PEACH have had a slow and steady gestation, initially forming in 2019 between JeanPaul (JP) Jacyshyn (Guitar) and Andy Sutor (Drums) over their shared love of 90’s and 00’s desert-rock, punk and grunge, before swiftly recruiting Tim Cooke (Baritone Guitar) and shaping their initial ideas. It was a little later in the summer of 2021, not helped by the global pandemic grinding the world to a halt, when Ellie Godwin (vocalist) joined and PEACH took their final form.
Reflecting on the state of the band in the earlier days, the trio had actually managed to get quite far along before they’d even found a vocalist: “We were actually recording, just in a different studio” JP reveals. “We had like, four or five tracks and we’re like ‘oh we’re just going to record these instrumental and then we can just pop the vocals on top because it’s that easy’”, he laughs, “Yeah, so obviously that didn’t go to plan at all. But that was the first time Ellie came down to the studio, that’s where we all just chatted, had a few beers, listened to the recordings. Then we went away for a bit, the recordings didn’t feel right and how we went about recording it.” Bringing Ellie into the fold seemed to be the catalyst to get PEACH moving again as Andy describes: “Ellie had started writing for vocal parts, then that started changing the arrangements of the songs, then we started writing new songs. By the time we had seven or eight, we were like ‘OK, we need to do this again, really’”.
It’s worth baring in mind that this is still in the uncertain times of 2021, lockdowns were coming and going, live music was taking tentative steps forwards and everything was still up in the air. “I think also, like not to mention the whole fact that it was in the pandemic, we kind of decided in the end to just rework them again with her. Because before it was just like passing ideas back and forth. It took a while to get into the room together, which was… It wasn’t the most conventional time Ellie to join, obviously” Tim reflects of the time.
Whilst not being conventional, it was seemingly exactly what Ellie needed as well: “Yeah, it gave me my mojo back a bit. Like many other musicians or anyone, everyone lost their mojo and it just gave me a bit of a kick up the bum, really” she smiles. “It was good, because Andy sent me some little recordings, which I think the first one was ‘Already There’. I was just like, yes, I mean, I want to do that!”
From the word go the band were already eyeing up a unique sound for themselves, notably with Tim Cooke opting for a Baritone Guitar as opposed to the more “traditional” bass guitar for the bands low-end. “I’ve never played bass to be honest. I was a guitarist, I guess it goes back to how it started. It was JP, Sutor and myself deciding to turn up with a pretty raw sound. I don’t want to say ‘not be conventional’ or anything like that, but I think we were rehearsing in a studio that had a Baritone. I’d never played one before and then I loved it” Tim clarifies. “You hear a lot of people saying it doesn’t replicate the bass. I would say well just come to a PEACH show then! It’s a bit like a nasal like muddiness. from octave pedals that sounds a bit different. I’m quite happy to keep that. I think it’s something we all wanna keep.”
“We were like ‘OK, we need to do this again, really’”
The band took to studio in February of 2022, opting to work with producer Peter Miles (Architects, Dodie, Petrol Girls, TesseracT) at his Middle Farm Studios in Devon. They had an approach in mind this time, wanting to stick to the ethos of the artists that influenced them, such as QOTSA, PJ Harvey and eleven. “I spoke to my friend Simon, who’s good friends of Pete, I’ve met Pete like once before and then that’s when we kind of started to talk about doing it live to tape and in the countryside” JP explains.
“That was an amazing process because so many of us are used to [production] just taking forever. Then you go old school and you just record it all. You have little manoeuvring space to edit anything. We had minimal amounts of overdubs because of the lack of channels on the desk. You mix as you go and for analog mixing, you’re doing it per song manually”, Andy acknowledges when reflecting on the recording process itself.
The nature of recording live to tape adds a certain authenticity, allowing a listener to feel like they’re in the room as the album is being tracked. It enables moments like the seamless transition from opening track ‘Dread’ into ‘Care’ to sound as natural as possible. “That’s something we came up with for a live segue”, Andy admits, “Then Pete said, just do that in the room, those two songs will just be as one. We had to make a conscious decision of where the splits were, because on quite a few songs, we just went from one to the other to the other. You can hear me fucking gasping for air between each song. You can hear me breathing. I personally love all of that, it’s like all my old favourite records. I’m so happy that he encouraged us to just capture all of that, you know, made a big difference for the overall vibe, I thought.”
One of the most interesting aspects of the production process was figuring out the best way to track the vocals, wanting them to be live with the rest of band, but as JP tells, the band’s preferences set their own unique challenges: “We didn’t want to wear headphones because what you hear in your headphones isn’t what you hear in the room. So to keep the atmosphere, we opted to not have headphones. Pete came up with the idea of just having her vocal blasting through this old Peavy amplifier with distortion on it.”
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“Yeah, it was really cool”, Ellie reflects of the production process. “I hadn’t finished all the lyrics to all the songs, that was really tense. I was just quickly writing them down and I was like ‘well that’s the lyrics to that song I guess, that’s how that’s going to go from now on’. So there was that kind of like fear in my head for a while.” Andy quickly adds to Ellie’s point with a chuckle: “So that was a small limitation with that setup, if Ellie decided to change anything we would have the original vocal track spilling into the mix. Luckily she sang them perfectly every time.”
The climactic finale of the album comes in the form of ‘Settle Down’, the longest and most elaborate track on the album with regards to instrumentation, with the band seeing themselves accompanied by Trumpet, Keys and a Hammond Organ. “I had an idea that it was it needed. The studio has got a lot of musicians that are just there always there. One of them is PJP (Patrick Jones Pearson), who plays in L.Y.R. as well as songwriting. I really wanted to get him to play keys on it. Another person was Simon Dobson, who’s a composer and he’s an incredible trumpet player. I just thought getting them involved, it’ll give it a bit of a different sound. With regards to the trumpet, we had no idea what he was going to do it”, JP discloses.
“We didn’t even know he was going to bring a trumpet necessarily” Andy says with a smile. “He plays multiple instruments and he was going to bring something to try out on one of the songs. It just happened to be a trumpet and it turned out to be fucking perfect. The extra instrumentation made the whole fucking record for me. We were sat in the room listening to ‘Settle Down’, me and JP were literally crying because I think it was like, two or three years of build up to this point of us cobbling together ideas. Having Simon do that trumpet part, backing up Ellie’s amazing vocal melody. It was just magic in the room, everybody was feeling really emotional while they were doing it, like this is the best thing we’ve ever done.”
“You can hear me fucking gasping for air between each song”
“[The album] was mixed and mastered the last day of the recording. We left with it done. Had to sit on it this whole time and its been horrible!” exclaims JP jokingly. Andy elaborates further: “Like what was finally printed was was it like what you just done. There was no other studio trickery or anything like that afterwards. So when Pete did the digital masters for us to take away, me and JP listened to it about four times on the way home from Dartmoor.”
JP laughs as Andy continues: “That’s been so frustrating. We were like, when are we gonna put it out? How the fuck do we do that?! Then we started realising how much work we had in front of us. Self release, when’s the best time, we sort of chatted to industry friends of ours who gave us lots of varying advice. In the end we got so frustrated that we were like, let’s stop listening to everybody else and just pick a fucking date. Do some gigs.”
Under similar tentative circumstances to finding their footing as a band, the band managed to make their live debut in a strange way, opening the 2000Trees/ATG organised 80Trees all dayer in Bristol in November 2021. “I mean it was all quite wild anyway” Andy admits, “It was just based off of people we knew and like. Building a tiny bit of buzz with those people that we knew. The fact that they were aware of projects that each of us had worked in, this was like, the new supergroup kind of thing” he chuckles, “And it was going to be fucking good. Like, I’m not ashamed to say that. I think it is a supergroup. It was really interesting. I really, really liked that show.”
Those in attendance were greeted with deafening power and encapsulating energy seeping from the stage, a tour-de-force of punk and grunge hooks swallowed and spat out by desert-rock beasts thundering forwards at deliberate pace. It clearly garnered a lot of attention, doubled when PEACH stuck out their debut single ‘Bad Touch’ in March 2022. This opened up a wealth of captivating support slots across 2022/23, opening shows for Mclusky, LIFE, Crows, Chiyoda-Ku, CLT DRP and a slot on the PX3 at ArcTanGent 2022.
The album finally made it’s way out to the public on September 30th 2023, by all accounts it more than lived up to the long wait. “It’s been great actually. People have been really, really lovely about it. Only really been positive feedback. I don’t know if people would give negative feedback if they didn’t. I don’t know. Some people do, I guess” Ellie jokes when asked about the reception to album so far. “There were nice quotes in certain reviews and stuff like that have been really nice. Discussing about how it was recorded live and to tape and what we wanted to try and capture and that people are getting that. So that’s been positive” Andy adds.
With their album launch show now fast approaching, its time for PEACH to celebrate the release of their album properly, in style. Drafting in Bristol alt-rock outfit Sang Froid and Welsh punkers SHLUG. That’s not all they’ve go in store though, as Ellie briefly teases: “You’ll see some piano and some trumpet if you come down” as she jokingly pretends to play a trumpet. “Yes, we’ve managed to source some musicians” JP adds. With a handful of other live dates announced for the rest of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, the future is looking bright for PEACH and 2024 should bring a wider array of audiences into the fold to witness some juicy live shows.