The unpredictable evolution of Jordan Cardy and RAT BOY

As an Essex girl myself, born in Chelmsford, I say that with no disrespect to reality TV personalities like Gemma Collins and Joey Essex, but simply to remind others that the southeast county is more than the sum of these incredibly polished parts.

Essex has an impressive history of alternative subculture. It’s a county that spawned cult 70s pub rockers Dr. Feelgood, who were from Canvey Island, and 80s electronic icons Depeche Mode who hailed from Basildon. Dave Rowntree, the drummer for Britpop paragons Blur was born in Colchester and alt-rockers The Horrors formed in Southend-On-Sea. The Pink Toothbrush - an alternative nightclub in Rayleigh, famed for its sticky floors and legendary live performances in the ‘80s from pop stalwarts Culture Club and Hip Hop icons Ice T and KRS-One - recently celebrated its fortieth birthday, bucking the nationwide trend of small venue closures. This history lesson does have a purpose: subcultures thrive in satellite towns, disrupting the banality of everyday suburban life.

Whether he was directly influenced by these cultural instigators or not, Essex native Jordan Cardy grew up in the same county. He began creating his own riotous anthems whilst he was at college, uploading them to Soundcloud under the moniker RAT BOY - a name bestowed upon him by his classmates due to his supposed rodent-like features. In between hanging around at local skate parks and losing his job at Wetherspoons - which he memorably documented in the lyrics to single “Sign On” - armed with a keyboard, guitar and a laptop, he excitedly cherry-picked from his favourite genres: hip-hop, indie and Britpop.

In 2014, he self-released his debut EP, The Mixtape, and sent out copies to record labels. “No one was interested for like, a year,” Cardy laughs - now aged 27 - as the musician reflects on his early attempts to get RAT BOY off the ground. Someone who inevitably did give The Mixtape their attention was Babyshambles bassist Drew McConnell, who was instrumental in Cardy’s signing to Parlophone in 2015.

A lot has changed since then. Cardy is no longer “young, dumb, living off Mum” as he sardonically stated on “Sign On”. As RAT BOY, he has released two EPs - The Mixtape and 2015’s Neighbourhood Watch - and he has two full length records under his belt - the 2017 debut LP Scum and its follow up Internationally Unknown, released two years later. He has supported Liam Gallagher on tour, amassed an impressive global following in China, Japan and America, and his song “Knock Knock Knock” was sampled on Kendrick Lamar’s track “Lust”, who he cites as one of his favourite artists.

Amidst all of these accolades and experiences, there are two things that have remained constant for Cardy over the past decade: his love of his home county Essex and the camaraderie and commitment to his friends and bandmates Liam Haygarth, Harry Todd and Noah Booth.

Despite Cardy insisting they “didn’t know what they were doing” when he reflects on their first gig as RAT BOY at The Bassment, a local venue in Chelmsford, he knew well enough that mucking about with his friends on stage - Haygarth on bass, Todd on guitar and Booth on drums - was a total riot. Having caught one of the band’s early live shows at The Haunt in Brighton as part of The Great Escape festival in 2015 - where Todd scaled one of the venue’s giant pillars mid-set - and witnessed a full stage invasion at the band’s sold out 2016 London show at Heaven, I can say with confidence that RAT BOY’s gigs were fuelled by comedic and chaotic spirit.

“We look back on all those stage invasions and stuff and we’re like, ‘how did that happen?’” Cardy laughs. His disbelief extends to his recent London gig at The Lower Third on the iconic Denmark Street in Soho. He seems happy to share that his fans’ enthusiasm remains the same. “We always think it's funny how, even during the laid back slow songs, people still crowd surf and split the pit.” The four friends have been channelling this chaotic spirit for over ten years, but it’s only recently that Cardy has officially confiremd that RAT BOY are a band.

So, what does this new RAT BOY record sound like? It’s been five years since the release of their second Internationally Unknown. What have these Essex boys been cooking up in their new recording space? It’s a converted barn on the outskirts of Chelmsford, dedicated to all of RAT BOY’s output, where the band go to record, rehearse and mess around. “I love being in the studio with the rest of the band,” Cardy shares.

Whilst there’s generally a lot of creative collaboration when the friends are recording together, occasionally, Cardy’s bandmates will happily veto his ideas – which he’s grateful for: “I can kind of go off in a different direction sometimes like, ‘I really wanna do this old ‘80s stuff’ and everyone was like, ‘maybe not...’ [so] it’s good to have people saying ‘that's a bad idea.’ It was good that we were honest with each other.”

“The studio is still a work in progress,” Cardy continues. “When we first set up the space for us to do live recording, we played the songs every day for about two weeks and the place was pretty gross by the end.”

From this collective grossness RAT BOY’s third record was spawned: SUBURBIA CALLING. A spin on The Clash’s iconic album London Calling, the LP pays homage to Cardy’s home county. Having relocated from Chelmsford to Maldon, spending so much time in Essex during Covid meant that Cardy’s enthusiasm for his roots - and his desire to resurrect the irrepressible teenage spirit that permeated all of his work - came flooding back to him when he was writing. The album’s title track is an amalgamation of these passions, with its swaggering indie rhythms and Cardy’s classic Essex intonation - with lyrics like “The only way is Essex, ‘cos London’s too expensive / You may have turned your nose up but one day you’ll confess it” - casually trying to sway listeners who have made snap judgements about the county to submit to its charm.

As well as his enduring love for Essex, Cardy wanted to incorporate his fresh appreciation for Britpop into the LP. “You know when you're a teenager and every three months you get into a different type of music? I’m kind of still like that,” he shares when detailing how he became obsessed with the genre again during the pandemic. The everyday lyrical content of Britpop songs inspired the musician to continue writing about the subjects that were on his own doorstep. “I was really enjoying writing stuff that I thought that my friends would find funny,” he offers. “I didn't use any of the ideas that I had before for an album, I just wrote everything within about three or four months.”

This was a relatively fast-paced process for the musician, who admits he has struggled in the past to finalise ideas and stay excited when working on new material. Reconnecting with legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, The Cranberries, Blur) was particularly important for Cardy. “I think the decision to get a producer in to help get everything over the line was the best idea,” he reflects. “Stephen is one of my favourite producers. I worked with him in 2016, but this time, coming [to the studio] with one solid idea worked a lot better.” After two weeks of live recording the new songs with the band in their rehearsal space, Cardy handed them over to Street who helped to shape SUBURBIA CALLING into a cohesive body of work.

There are a few standout tracks on the new record that the songwriter cites as his favourites: “Best Is Yet To Come” and “Mob Mentality”. Cardy also wrote “She’s The One” about his wife, but is understandably bashful when asked about her reaction to it, offering a brief “I think she likes it, fingers crossed.”

The “Best Is Yet To Come” was a demo from 2017 that the band originally worked on at Booth’s studio, which is nearby the new RAT BOY HQ. It was a “struggle” to complete lyrically. “I found notes from when I wrote bits of the chorus and it was like 3am sometime after going on a night out,” the songwriter recalls. The band recorded multiple versions of the track, experimenting with different time signatures and chord changes, before producer Street was able to cut it into a full song in the studio. “Mob Mentality” was a last minute addition to the album. “We spent all night playing it live and recording it. All the other songs had a lot of thought into them, so it just kind of stuck out.” Haygarth mixed the track and they sent it over to Street, and it became the album's opener.

Cardy’s authenticity and confidence as a songwriter is the result of a ten-year learning curve, navigating recording studio etiquette, record label expectations and internalised pressure to appeal to the masses. He has evolved from being a self-releasing artist, who signed to a major label Parlophone, to being picked up by independent label Hellcat. “I used to be in the studio all night. I would sleep on the studio floor and I used to be so stressed about every little detail, which isn't healthy,” Cardy shares, when reflecting on his earlier releases. “I think with the first album, Scum, I felt a lot of pressure trying to make stuff for the mainstream. Not that that is a bad thing, I was sort of taking the advice in the wrong way. I was thinking, ‘oh, I shouldn't make music like this. I should try and write in a different way.’”

Cardy elaborates: "Maybe because I was on a major label, I thought that's what they wanted. When you're young, you look at what else is popular and you're like ‘I should try and make something like this’ but I don’t think that music ever really came out when I was trying to make it like that.”

Cardy says has been happy with every record he has released to date, but learning to ignore the perception of what something “should” sound like has taken him some time. Working alongside Tim Armstrong - frontman of punk band Rancid and co-founder of Hellcat Records - on his second album, Internationally Unknown, gave Cardy some of the clarity he needed. “Tim taught me a lot about writing for yourself and writing about what you enjoy, so it comes more naturally,” he shares. “With this new album, I just wanted to write about where I'm from and that sort of story. I wasn't really thinking about ‘will I get a radio play? Or will people like it?’ I think being on Hellcat records really helped. They let you be free with what you want to write about and the music you want to make.”

Another key thing that has changed substantially in the past decade is social media, and the way musicians use it to share their work. As a teenager in the late 2010s, Cardy felt at ease uploading videos of RAT BOY’s Jackass-like stunts and tour diaries online. The internet helped him to gain momentum as a new artist and to connect with the fans who came to his shows. Now, in the current landscape of social media giant TikTok, he confesses that he feels a little out of the loop. “I was trying to post a TikTok the other day, putting all weird filters on it, and I was like ‘I wouldn’t have done this when I was like 18, I would have done something more interesting’ on it, so I'm just trying to like learn how to use like social media again - which is kind of funny really.”

Something that Cardy still finds gratifying and takes great pride in is making the music videos that accompany RAT BOY’s singles. Like many of his previous visuals, the video for single “Suburbia Calling” features the band playing their instruments and messing around on their home turf - long-time RAT BOY fans may even recognise the Burberry stripes on the random car door in the garage they’re playing in - a throwback to the vehicle they cruised around in for “Sign On”. In this new video however, they’ve upgraded to a red model with the word “Suburbia” emblazoned across the windscreen. Cardy has always worked alongside the same director, Tommy Davis, who he describes as the fifth member of RAT BOY.

“Tommy actually met us at our gig at Rayleigh Mill in 2015, and then he came on tour with us after that, shooting all the tour diaries, so he really feels like our family,” Cardy shares. In the past, shooting videos locally presented its challenges. In 2018, the main stressor was weather - “how are we going to get Essex like LA?” - but with the new record being all about Essex, this time there was no hassle trying to make the likes of Rayleigh and Chelmsford look authentic.

Ultimately, with his feet firmly on home ground and his friends by his side, Cardy is ready to embrace whatever comes next for RAT BOY. “We’re just all really excited to play shows,” he enthuses. “There’s another EP written, which I really want to get out after the album, and I just want to keep dropping music and not have a big gap [between releases] again. That’s what I'm really excited about.”