Get to know Sleepless Pleasures…
What are your main musical and non-musical influences?
Brad (drummer):
For musical influences, I would say hip-hop and breakbeats make up a lot of where my drumming is influenced from. It allows me to make the music feel bouncy which in turn makes it feel easy to dance to. Non-musical influences for us as a band is the "backrooms" theme, deriving a lot of our visual image from horror-like elements, combined with the smart classy attire of the 50s.
Reuben (frontman):
Typically we have always tried to blend together our individual favourite artists as well as the artists that we all have in common.
My main stylings have always been a strong mix of 90s alternative with 50s/60s pop:
-A mix of 90s alternative: Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies, Weezer, Queen Adrena, Violent femmes, Jesus and Mary chain
-50s/60s pop: Elvis, Ritchie Valens, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Dion, Captain Beefheart, Etta James, Lloyd prince
As for non musical influences my biggest artistic influences come from my love of old movies that i grew up watching with my Nan, mainly westerns. I always adored the strange melancholic nostalgia that follows cowboy movies from the 50s
Abbey (guitar/vocals): Main musical influences
Musically, I heavily connect to 60s/70s soul and rock artists such as Janis Joplin, Sam Cooke, the Beatles, the Doors, Bowie, Barbara Keith and as for more modern artists, Black Country New Road, starcrawler and Billy Nomates. Artistically, I’ve always loved art and film, and fashion, notably daisies (1966) and Clockwork Orange, I derive a lot of my music from fashion movements such as punk and subcultures!
Theo (bassist):
My main musical influence is definitely Weezer, specifically Rivers Cuomo, who writes all the music. Their first two albums will forever have a place in my heart as the pieces that got me into music. My biggest non-musical influence is tough to say, but I’m a big fan of Jack Kerouac’s book “On the Road” about a man who hitchhikes all around the US during the late fifties, going to jazz bars, meeting people and romanticising life. The way the characters live their lives in that book is very inspiring to me.
At what age did you guys start to consider being an artist?
The youngest to start was Abbey (Guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist) :
I started singing when I was around 3, my parents have always been heavily into music as my dad has always played guitar and mum singing, Nan is a piano player, so it came to me to write music. I started with piano and cello, then moving to bass at 12, and began playing guitar properly at around 17. My parents always being supportive of my love for music really helped push me to want to explore it further.
Reuben(Frontman/guitarist):
I started playing guitar at age 13 after growing up with a housemates of my mum who played in bands all through the 60s. After watching and imitating him through my Childhood, I finally asked my brother for his old guitar that he never learnt to play properly. It was a “QTX” Stratocaster rip-off that was so cheap every note was chronically out of tune because of the high action on it. At the time, my dad didn’t have a lot of money, so I played on it for a year until my girlfriend at the time’s father bought me a second-hand Mexican Fender Mustang for my 15th birthday.
Brad (Drummer):
Since I was young, I had always wanted to be an artist, whether that was musically or not. I had tried to learn the guitar on multiple occasions but couldn't stick with it long enough before gaining a deep interest with the drums. I started drumming in the beginning of 2024 when I was 21, and have been playing and learning since then, and I could not have asked for anything better.
Theo(Bassist):
I think I must have been sixteen or so when I thought about getting into music, with me and Reuben’s first band, Blank Verse. We were terrible, jamming mainly in my bedroom, never getting a drummer aside from a friend’s partner stepping in on drums once as a favour.
A few of the songs from that era made their way into sleepless pleasures, like Hauntingly, a song that I knew as ‘Miranda’. I originally wanted to be a drummer, then a guitarist, and when I found the bass guitar, I liked how I could use it to add to jams and fill out the sound. I basically thought of it as an easier guitar, but when I kept playing I discovered so much more- how it could follow the guitars, or play an alternate melody. Bass is usually what I listen to in music: it’s deep, it’s powerful, it’s satisfying in a way that a guitar never truly can be.
All this is just to build an idea of you as a band for my readers to latch onto.
As a bonus if you wouldn’t mind disclosing any future event plans and releases you are willing to share and tease… :):
At the moment we have 3 gigs coming up for autumn so far, as well as we plan to release an EP before the year ends. We’re also currently experimenting playing with a fifth member who may potentially join the team…