your tour, how is it going so far?
It’s going very well. This is our third gig, though it feels like we’ve been away forever. It’s quite an easy tour in terms of the amount of dates, but we spend most of our time recording when we’re not gigging, so it gets tiring! We do a lot of street busking to get exposure too, as it makes us feel like we’re working hard as opposed to just sitting around waiting to play. We like to take our music to the people, man- we’ve been around Suffolk College earlier today playing a little bit of our stuff, for example. An estate agents allowed us in to play some tunes earlier as well; they bought us coffee and filmed us for their twitter account, so sometimes the busking works quite well!

Your music has a pretty distinctive sound, who are your main influences?
We all have different influences individually but collectively there’s a lot of 80s stuff- Sting, Prefab Sprout, Phil Collins, that sort of thing. Then there’s bands like Friendly Fires, who are recent but have loads of dance-tinged stuff. Our individual influences have a nice contrast- Mooch is into a lot of new bands, whereas Matt likes more 60s/70s music. Plus Ross was in a hardcore band before we started- we wanted that real sort of pop vibe, so what better than a rock drummer!

Have these different influences had an effect on your songwriting?
Of course! It influences the sound of the band- the more we work together, the more we start to realise our limitations and what our sound is. There are certain bands, mainly local groups, who we can see as a direct influence on us. All the big bands like The Cure are more of a subconscious thing; people say we sound like Talking Heads, but none of us have ever really listened to them. It’s more of a reflection on the listeners record collection, rather than what we were aiming for as songwriters. Not that that’s a bad thing!

What are your plans for the future?
We’ve got our album Headbowl Custard coming out soon; it’s all recorded, we’re just finishing it up. It was supposed to come out earlier this year but there were a few setbacks. Like back in February, Matt broke his hand in three places after Mooch tried kicking him up the arse and caught his hand instead. So that didn’t help. After we’ve sorted the album out we’ll get back on the road. We’d like to go to the same venues with larger crowds next time around, but who knows where we’ll be in 2 years time!

Headbowl Custard will be released in late 2012/early 2013, provided that no-one breaks anymore bones. Athletes in Paris are also on Facebook and Twitter!