Talking Tummyache

As I’m having breakfast, I jot down the talking points on scrap paper. I’ve never really done this before, so striking the delicate balance between preparation and candidness is a skill I haven’t yet mastered. But I try to swallow all the insecurity – after all, I’m just asking the questions.

In response to my final reminders, I receive a text asking whether the bandmates can come along to the interview, just to be “funny”.

And it bubbles right up again. The inner saboteur spits vitriol: “It’s a ruse, it’s a ruse! They’re only coming to laugh at you!”.

Luckily, once I get to the meeting place, it shuts up. And, as you could expect, this idea (further) proves itself completely irrational once I see them enter the small café, with all their gear that they swiftly stuff under the bar table.

The current line up of Tummyache is as follows: Josh Bannister on guitar, Linus Fenton on bass, Charlie McWilliams on drums, all led by the creator of the project – Soren Bryce. It’s their first time playing a show in Amsterdam, and as the day goes on I’ll watch some of them discover the little wonders of the city, with its proneness to coincidences, socio-spatial quirks and futuristic parking spaces.

Left to right: Soren, Linus, Josh, and Charlie (they are the hot merch).

Right off the bat, I get it out of the way and ask Soren the dreaded old question of describing Tummyache to those unfamiliar with the music.

“I think we just have fun. We talk about some pretty intense subjects, but we try to have a nice time and keep it light when we perform. Someone the other day described it as edgy and raw, but also, like, nice. [laughs] I guess it’s heavy music for people who also like to cry.”

We talk about how this is suggested by the name itself, the softness countered with a physical disturbance, a symptom of something worse underneath.

“I like the name because I feel like it really represents our personalities – obviously, cumulatively, we’ve all been through a lot of shit. But we’re also, you know, quite silly and fun. I thought it was tongue in cheek, a cute name for something that’s actually really bad.”

I throw it way back, and mention that I actually found her music through the feature she had on the song Nobody Knows off of Blackbear and Mike Posner’s collaboration project Mansionz from 2017. I was in middle school, and going through a trap/R&B/rap phase (if this surprises you, please remember we contain multitudes, also, it was middle school).* I ask her to look back on that time now. 

“It feels so long ago, cause I’ve lived like 5 different lives since then.”

Living in California as a teenager, Soren was playing small venue shows with her drummer friend, who also happened to be touring with Blackbear on his tours, and introduced him to Soren’s music. Blackbear liked what he heard, the two became friends and from there, she started to record for him. 

“I did a couple songs, actually. I’m an easter egg on Paragraphs, I’m the backing vocal track. But you can’t really hear that it’s me, cause he pitched it down a lot. I was just down to make music with whomever, and just happened to do really well. I think even that feature on Nobody Knows is a voice memo of me in my parents’ house, done on my shitty little keyboard thing. I asked whether he’d want me to come in and rerecord it, and he was like ‘no, that’s cool’. I thought we were going to re-do everything but he was just going to use that. I would have done it better if I had known!”

A lot can happen in 6 years. Blackbear settled down and started a family, and I don’t even know what Mike Posner’s up to anymore. 

“We’re just really different people now, but it was a nice era. It was good to see that, even at that level of the “rap game”, or whatever, that they’re still very nice people who are wholesome and not trying to be dicks – who were down to make music just to make it, and not trying to take advantage of you.”

On the topic of California, I ask about all the moving around – from there to New York City, to Nashville, to the United Kingdom where she currently resides – and the effect this has had on her creative process. She says she’s never been too precious about these things and never sets out for it to be a certain way. Mostly she writes in the way that feels most comfortable in the moment, which allows her to be very flexible. This changes, with age and herself, but she never gets stuck in one thing. 

“And when it does start to feel that way, I usually need to change something up because I don’t want to be trapped in it. And that’s kind of when Josh became involved, and we’ve been recording. And when I did the last record, Linus was playing on it – and the second album, that’s not out yet, Charlie played on. So it’s always new people coming and going. Before now, I was very insular. On Soak I did everything myself, except for having Linus on bass and my friend playing drums remotely. The second album I wanted to be more collaborative, so I had us all come in and play live together. Each time you make a record it’s different.”

Now, Tummyache is putting stuff out under Speedy Wunderground, Dan Carey’s label – a big name in the contemporary post-punk scene. Carey’s a Mercury prize nominated producer known for his work with bands like Squid, Black Midi, and Fontaines D.C. (among many others, including Tummyache’s friends Honeyglaze). 

“We just did the one single with him, Circling the Drain. It was very fun and very intense, we had to do it all in one day. I think that’s part of the thing – that you have to do it and finish it in one day, which is kind of nice. We brought him a song that we rehearsed a couple times, because we were going to be playing it live together. We did it in two takes, and it was to tape so we had to do it close to perfectly, basically. He’s kind of sneaky.”

Although they’ve mostly been quiet listeners until this point in the official interview, this is where she asks her bandmates to chime in on the experience. So Linus elaborates on what she means by ‘sneaky’: “While we were setting up he deliberately didn’t want us to play the song we were recording at all. So the first time we played the song that day, we were already recording. We only played the song twice in the whole day, and ended up going with the second take which is what you can hear now.”

“He wanted us to warm up with a different song, so that we wouldn’t get too stuck in the delivery of the one we came in to record. That was very interesting.”

From there, I change the subject to the scene itself. They tell me that, yes, there is a London post-punk scene (and I asked because some time ago, I read an interview with Dry Cleaning where they say there isn’t one, so this conflict interests me) but no, they don’t think they’re part of it – and don’t necessarily mean to. 

“We’re not even living in London at the moment. I feel like Tummyache did a lot in London, we sort of plateaued, I don’t know how much else we could do there, really. We did the Speedy thing, we played Windmill and Electric Ballroom… To me, London was never my end goal, I didn’t necessarily need to, like, be in a ‘London band’. I feel like it gives me more freedom to – and I know this from having moved around so many scenes – if you can sort of get to know a lot of different ones, it’s actually more beneficial to you, because once you’re too deep into one scene you kind of can’t leave. And that’s very much a thing in Nashville – if you get to a certain level there, and you’re a Nashville band and always play there, it’s really hard to leave that scene and go play other places because you’re so used to everyone being there for you. As soon as you step out into a different city and there’s no one there, you’re just like ‘oh fuck, I’m actually not as big as I thought I was’. [laughs] Whereas if you’re always playing lots of different places, it’s like you’re slowly collecting Pokémon. So I like that I always move.”

Speaking of venues and important stages, Soren got to perform with Declan McKenna at Glastonbury’s the Other Stage last year, and also at Reading and Leeds this year, along with Linus who’s now his full time touring bassist. That was Soren’s first Glastonbury, and the main difference to be noted was obviously the scale of the event.

“You have like two weeks of rehearsals, and there’s a lot of crew helping with set up which is strange cause I felt like they shouldn’t be helping me. [laughs] We’re very much plug and play, which is fun. It would be nice to play some of the good things, get a bit more of a production going, but I’m happy with how things are at the moment. I think we still have a very good live show because we’re all friends and we all like to have a nice time just playing music together, which I think is fun to watch. Hopefully. I guess you’ll see tonight.”

And see I did. But before I part ways with the band and reunite with them at the venue later, I ask about any culture shock moments they might have had so far, if any. After all, Amsterdam is its own little beast, but I didn’t anticipate the thing that would stick out to them.

“It’s so silly, we were like ‘oh yeah, we can drive to Amsterdam, that’s fine’, and when we got in last night I didn’t realize parking is so hard. And so we paid someone to use their parking space but she had to come let us in, we pulled our car up on this elevator and then it got taken into this robot car vending machine, and that was the first moment I was like ‘okay, we’re in a different place, this is weird.’”

When the time comes for us to meet again at the show, the aforementioned wonders of this place make themselves known. They tell me how they kept bumping into people they’ve met once in London, and then it turns out that one of their friends is actually in town (unfortunately, I don’t think he biked fast enough to join the concert), and how everyone’s so nice – but as I sit with them, there’s some nerves to be sensed. This perplexes me – audiences here are quite generous, in general. That’s why being in that small but mighty crowd while the band plays makes me so happy. The energy is palpable, and it’s not only them having fun, but the people too. The music is punchy and so loud (I was advised to bring earplugs. I didn’t. But I’m stupid, so don’t be like me!). Soon enough, a mosh pit breaks out, and Tummyache play what feels like all their punk songs back to back to back. Still, you can’t escape the softness: “Please don’t hurt each other”, Soren says from the stage. 

After the set is done, I go outside to catch a break and when I turn to my side Charlie is also there, cooling down in the ever typical drizzling Dutch rain, after what I can only imagine to be quite a killer workout with no breaks granted. Wide eyed and probably still high on all the adrenaline, he goes: “God, my legs feel like jelly, and I’ve been sitting down!”.

Tummyache will be back in the Netherlands this October to perform 3 shows at Left of the Dial in Rotterdam. The next record’s rollout is to be expected early next year, although it’s been finished for some time – from what I’ve been told, the subject matter of the album centres around some controversial events, so they’ve been trying to navigate how to handle the release publicly. You can now listen to the latest single, Circling the Drain, wherever you listen to your music, as well as purchase the 7” vinyl out from Speedy Wunderground. Speaking of vinyl, the band also teamed up with friends Heavy Heavy Hands, Dégage, and Josh’s band Slunk on “Bat Split Crazy”, a compilation out from Creative Friends Records, with the bands recorded straight to tape, 10 minutes each. Make sure to check out Slunk, the solo stuff from Linus, and Charlie’s drum videos if you find them [I didn’t I don’t know how to plug these sorry!].

*That’s why getting to sit down and do this with her feels so special, as so many decisions (big and small) led here, and I have the power of the Internet to thank for it. Twitter, as much as it sucked, also used to be quite a magical place for a teenager like me. Did I ever embarrass myself? Profusely! It’s all part of it. Even though I’m no longer an active user (frankly, fuck Elon Musk), I still kept the account to look back on and cherish even the minor connections it allowed me to make. Like this one! So I guess the lesson here is: use the Internet… the right way? Don’t underestimate its border-breaking (…and, I believe unfortunately, border-making) powers.