Playlouder - Music is the Network

"It's good-time late-'70s via early-'00s urchin punk'n'roll with a cast of characters straight out of an episode of Minder."

Produced by their mate Baxter Dury, The Metros announced their forthcoming debut album 'More Money Less Grief' on September 15th through 1965 Records/Columbia!

Saul Adamczewski (guitarist) and Jak Payne (vocals) have been mates “since they were born”. Aged 15, they started writing songs together, recruiting mates Freddi Hyde-Thompson (drums) and Charlie Elliott (bass).

The band played rowdy ska for a while under the moniker The Wanking Skankers. “It’s a better name than The Metros,” muses Jak. “We changed it purely for commercial reasons, I feel.” A year or so ago, they brought in a second guitarist, Joe Simpson, who shared an arty background and a penchant for unruly behaviour.

The band's influcences were ska, Oi punk and The Libertines and The Strokes, but their sound developed and changed into somewhat more distinctive... This might be traced back to the fact that guitarist Saul moved to his father's house that seemingly contains vinyls from the Specials and The Clash to Ray Charles and Bo Diddley, but most crucially Squeeze, Beastie Boys and Ian Dury & The Blockheads...

By using their youthful exuberance combined with incorporating and invoking pop hooks, trashy punk rock, hummable choruses, tongue-in-cheek humour and frank pup-crawl tales, The Metros established their own unique sound. Their music is so easygoing while upbeat and kind of catching by the guitar refrain, rolling drums and call-and-respons vocals from frontman Adamczewski and the boys in the band... But the lyrics somewhat undercut this mood of jollity with their references to Asbos and geezers with shooters, and Adamczewski's expletive-ridden fury at the British school system ("Education's overrated, and I'm the monster that it created").

There seems to be the germ of a social conscience in their music, too, with the track 'Robbin Hood' name-checking Che Guevara and ruing the “degradation of the Welfare State”. So are they old-school socialists? “Saul’s a card-carrying member of the Communist Party,” quips Jak. “We might talk about that sort of stuff when we’re drunk,” counters Saul, “But politics and music… it’s a bit dodgy, innit? All I want is people to put on our records at a party and dance and have a good time.”

“What we write is a cross between what’s actually around us and a fantasy of it,” explains Jak."We take a bit of our own experiences and what we see around us and turn it into songs.”

So listen to these own-experiences-and-what-is-around-them-songs of The Metros 'More Less Than Grief' that include the magnificent 'Education Pt. 2' (an attack on the schooling system with its anthemic final line about getting “10 years and a fucking ASBO”) and 'Missing In Acton' (the story of a hapless armed robber, loosely based on a friend of Jak’s father’s called Ginger).