On The Road with Ray-Ban Envision: Theme Park
It’s only been a couple of month’s since our favourite tropical indie pop upstarts Theme Park released their self-titled debut through our friends over at Transgressive, but having been with them since the fledgling days of ‘Milk’ in 2011, we were never going to be too comfortable with the whole long distance relationship thing, so we decided it was high time we had a proper catch up.
It seems like we both spent February getting a little too over-excited, for us it was the never ending stream of surprise releases and returning legends, for them it was of course mostly about the release of that, rather brilliant, aforementioned album. “We had big party plans for the day of the release” explains Miles Haughton, one half of the sibling duo that fronts this trio, when I ask him about their celebratory antics, “but we had a hectic schedule that day. We got home at like midnight, our drummer had bought loads of champagne. We were going to have all our friends over and go crazy but everything stacked up” he continues before Marcus Haughton chimes in “so we played a bit of Call of Duty, drank the Champagne and put on a Rolling Stones record. That was our party!” Our invite must have got lost in the mail!
“It certainly felt like capturing a moment,” Oscar Manthorpe says when asked how they feel about the album with a little bit of distance “I don’t see it as like ‘This is what we’re all about, this is the end of us’.” “Obviously it’s this thing that you build towards” Miles interjects “but if you really do it properly, a creative thing should always be growing and changing, so it’s nice to have that out there, I’m glad it exists in the world, and I’m glad we got nervous and anxious about it, but it’s just the beginning we hope.”
“We’ve been touring pretty solidly since” he explains. “We actually only finished two weeks back, and now we’ve got Festivals to get ready for in the summer and our Ray-Ban show.” Their next live outing is indeed set to be part of Ray-Ban‘s Envision tour, a series of regional outings that look to align lens characteristics and designs with a live experience. In this particular case they’re matching Ray-Ban lenses treated with hard-coating to resist abrasion and scratches with an ‘Impact Resistant’ event in a Boxing Gym, more specifically a Theme Park gig in the West Country Boxing Gym in Bristol. Thankfully Theme Park haven’t been subjected to too many hard knocks themselves over the past couple of years, and apparently the guys don’t really fight that much “I spar with Oscar, I think I could be quite good in the ring,” Miles says with a wry smile on his face.
“We’re really looking forward to it” We actually played our first ever show in Bristol. We did four shows undercover as a band called Lego Land before we were ready to play as Theme Park. We’ve actually got a recording of that show somewhere but it was like 5 years ago now.” “I like to imagine the show will just be us playing while everyone just going about their boxing business and not really paying attention to us” muses Oscar.
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With the West Country Boxing Gym being famous for nurturing young boxing talent, we asked the guys whether they felt anyone had helped nurture them along the way. “We’re still at that fledging stage!” Marcus laughs before talking about how much his school influenced the band “Our school was really good for music so there are a few characters in my musical education who’re big figures to us, and also I know, to the guys in Bombay Bicycle Club. We had a really great Jazz teacher called Fergus Ried, who died sadly, but he was just a really big guy and he was more than a teacher in the sense that the jazz was…it was quite a community in the school and things. He was really cool. In an actual rock and roll sense, we’ve sort of made our own trail but it was useful at school to have other bands doing it before us. They were the same age as us so it doesn’t quite feel like it fits this category but they were people that inspired us because in the holidays they’d be going to play at Reading and Leeds or something and so it became something very tangible, something you could do rather than something like unobtainable.”
“I don’t know” is Oscar’s answer. “To be honest, I’ve never felt like I’ve had a “guru” or someone who’d inspired me to go and do a particular kind of music. I had great music teachers but yeah, it has definitely always been about just friends for me, people who you can jam with and who will inspire little riffs, someone who get’s your style but brings something new as well. I think we’re just slowly getting better and it’s fun just to go where we want to go in that sense.”
Creativity is something Ray-Ban are encouraging with their Envision series, and creatively Theme Park certainly don’t seem to be tiring. “We’ve been playing these songs for a while now” Miles posits, “so there are elements I feel close to and others that I’ve moved on from already. I’m already thinking about what to do next, what things I want to focus on. For me the lyrical element is really important and I’d like to get back to a place where that comes first in my mind, it slipped a bit with the last record when we were rushed for time. It’s like when you start back at school and you’re hand writing is really nice to begin with but by the end of the year you’re just scrawling.”
On a personal level, Oscar agrees they have to move forward “I like it when bands keep a really unified sound across all their albums but they somehow manage to sound different. A natural progression is what we’re after I guess. We don’t feel pressurised to go and make something completely different but we don’t want to just go through the motions either. I feel like we can get better, organically.” Marcus nods in agreement “That would be a nice thing to aim for! I’ve always been impressed with band’s that come back and they feel like they’ve tangibly improved, not improved actually, just like they’ve really sat down and thought about it.” Miles feels the same, pulling out a rather poetic analogy from His Dark Materials book series. “There is a girl who has this natural skill set, I can’t remember why but she looses it at some point and has to work hard to re-learn it manually. It’s like if you’ve done something naturally, like our first record, it’s much more effort to then go back and to it cerebrally, but it’s more satisfying and worth while in the end.”
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Theme Park play the Ray-Ban Envision Tour at the West Country Boxing Gym Bristol on 25 May.
Win tickets to the Ray-Ban Envision Tour here.
Watch, get inspired and upload your vision project, your idea to show the world who you are. Ray-Ban will also choose the coolest and most extraordinary idea and bring it to life this September, as the 5th and final special London event.
Follow Ray-Ban on Twitter. and the hashtag #ENVISIONSERIES. Like Them on Facebook.
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Photographs by Sebastien Dehesdin
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